Spring Rubber

Changes are effective February 10th. Vargas moves to 7pm ET, and NewsNation Now with Connell McShane expands to three hours to cover the 5pm ET hour that Vargas's show currently occupies. Really surprised they're actually not adding a new personality to the schedule.

Fox Weather is toast. The most dangerous tornado outbreak of the fall/winter season is underway, and Fox Weather dropped coverage at 8pm or 9pm ET (not sure which), because welp, it's a weekend during the holiday season, and ya know, 9pm is pretty late, so we'll be back live at 6am to assess the aftermath. Even TWC, which originally planned on also dropping coverage at 8pm ET, added an additional live shift from 8pm to ??? (still live as of now at 9:37pm ET) when they saw how serious the tornado outbreak was going to be. I don't think the higher-ups really care about Fox Weather anymore. It seems like they're just treating it as another shovelware FAST network that plays whatever they feel like showing in between constant ad breaks. I think 2025 will be the year that Fox Weather drastically cuts back even its weekday programming schedule, with additional staff cuts.

Well that's certainly going to create a lot of holes in their lineup. He had Monday-Friday shows on FNC and Fox Business, as well as a 2-hour Saturday morning show on FNC. He hosted the 4pm ET weekday hour on FNC basically since the inception of time. The USA Today article says that FNC will roll out a new programming schedule in January, with guest hosts filling his shows in the interim.

Looks like Tom Niziol didn't return at Fox Weather for this winter season. His bio has been removed from their site.

Nope, I wasn't aware. Thanks for sharing. Another thing I've noticed lately is that if one of the AMHQ Weekend hosts is off, TWC is sliding Molly up from Weekend Recharge to host the AMHQ shift, rather than calling someone else in to host, as was the norm in the past. They're doing anything they can to slash costs right now.

Indeed, and Chris Warren was on the 2-6pm show Thursday and Friday of this week, alongside the other Chris. (Felicia co-hosted Mon-Wed) I wonder if Chris Warren and Jacqui Jeras are both per diem at this point, or what the deal is.

Agreed about the graphics. What are those lower thirds? There are private YouTubers (and maybe even college stations) that have nicer graphics than that. What are those shapes? What is that font?

I like the use of the windows and the backlit logo. Nicely done.

Chris Bruin and Felicia Combs ended up not being paired together the entire week. Thursday's show featured Chris Bruin and Carl Parker. Today's show features Felicia Combs and Chris Warren (still with TWC in some capacity, I take it).

It looks like this is a very old page from back when she was newer at TWC and was still per diem. http://web.archive.org/web/20190318013952/http://www.jacquijeras.com/when-to-see-me.html I found a copy of this page on the web archive from March 2019. I suspect given the dates of the weekend shows (Nov 10th, 11th, 17th, 18th) that this page is from November 2018. That's the only year since 2012 that had weekends on those exact dates.

Both yesterday and today, Carl Parker has had a presence on The Weather Channel LIVE. Yesterday, he was live with Chris and Felicia in The Lab. Today, he's featured in pre-recorded hits from what currently serves as the TWC En Español studio. This studio previously served as the COVID isolation studio in 2020-2021, and from 2015-2019 as the Weather Underground studio. On another note, apparently the height differential between Chris and Felicia was too great. They now begin the show seated. They actually made this adjustment somewhere in the middle of yesterday's program. Also during the middle of yesterday's show and continuing today, the LIVE NOW bug was replaced with a standard bug that appears during other programming.

Indeed, it sounds like both networks have modified their schedules within this past week (Fox Weather shortening weekend hours; TWC lengthening weekday hours) to mirror each other.

Hmm, the "LIVE NOW" bug is something we used to see on the live break-in coverage that would air during long form programming. Similarly, this show is not using any lower thirds other than those identifying the meteorologists. This seems to suggest that this is a very paired-down broadcast, as we suspected. I wonder if Chris Warren and Jacqui Jeras are still with TWC, or if this is the end for them.

If I'm not mistaken, that studio was used by The Weather Company for their web/mobile video forecasts, back in their IBM-owned days. I don't believe the TV network has made use of it, outside of the malware incident that you referenced.

I've always said that major storm coverage seems to have a permanent impact on Fox Weather's schedule afterwards, and it looks like Helene and Milton were no different. Judging from last weekend and this weekend, all weather programming on weekends after 2pm ET has been discontinued and replaced by returns of Park'd nonstop until live programming resumes the following morning. Awful.

So whatever "The Weather Channel LIVE" ends up being, would we expect it to be a very low-staff program, perhaps something that originates from The Lab like the old "Weather Center Live"?

I like this idea. It feels like they're afraid to stray from the AMHQ branding (for ratings purposes, idk?), but having the show end at 2pm ET is just silly at this point. I remember back in like 2021, if Jen and Alex's show ever extended past 12pm ET due to severe weather/hurricane coverage, the 12pm ET hour would be run as an unbranded hour instead of AMHQ, because they refused to push the AMHQ brand into the afternoon. Funny how that's all out the window now.

Thinking back to like 2020-2021 when Weather Center Live still existed, the program guide called the show "The Weather Channel LIVE" using the exact same show description, so I'm definitely curious to see if this show will be Weather Center Live or something brand new. I'm curious to see if Jacqui and/or the two Chris's will be hosting this afternoon show. But yeah, live programming until 10pm ET? When's the last time that was on TWC's regular schedule?

So with the Weekend News moving to 57, do we foresee renovations to 47 to eventually bring the Evening News back to its longtime home?

That bad? Are we talking the possible cessation of all live programming on said network?

For the Fox Weather overnight simulcast on FNC, unlike the last few times they've done this, they brought in FNC news anchor Kevin Corke to host tonight's coverage while Ian Oliver provides the weather information. I believe the previous simulcasts for hurricane coverage only used Fox Weather meteorologists.

Both The Weather Channel and Fox Weather dropped live coverage overnight. To see this on the night before landfall is just bizarre. We're in a different era now of non-24/7 coverage I guess.

The Weather Channel still has the AMHQ team live as of 1pm ET. I haven't seen them use this schedule for any storm coverage since they moved to the current schedule. The only thing I'm thinking is that maybe their plan is to stay live one hour later until 2am ET tonight, to avoid bringing in an overnight crew like they normally do from 1am-5am ET if they were to stay live all night.

Thin vertical score bug on the left side of the screen? Reminds me of the shape of the early 2000s WGN scorebug, but of course, a lot more modern. The huge GOAL graphic that takes up the left side of the screen looks ripe for social media thumbnails.

Looks like the "light mode" version of the score bug is being used so that the black color of the Raiders doesn't blend in with the normal color of the graphic.