Spring Rubber

Tornado confirmed on the ground near Dyer, and WGN is in postgame commercials with no ticker over the commercials. Ticker didn't come up until the postgame show came back on. And despite the urgent situation, they are still continuing the postgame show like nothing ever happened because the car company with the blue oval is paying them to do so.

No, they're playing in Houston.

Has WGN covered this tornado warning at all? Every other station in the market has broken in for wall to wall coverage, but it looks like WGN has committed to stay with Cubs coverage without so much as a double box live report from the weather center as they've done in years past.

What the heck is with the horrid lighting and the junk over in the lower right corner? Did they hang a green curtain inside of a storage closet? Is he recording this from his own home?

Yeah, all labor on TV studios must be union.

And today we have an artificial city backdrop on WGN. Not sure if their camera is down or what. Normally they'd be eager to show a live shot of the snowstorm out there.

I only saw the highlights, but I don't think there was anything new for their last year of Cubs game coverage, right?

You could almost argue that they were ahead of the trend in 2016. ESPN was still messing around with the blue and silver motif at the time. It wasn't until 2017 and especially 2018 that ESPN decided to fully return SportsCenter to the red and silver color scheme.

Irika just opened the newscast solo and said, "Rob...err...Brad is off tonight." Old habits die hard.

The first pairing of Antonio and Tracy was just for like a couple weeks between the date he started and the date Tracy went on maternity leave, right? I can't imagine it being more than 2 or 3 weeks.

She's not with TWC anymore. She left TWC in September. Looks like she's mainly been doing freelance work for NBC on the Today Show and on WNBC since then.

Let the record show that the excessive lowercase was done for stylistic reasons... j/k. Blame the weekend crew. (Yet they capitalized "Million" but nothing else.)

I hope she does turn up at Fox 32. She would be a huge asset to them.

Well, I guess it's the most bland thing that could have come out of this.

Would we describe this as, "What happens when the news division has to produce graphics that mimic the sports division?"

As I understand it, WMAQ doesn't really have space for anything. That's why their current set is so small. IIRC, in 2012, their current studio was built inside of the newsroom where their former newsroom set was. At the time, they were lucky to have the streetside "Studio 5" in a completely separate building where they could temporarily broadcast all of their newscasts while the main studio was constructed. Now that they no longer have that lease, the only conceivable way to remodel their set is to reconstruct it piecemeal and broadcast from whatever portion of the studio that's not currently under construction.

WMAQ is using the Weather Center as a temp set right now. Might be worth a new thread if this is indeed a sign of a new set on the way (which I think it might be) Since it's such a small studio, they might be able to get things done in time for sweeps, but then again, they didn't exactly get their current set done in time for sweeps in 2012, so maybe it doesn't matter to them.

Regardless, that is rather shocking that they'd let the N-word slip without censorship on broadcast TV. Is that even allowed by the FCC?

She was on tonight. She's not on leave yet. Feels like it could be any day, though.

Oh, did Alicia already go on maternity leave? I haven't been following.

Makes sense that they're doing slow updates to keep the set fresh. It's such a tiny studio space that it's probably not worth doing anything entirely new. Plus, the existing set still looks modern.

Yep, he has filled in for Hoda several times. I also wonder how he's holding up lately. Sad, it's an end of an era. I always kinda felt like this was coming after Hoda got the main anchor role. Hoda & Kathy Lee was bound to come to an end sooner rather than later.

I guess it's just to be considerate to the weeknight team? I'm sure they would bring them in for major breaking news, but in the case of SNF, they must like to have several months' notice to bring them in.

Tonight, we saw the difference when the Bears are scheduled to be on SNF from the beginning of the year versus a flexed SNF appearance. The previous two Bears appearances on SNF were scheduled when the season started, so WMAQ had their weekday team on the Sunday night newscast after the game. Tonight's game was flexed to Sunday Night Football about 4 weeks ago. With such comparatively short notice, WMAQ did not have their weeknight crew tonight. However, with Michelle Relerford still on maternity leave, they did have Marion Brooks co-anchor tonight so that they wouldn't have a solo newscast like they've been doing on weekends for the past three months.

WGN added a 10pm newscast tonight for the blizzard coverage.