Spring Rubber

Look, this is the most exciting thing to happen to that set in 8 years. We gotta find something to talk about.

Feder published it last week, but I think we forgot to talk about it due to our collective WGN obsession last week.

Wow, Tom stayed for the late news? Typical situation used to be that Tom would go home, and Jim would come in. Maybe Jim was also unavailable tonight.

I wonder if that's permanent. Did they ditch the box saying "EVENING NEWS", "MORNING NEWS", etc.?

Yes, it has been quite bumpy so far.

Nothing new for the sports division at all. They're even still using the old logo. Looks kinda lame using the old logo when the station is trying to sell this new identity so hard. Guess they're waiting for hockey season to overhaul the sports stuff.

Also, I read this a long time ago and forgot to reply. Yes, I agree with this. They'll most likely go with this strategy, now that you mention it.

WMAQ? Picking an "official weekend anchor"? I think you're asking a little too much. A simple coin flip will determine who anchors day-to-day, I'm sure.

It's definitely a big month of changes at the ol' number 9.

Any idea what the arrangement would be if Byron departs? I doubt they'd hire another meteorologist. I'd say either Kalee would take the 11 AM, and Alicia would go back to doing all weekend newscasts, or vice versa. Given Alicia's seniority, I'd actually expect Alicia to be offered the 11 AM while Kalee gets assigned full weekend duties

Make sure you follow him on Facebook before it's too late! Click that Thumbs Up button!

If true, that's a shame. I've always enjoyed his unique, somewhat comedic take on the forecast.

I'm a bit bored of full-screen video walls as the main backdrop for sets. WMAQ, WLS, and WFLD might as well all have the same set. You can just change the video source, and voila!

WGN has removed the "WGN9 Weather Center" logo from the Weather Center and replaced it with a URL. They also repainted the wall behind the monitors to white.

Think there's any chance of the set debuting tonight? There's a special edition of MLB on Fox tonight with Yankees @ Cubs. Might be a perfect Saturday night to launch the new set with such a huge local audience tonight.

Yeah, it did look very similar to the WGN America logo, with the 9 placed after the WGN logo.

Judy Hsu is in for Ravi tonight.

The ad basically said that Hoda is back, and now you can get even more Hoda... every morning from 7-9 AM on Today.

NBC ran an ad campaign last week and this weekend stating that Hoda is now a permanent and regular member of the 7-9am show. Hoda's stock seems to be continuously rising.

Here's what I don't understand: why would they use a new logo with these same 2014 graphics? Based on the style of logo they used, it doesn't really match these graphics at all. Either they were just testing the logo inside of this graphics package to see how it would look, or maybe the logo itself isn't even final and is just concept art that they were experimenting with.

My stupid DVR was still buffering ESPN instead of WGN because I just got home. I'm so pissed I wasn't buffering WGN. The WGN font was definitely different. It was more "retro" looking like the classic 9 logo.

Ok, and there's this, freshly announced on the 5pm news.

We've got another short one. Ben and Lourdes are doing what should amount to an 8-minute newscast from 4:49 PM to 4:57 PM. They led off with Demetrius with weather as the top story. EDIT: Uhh... is WGN planning on launching a new station logo or something? During that short 4pm news, they aired a segment opener for an "Update", and the segment opener featured a new WGN logo that appeared to be inspired by this classic logo: http://logos.wikia.com/wiki/WGN-TV?file=TW_Thumbnail_Best_400x400.jpg The logo they showed a similar style of 9, but it had the filler inside the 9 removed, the text "WGN" to the left of the 9, and the tagline "Chicago's Very Own" above the "WGN9". The graphics on the opener were the same as the current news graphics, just with a different logo. The opener was pulled off the screen with a quick hard cut as to indicate we weren't supposed to see it.

Same. I wonder if it's intentional or not.

WGN may never get a new set, but they sure have modified the wall to the right side of the Weather Center enough times in the past two years. Now it's brick.