Spring Rubber

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.

I've noticed over the past month or two that WMAQ got rid of the unique openers for the "NEWS AT 10", "NEWS AT 5", "NEWS AT 6" etc. All of the news openers are now generic openers with no time listed. The city backdrop is still appropriate for the time of day, but there's no mention of times anymore.

Wow, didn't see that coming. All the best to her.

They did a live hit with Gaynor Hall reporting on a shooting in Gresham from 4:53-4:55, and weather with Demetrius from 4:55-4:57. That was it.

In the silliest decision ever, they did a 4-minute newscast with Ben, Lourdes, and Demetrius after the Sox game from 4:53 PM to 4:57 PM, and now they're going to hand it over to Mark, Micah, and Tom for the 5pm news. I don't understand it. EDIT: Also, I imagine this problem is going to creep up a lot during the baseball season. My proposed solution would be to just automatically give the 5pm hour to Ben, Lourdes, and Demetrius whenever there's a 1:05 or 1:20 pm baseball game, because these games all but guarantee that their 4pm newscast will be eaten up. But I don't know if their contracts allow for Ben, Lourdes, and Demetrius to do the 5pm. I just think it would be a better solution than to have them do these silly 5-20 minute newscasts whenever there's afternoon baseball.

On Tuesday, Tom did an outdoor weather hit to start the 5pm news. Not sure if that will remain permanent.

Because today's Cubs WGN game was postponed till tomorrow, when the White Sox have a game scheduled on WGN, the Cubs game will be handed over to CSN since WGN no longer has an alternative outlet (like WCIU or WPWR in the past) for a second game to be aired. http://wgntv.com/2017/04/05/cubs-and-white-sox-wednesday-games-both-postponed-by-rain/ With CSN taking over the rights to tomorrow's game, does this mean that CSN will have to give WGN a game later in the year? Or does CSN just pay WGN a negotiated amount of $$$ for the game and call it a day?

I think the only difference from the previous 4-6pm news with Mark and Micah is that the 6pm news now has a quick-hit headlines piece at the start of the newscast where they recap the top 6 stories or whatever. I was watching while working, so I wasn't necessarily fully paying attention. Also of note is that they don't have proper rejoin opens for this newscast, so they're rejoining with the generic "This is Chicago's Very Own WGN News" openers that you'd typically see on a late night newscast after sports coverage. The openers use the 9-10pm music with the nighttime skyline and graphics.

She reminds me of the style of presentation that you see on the current version of The Weather Channel.

The Accuweather brand officially rolled out today. It's being used for all weather segments, along with the verbal introduction, "Here's Tracy Butler with your ABC7 Accuweather forecast..."

When I was speculating about the reason why they didn't debut the schedule change today, I think the answer is because of the number of people off today. Robin was off in the morning; Mark is off in the evening (continuing from his time off last week). Maybe Mark is coming back tomorrow so that they can have the full evening team together for the 6pm news tomorrow.

Robin and Erin are off today. Lourdes is back in the afternoons. What does that mean? Yep, Ana Belaval gets her shot at anchoring the 6-10am show today! Also, did anybody watch the 4-6am show? Did Dan anchor solo? Did they get somebody else on there? Seems like a lot of people are off right now, so I'm not sure if anything's permanent or not.

Dan and Lourdes are anchoring the big show together on this their final day in the morning as a team (I wouldn't expect Lourdes to be in the morning on Monday, at least).

So is that why, 12 years later, Tribune still can't budget a new set for WGN?