Spring Rubber

It's time for everyone to stop caring about 4:3 and to just give 4:3 viewers a letterboxed feed. 16:9 has been the standard for 8 years at this point, and networks shouldn't have to keep designing all of their graphics and framing their shots with 4:3 in mind. It's time to utilize the full 16:9 frame on everything.

So Jerry and Phil had the March Madness, and Mike had a much more unfortunate reason for being off. RIP Mike's dad.

I think Jerry, Mike, and Phil all caught a little March Madness.

That was really cringworthy to hear Mike Caplan introduce the 7-Day as the "First Alert 7-Day Forecast powered by AccuWeather". Yuck.

I don't like it either. Chicago used to be a place where we didn't have stupid gimmicky names for the weather segment. The weather segment is just that...the weather.

 

First Alert, especially with that red color, makes it look like there's some severe, extreme weather going on. It reminds me of 2012 at The Weather Channel when they permanently turned their main on-air graphics red because of the good ratings they got when they used red for their Superstorm Sandy coverage. They figure they can use red all of the time to get attention. (TWC got rid of the full-time red a year later and went back to only using red for severe weather/major snowstorms/hurricanes.)

 

I vaguely remember the Fox partnership, but I couldn't vouch for the CBS union.

 

I want to say it was around the Works For You era or just before it.

The Sun-Times has now been a partner of all four non-Tribune stations in Chicago in the last 15 years, haven't they? WBBM, then WFLD, then WMAQ, and now WLS?

 

So Tracy & Troy were tag-teaming this morning......

 

I know she'd done Sunday Mornings before. But I think this is a rarity seeing her on a Saturday Morning.

 

It was a very weird arrangement. It make sense for the segments where Troy was standing outside on State Street, but there were many segments where Tracy would be at the key wall to do half of the weather segment, and then she would toss to Troy at the Weather Center to finish out the maps. The one at the top of the 8 AM hour was the weirdest. Tracy did almost all of the segment, and then she tossed to Troy, who spent like 15 seconds just showing one more radar image and then the snowfall totals before tossing to Ben Bradley for the top of the hour stories. Talk about forced talent usage.

Tracy Butler is filling in for Phil tonight. Weird.

Just saw a typo on the school closing ticker saying "COOL" County. They might as well call it COLD County instead.

Meh, I'm not too excited about shake-ups. I enjoy the stability.

It's time for the annual tradition of Ron Magers anchoring the two Black Friday newscasts solo and standing in a bunch of different places every segment. He started out the newscast standing outside with the people on State Street. Let's see where he goes next!

It's like 2001 all over again!

Ok guys, are you ready for the weirdest thing ever? Well, you guys know that ABC 7 is the master of having different people on different newscasts during the same daypart, and you guys know how Mike Caplan does the 4 PM news while Jerry Taft does everything after that, so maybe this won't come as too much a surprise, but in my opinion, this is even weirder than that...

 

Stacey Baca just announced that Troy will be doing the entire Saturday morning and ALSO the 5 AM hour of the Sunday morning news, and Phil will take over from 6 AM onward.

 

My question is if Troy is gonna do the 5 AM, why not have him do the 6 AM, too, and let Phil get some rest until 8 at least?

 

Lazare posted on Friday that WCL's ratings in August did slip. The show cited that most of the shows were on repeats that month.

 

Tomorrow will be a very interesting day. First time in more than a decade Live returns to Channel 7, but the very first time to hit that lucrative 9am timeslot.

 

Very awkward for the transition to happen on Labor Day. Kinda ruins the moment.

Looks WABC-ish, no?

What color is the ABC logo on the ABC7 logo? I've noticed that the ABC network itself is using different colors based on what the program is. I've seen both red and yellow/orange variants thus far. Do any others exist?

I assume the temporary situation will be Phil Schwarz not getting any sleep on both Saturday AND Sunday.

So wait, do all of the maps during the weather segment live inside of these "boxes" now? I'll have to remember to check out the weather segment at 6 or 10.

Are those ABC 7 logo transitions an in-house job or a sign of a future graphics package?

Maybe it was a social media experiment of, "Hey, let's throw this idea out to the public and see what reaction we get."

I really expected 7 in the Morning to have launched during sweeps. Has it been delayed or cancelled?

Is this rebrand launching today? Thursday? Later?