NBC 5 Chicago

Here is Phil's send off from the 6pm show. I will miss his style of reporting.

Looks like Frank Whittaker VP of News at WMAQ is also retiring this week. He's been there for 26 years. So far 3 retirements, Rob Stafford, Phil Rogers and Frank Whittaker this year.

Interesting. I wonder what this means for Alex Maragos. With Rob retiring I wonder if he'll take over the 4pm. But I figured Patrick Fazio would be both 11am and 4pm with Marion. Honestly I thought with WMAQ hiring Evrod Cassimy he would have went right to weekday mornings. I don't mind JC but he's more suited for reporting. They just need to revamp the morning anchors. Michelle should have stayed on Weekend nights. Now with Evrod moving to weekends they would be a great pairing.

And another retirement. Phil Rogers will be leaving after 31 years at WMAQ on Friday. Not sure if he is part of the early retirement being offered as most of those were announced weeks ago. The investigative unit is taking a hit with Rob Stafford and now Phil Rogers gone.

I know its holiday season so there's different people filling in however I thought todays pairings were interesting: 4PM: Rob Elgas & Judy Hsu (normal) 5PM: Terrell Brown & Karen Jorden 6PM: Terrell Brown & Judy Hsu 10PM: Terrell Brown and Judy Hsu It was Val and Tanya this morning. Diane Pathieu filled in for Roz. Has she previously filled in on traffic before? I wonder if they'll use this time to test pairings. I've never been a fan of Cheryl Burton. I don't care for her style. However Terrell and Judy was a surprise and a good pairing.

Also, Lauren Petty moved from reporting weekday mornings to full feature health reporter. WMAQ hasn't had that since Nesita Kwan who left in 2015.

No live overnight coverage tonight. They do have intense music playing and are doing top and bottom of the hour updates.

Here's the new schedule: CNN Special Midterm Election Programming Schedule: 4pm-5pm ET: The Lead, anchored by John Berman/Brianna Keilar 5pm-7pm ET: The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer 7pm-8pm ET: Erin Burnett OutFront 8pm-9pm ET: Anderson Cooper 360 9pm ET: CNN Tonight, Jake Tapper 10pm-12am ET: CNN Tonight, Alisyn Camerota and Laura Coates Don Lemon and Poppy Harlow will sign off their respective programs on Friday, October 7th to begin work on the network’s new morning news show launching later this year. Both will continue to appear across the network until then. Fill-in hosts for other programs will be announced in the coming days. It'll be interesting if some of this sticks after the midterms, if so its going to be a complete schedule shake up. I'm glad they gave Wolf an extra hour and left Erin and Anderson alone, for now.

Looks like Patrick Fazio is off the morning shift and will only be on at 11am with Marion Brooks. I haven't seen an announcement for a new morning anchor so I wonder if it's in-house musical chairs. I was really starting to like Michelle and Patrick in the morning. Patrick can be quite funny however the chemistry was a little off with Michelle. I still think Michelle is best suited for evening/10pm news. https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=491049226172733&set=a.144880187456307

Chris Hush is moving to WTVJ-NBC 6 in Miami to be the weekend anchor and weekday reporter. Press release below.

Wow... their better option would be 8pm ET. Run their live programming through the day and then at 8pm is the rebroadcast of Pattrn then they can run their deep bench of reruns of shows. This also gives them an option if Pattrn didn't air that day due to severe weather they can run a show if severe weather isn't happening at 8pm or continue with live coverage. I actually like Pattrn. It's a really neat show and I like where they're going with it. You'll still get updates on weather across the country. The climate stories they are doing are quite interesting and informative.

Tyler Mauldin made his debut today on Storm Center. Looks like he freelances a lot at CNN/HLN and now TWC.

In Out & About it was posted that Tevin Wooten is going to NBC Boston. It explains why he hasn't been on air since the beginning of May. Now, I wonder if they'll replace him on Storm Center or just keep it Jacqui and Chris. Felicia posted on her socials that she was no longer going to be a regular on Weekend Recharge with May 21-22 being her last time as a regular on there. Curious to see if we'll see some shuffling around and if they'll hire anyone new any time soon. With the holiday weekend they've had a lot of the part time OCM's on to help fill the voids.

Explains why Tevin hasn't been on TWC since the beginning of May.

See regardless if its not dramatic as tornado coverage its still severe weather. That should ALWAYS be covered. I get your assumptions regarding the 10% and hatched tornado risk. Regardless there needs to be a better parameter for covering severe weather. If there are active tornado warnings and you're approaching going into programming hours they should pre-empt, period. That's the reason people turn to the weather channel anyways or at least used to. I know ways of getting warnings and keeping informed have changed since TWC formed but a channel devoted to weather should still be devoted to at least covering the severe cases of weather.

Looks like they've extended morning coverage to overtake the live edition of Pattrn today. There's an enhanced risk of severe weather but nothing like the past severe weather days so I'm curious why the change today. Wonder if WU will take over the 1pm hour for additional coverage and if there is extended overnight coverage or they just ended up scraping Pattrn for today.

They did break in twice so far to update the status of those storms. I don't know why they just didn't do another hour of Storm Center until things calm down then bring Carl in. Their severe weather coverage outside of their shows sucks anymore.

Don't get me started on the lights. Half the time Storm Center is blue and the other half its yellow, like today. Then we got T-Mobile for Pattrn which I feel is way overboard than the other shows. Samantha Mohr is on tonight during Storm Center. I forgot she was a fill in again. They've been going deep into the fill ins this week for coverage. Yet they had Felicia on yesterday during Pattrn but Molly at the beginning of the week. It'll be interesting to see who's going to be paired with Carl for the late night hours. But so far Mark, Jeff, Colleen, Samantha have filled in this week. Chris Bruin filled in for Alex Wallace on Monday even though Alex was there for the 40th anniversary. It's been an interesting week with the OCM's.

Interestingly today they are not showing Pattrn at all and running live storm coverage with Jen and Alex during the noon hour. I suspect Mike and Alex will take over at 1pm for an extended Weather Underground coverage. They're already advertising extended coverage for the evening and overnight so I suspect an added hour to Storm Center and then Carl Parker will do coverage late night. Yesterday was a higher outlook for Severe Weather than today so I'm surprised they went this route however there is already a Tornado Watch out so maybe that's why.

I've noticed this as well. Molly McCullum finally got upped to full time so I'm wondering if she took over Mark's spot. They don't see to hire a lot of full OCM's as they used to and they've seemed to be doing the Fox Weather route and have 3 OCM's on during their shows. I know usually its 1 Expert and 2 OCM's but Storm Center has 3. Tonight though is interesting on Storm Center. Chris Bruin and Jeff Morrow are on tonight. Last night it was Jacqui Jeras and Tevin Wooten, Chirs Warren was off. Normally Jeff fills in for extended coverage usually with Carl Parker in the overnight hours and usually just in the lab. Its nice to see him again interacting in the studio during a normal show. They do have a decent list of fill in OCM's that they tap during extended coverage. I noticed some have been on over the past few days. They do have an OCM job posted on their website so maybe its like every other industry across the country where the job force is just not there. But they've had quite of few people leave and not a lot have been hired or promoted to full time.

First Tornado watch is issued and bye bye jazz music. Indeed the alert music is playing. Looks like TWC en Español is using all the same music and graphics as the OG TWC from what little I saw of the stream. I was half hoping for today with the TWC en Español launch that they might do a graphics update across the board. They've been using the same graphics since 2013 with some updates here and there. While they have aged well I feel like now would have been a good time to do nice big update on the 40th anniversary.

I feel like the storm alert music is overused now. I remember when it was just for Storm Alert for hurricanes. I get sever snow storms or a huge outbreak but I feel they use it to use it sometimes. Also, I'm totally loving the jazz music back for the local on the 8s. I miss that. The only thing that stinks is the forecasts are only 1 min now and it was cool to have the longer 2 min flavors of the music back in the day.

Looks like Anita Blanton debuted this week anchoring the 9am hour of Good Day Chicago and the 12pm newscast with Sylvia Perez. https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=536128081216308&set=a.223779982451121

They were definitely live for the first hour today except for pre-recorded segments. Now the second hour the beginning was the exact same as the first hour but I didn't catch the whole hour to see if there were other live segments or just a complete re-run of the first hour.

I noticed that too. I figured maybe they were doing updates or something in the studio. So, there goes another 2 live hours of weather on TWC. One thing I noticed and its small but the pillows on the couch change for what show is airing. AMHQ = Yellow and Blue, Pattrn = Pink, Weekend Recharge = Teal and Blue. Like I said nothing worthwhile but it brings a different touch to the shows when they use the couch in addition to the different lighting.