LoadStar

Isn't another reason the same as with radio... for those who are Nielsen diary reporters? I thought that at least with radio, part of the reason they repeat call letters frequently is to make sure a listener knows (and remembers) what station they're listening to so they can report it later for ratings purpose.

Man, they are dropping like flies here in Milwaukee. Not literally, but it seems all of the veterans are all retiring. Within the last several months, we've had John Malan (Weather, WTMJ) and Tom Pipines (Sports, WITI) both retire, and now Mike Anderson (News, WISN) announced his retirement as well. This follows not long after Vince Condella (Weather, WITI) retired mid-last year. This list doesn't even include Kathy Mykelby (News, WISN), who announced a little while ago that she was scaling back, but doesn't plan to immediately retire quite yet.

I just noticed that the backdrop at WISN still has a duratrans with the logo with the Bank Gothic text below it, *long* after the station and the company stopped using it anywhere else. Is their disinterest in swapping out something so relatively inexpensive as the duratrans just them being cheap... or a sign that they might actually be planning a remodel sooner rather than later?

Forget the graphics and music. I'd rather they spent the money on sets. WISN desperately needs a new set, and I'm sure they're not the only one.

KCRA, WISN and WGAL now have the new web template.

The senior member of the Milwaukee anchors, Kathy Mykelby, is beginning a slow transition towards retirement at WISN. As a first step, she has announced she will be leaving the 10:00 newscast, but remaining with the 6:00 show. She will transition to doing special in-depth reporting that will appear on newscasts throughout the day.

WISN is still on the old layout as well.

I'm pretty sure that WISN is one of ABC's top stations. For a while, they were #1. I'm not sure they still are, but they're definitely up there. Additionally, Hearst has a particularly strong relationship with ABC. There's near zero chance of WISN switching to a different network, even if one were available. (Oh, and Michael didn't "get taken off" LIVE, he got a better job offer from the network and chose to leave.)

Brian Williams on MSNBC this evening covering the Dallas protest shootings. At 1:00 EDT, he also anchored the NBC News Special Report cut-in on the NBC network. (Is this the first time he's been back on NBC in a professional capacity since his hiatus?)

No one is "taking Michael off of LIVE." The reports seem to indicate that this is his choice to leave LIVE. My guess is ABC probably offered him a big payroll increase to come to GMA full time. Keep in mind that LIVE is not an ABC show. Although it airs on primarily ABC stations, it is actually produced by WABC and distributed by Disney-ABC Domestic Television -- in other words, it is a syndicated show.

Even if it were a hard news reporter, I'm not sure how doing ballroom dancing on a television show diminishes their credibility in any way.

She previously appeared on "Nashville," although she did so portraying herself.

ABC World News Tonight is broadcasting live from inside the stadium bowl at the NCAA Div. I Football Championship at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, in my opinion an attempt to draw attention to the underrated bowl games on ESPN. The stadium is already quite noisy, and is a severe distraction from the news he is attempting to deliver. I think they already realized trying to deliver news from inside a noisy stadium is a bad idea. They started him off with a body microphone, but after the first story, they had already switched him to a Sennheiser handheld microphone. IMO, they should have either reserved an additional press box for ABC News, or reported from *outside* the stadium.

And it looks like Josh finally clued in on all of this. The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Elliott is out the door at NBC Sports. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/josh-elliott-leaving-nbc-two-848553

If there's been one failure of all of this, it's the quality of the video from their remotes. Some of the video is clearly Skype or similar consumer-level video conferencing. It's compressed all to heck and back, but it's generally watchable. The real failure however has been the streaming backpacks. The connection from those guys have been so unbelievably unreliable. I just watched Dr. Besser struggle through a planned segment where they took a tour of a maternity ward of a hospital where the video was worthless, and eventually they threw in the towel and gave up. I'm not saying that the backpacks don't have a place. They seem to work best for fairly stationary outdoor segments, not "walk and talks" indoors.

While he looks quite a bit older, he doesn't sound old, if that makes any sense. Just listening to him makes me think he could jump right back into the anchor chair at any moment. (I sort of wish he would... he's right up there with Peter Jennings in the list of legends over at ABC News, IMO.)

There have been so many fascinating moments in this conversation between Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopolous. For one, George seemed amazed when Charlie commented something like "It must feel nice not having to fit a piece into 3 minutes 30 seconds." George responded "3:30? Try 2:30," indicating the show has shifted to a more rapid-fire style than it was in Charlie's era. There was a very honest discussion between Charlie and George about suggestion of bias in reporting, with an acknowledgement of the difficult position George is in given his background.

The fascinating part of the live stream is that those of us who normally get the east coast broadcast are getting the rare opportunity to see the GMA West Coast broadcast.

Just turned on the live stream... not what I expected. It is just going to be literally a 40 hour long edition of a standard GMA episode?

That is interesting, as it leads to the question of when the Journal stations with VizRT will get the Scripps package.

I get an immediate redirect to the front page of the Scripps template'd TMJ4.com when I go to that URL.

I'm frankly shocked to hear that anyone would be that unfamiliar with the history of the Holocaust that they wouldn't recognize that symbol and it's origin. It's truly amazing, and a little disheartening. I'm going to hope that the use of the image was by someone out of ignorance, but I'm not sure that makes it any better in my mind.

Read this Doonesbury comic strip. Trudeau really nailed the rather odd and stilted World News Tonight writing style.

I'm somewhat surprised that WTMJ hasn't gotten The Now. They've got continuous newscasts from 3:00 to 6:30 (7:00, if you include "Wisconsin Tonight.") One would think they'd jump at the opportunity to rebrand at least a part of that, if only to reduce that nonstop block of news (albeit with a slightly different newscast).

I like "NBC Now" for the very reason that Mannym13 pointed out; although they're slimming down on the editorial programs, they're not eliminating them entirely, and they probably wouldn't want to link the NBC News banner that tightly to the network for that reason. NBC Now, however, suggests "current" which could include news, but also current affairs editorial programs.