SterlingNorth

Hey, all. Long time, no see.

 

For whatever dumb reason, I was looking at the online listings for WUSA, and what do I see?

 

Wait? What the WHAT?!

 

[Puts on glasses]

CO--ME--DIAN.... U--NIQUE POINT---OF---VIEW.....TRAFFIC...WEATHER....IMPORTANT NEWS OF THE DAY.....

 

COMEDY.... NEWS...

 

Oooookay

 

So, is this like a thing where a (former?) comedian just takes up hosting a coffee clatch local GMA/Today type thing where the first five minutes is what happened yesterday, then they go to the guests to show new yoga moves or talk about the hot new parenting trend, or is this like The Daily Show or Stephen Colbert but in the morning?

 

[Looks for something on YouTube about this show...]

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id=sm1kGplXSXI;list=PL0FBhSp_O7Myol7nIKklr0z-LAzSiy2Az

 

Oooookay..

 

So, um, The One and Only Channel Nine has three different types of morning shows running at once: The traditional local morning show running from 4:30-6am, the advertorial thing that runs from 9-10am, and the one with the comedian from 6-7am that seems to be a marriage of the comedy bits of late night shows,Seth Myers "A Closer Look" and the "Today" show.

 

And it's crazy that the shows are named "Wake Up Washington" (4:30), "Get Up DC!" (6:00) and "Great Day Washington" (9:00). It's like the namestorming sessions was just find the thesaurus! (Where "Great Day Washington" is the synonym title to WTTG Fox 5's "Good Day DC".)

Pretty soon TEGNA and Sinclair will be the only station groups left.

 

And then they merge as SiGNA.

 

Or does that sound too much like an insurance company?

[T]he show has always supposed to have a vibe of opposition between Mika and Joe, but with an impending marriage, that's clearly changing.

 

I thought most marriages had that vibe.

UPDATE: Apparently, WUSA/Washington will also lose customers on the southern end of their market, albeit not in a large area. Apparently, all Fairfax County (excluding the city of Fairfax) is the only county in Northern VA where Comcast doesn't have a stranglehold or monopoly franchise agreement, and where Cox is the sole provider (sans satellite).

It's a big segment though, given Fairfax County is the most populous county in the Washington-Baltimore region. Also, the city of Fairfax is in Cox territory. It's the Reston region where Cox doesn't service. (Comcast does).

Don't forget WUSA.

 

Never mind. WUSA doesn't seem to have it yet.

KING 5 is doing a town hall after the football game this coming Thrusday about traffic in the Seattle/Tacoma area.

 

Sinclair is well known for their town halls but usually the topics are more political. Are there any other TEGNA stations that have down Town Halls before? I don't think KSDK ever did one before unless they did one during the Ferguson crisis and I just missed it.

WUSA did a town hall discussion (partnered with the Washington Post) about race relations a few weeks back.

 

I'd think it'd be rather easy considering the pro-forma nature of these transactions. Hell, they paid someone to come up with the Tegna name, they can pay an in-house counsel to reorganize and restructure their company.

 

But the question would still be whether there would be any benefits to even go through the trouble. Other than moving several stations out of subsidaries that appear to also be owners of newspaper properties (the org chart is inaccessible by the link above at the moment, but from what I recall the changes were moving WUSA and KXTV out from Detroit Free Press, Inc., taking another station out of Gannett River States Publishing and into a different subsidiary-- I think that was WJXX, but not entirely sure -- and I think moving KTHV into a different subsidiary), they just redesignated some subsidaries as LLCs. They probably also want to hold on to the old company names like Multimedia, Belo, and King Broadcasting. It would be easier by leaving those existing structures in place from each purchase than breaking each up for reassignment. And I doubt the financials would be impacted either positively or negatively by a restructure vs leaving well enough alone.

 

I'm no expert in corporate parent-child structures... but that structure seems extremely convoluted, both before and after. I'm sure there are tax implications, etc. on why they are keeping the structure that way, but it just seems extra-busy to me.

 

The structure is likely the results of each of the purchases Gannett made over the years, and cleaning that up would require lots of paper transactions needing regulatory approval and such and probably not being worth the hassle. For instance -- and what I found interesting -- is how WKYC is housed in a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Gannett that exists just for them. This likely stems from back when Multimedia bought 51% of the station from NBC, thus WKYC Holdings was how it managed it's partial interest in the station, until Multimedia/Gannett bought the rest of the station from NBC.

 

 

Will any of the stations update and/or change their logos as soon as the split happens?

 

I find that doubtful. None of the stations really trade on a look of a Gannett property or of the company itself, except WUSA, and their look is distinct enough from USA Today's (using a sort-of lowercase in its wordmark), to get away with it. Also, it looks like Tegna will be keeping the WUSA calls as is, given the creation of "WUSA-TV, Inc". (Didn't think they would give up on those calls, anyway.)

Speaking of, one change that will have to happen is that WUSA will stop being owned officially by "Detroit Free Press, Inc"...

 

Why don't they have a rundown? It looks off. Also the fade from the open to the anchors instead of the "wipe" effect that the other stations have is interesting as well..

 

Something tells me Gannett just took the cheap way out and didn't bother upgrading their graphics systems...

 

I think someone earlier in the thread said that Gannett was going to adapt the graphics to the existing systems at the station, rather than upgrade them. Though I cannot find the post at the moment...

 

 

 

Unrelated, I caught the WUSA broadcast off the internet feed, and I just noticed the temperature only variation of the bug.

KUSA does also leave the bug up during weather segments.

As does WUSA, whose weathercast is sponsored, thus a "Michael and Sons" logo is next to the WUSA bug.

Thanks to the eagle-eyes of the DCRTV "Mailbag", they've discovered that Gannett has posted want-ads for some one or some ones to host a coffee-klatch show on WUSA to start in September called "Great Day Washington". ("Good Day DC" was already taken by WTTG for its 9am coffee-klatch.)

Thinking about this for a little bit, it was probably no surprise that Fox probably has the strictest branding agreement with its affiliates, coming along in 1986 when the other networks had 30, 40 plus years of history behind them. Fox needed to get their branding out to people as heavily as possible. (And likewise in 1994-95 when they flipped so many Big Three stations to their network).

Doesn't look like WUSA got the updates yet. I've been watching the online feed.

KOAA, a non-Gannett station in Colorado Springs has introduced their own "Rundown" ticker at the bottom of the screen. Unlike Gannett's, it's not color-coded.

 

Anyone heard any rumbles as to KREM's plans to change graphics and website?

 

A new banner just appeared on their website, announcing the website change will happen Wednesday.

Look at your point 3: The Belo deal happened in 2013. Nearly 9 months ago, in fact.

 

It's not news anymore.

 

Graphics changes, are inside baseball things and aren't usually mentioned unless there is some sort of impact.

 

The only reason these are getting a news story at all is 1) the legitimate necessity of introducing the technicolor cheat codes to viewers, some of whom may find it of interest, and 2) Gannett's insessant need let everybody know how they brand it's properties. Even though, "we're still owned by Gannett" is not a news story.

No station has ever said “Here are our new graphics introduced by mandate because of our [new] owner's corporate standardization policies.” The new graphics story is a must-run? Fine, stick it in C block and hope it doesn't stand out like a sore thumb.

Gannett can't seem to make things work right... what else can they f*k up? Anything!

Nobody's perfect. Just ask Apple.

They changed the header logo at KHOU.com. It's now within a white background box.

I agree on the latter. No station is special whatsoever. Gannett is just like CBS which forces branding down the viewers throats.

There's only one 'JZ.

I suspect the KGW logo change was something that just came about very very recently. The NWCN open which had the new KREM logo had the now old KGW logo.

 

Did anyone noticed to the KREM's new logo?

 

 

KHOU's actually looks like a live website, with the most real content as opposed to dummy content. [Never mind. They are testing by posting a lot of old stories. That said, it is fun to see the website update almost every five minutes with a bunch of different "new" stories. Maybe they are trying to move their entire archives to the new site.]

 

While all these new stations are getting the graphics, one station that's had them,WUSA, found a way to really butcher the open. I hate three note sig played in the tease as a transition. And they have some crappy in-house graphic for the wx sting now:

[yt]eB3IvQ73V-o[/yt]

 

I thought the new weather graphics open came from Gannett since they've been using it from the very first day they got the rest of the new graphics. Anyway, it's the same way WJXX/WLTV uses the stinger. "This is Home" doesn't seem to have a hard open (and WUSA uses a very soft verison of the open for most of the other newscasts).

 

[yt]kpM_ug3CVpQ[/yt]

Check WUSA's site now to see how they'll probably do it... (WUSA chosen because of the geographical proximity of DC to the Norfolk area).