C Block

Well-put. Something about him really rubs me the wrong way. He feels like he was created in the same test tube in the same lab as Muir and Glor were. I actually think a better pick would be Kate Snow. She's a solid anchor and was the Sunday Nightly News anchor for many years. Of course, she gave that up to focus on Daily five days a week, and I'm sure that must be a far less stressful gig with better quality of life than the main Nightly gig.

It has good lighting, seamless video walls as you'd expect, and a few options for standup presentation – what's not to like?

Some of the more modern (but lesser used) newsroom software like Inception and Octopus have automations that make clipping video and posting to the web a lot easier. Supposedly it's as easy as just highlighting a few lines in a rundown and the app then clips it at the right spot and gets the clip ready to publish in a web CMS or YouTube. I've heard we may be switching from iNEWS to one of those, so I guess I'll find out how well it works sooner rather than later. You are right though that YouTube has limited revenue potential, and that's true not just for local TV stations, but really any content creator who's not selling in-video sponsorships.

You could make that same argument against the Major Garrett piece that ran on Tuesday, or the Adam Yamaguchi piece that ran today. With that said, I do think both of those pkgs were very well done and illustrative of the larger issue, though it still just feels weird that they can completely ignore what's the lead on literally every other major outlet. I did notice that they moved the "Evening News Roundup" segment up both Tuesday and today to be right after the first story, which is probably a smart move. It seemed a little buried and lost the first day. It's worth a shot for them. And if anyone is going to try this, it's going to be CBS and not the leader. I just can't stress enough how this is perhaps the most radical departure from anything they've ever tried going back to Murrow. This is not the CBS Evening News. It's not a "network nightly news program." This is a fundamentally different type of broadcast altogether. Most striking to me is that based on the first three days, they haven't run sound from any sort of press conference or anything else that could have been picked up by a competitor's camera. They haven't run any sound from the president, and they've run very little sound from other politicians or authorities— not even anything from the fiery RFK confirmation hearing, which they covered today. Instead, they are prioritizing exclusive interviews and stories from real people. That is all good practice and very refreshing, no doubt – it just feels strange in the absence of *any* of the typical meat and potatoes material. Is that going to be a turnon or a turnoff for viewers? I really don't know as that hasn't been tried before by anybody to this extent.

I believe those are real comments. I'm not nearly as negative on the new show as those comments are, but I get the criticism and share some of it. On Monday, the lead story on CBS's competitors and pretty much every other major national news outlet was the ICE raids. CBS reduced it to barely more than a 10 second mention. Instead, they led with Margaret Brennan on Deepsake as a debrief segment with nothing more than talk and some slick fullscreens. They didn't roll a frame of video or sound until almost four minutes in when they were onto the second story. After watching the first two days, it seems like they're not really chasing the news of the day anymore in favor of fewer, longer enterprise stories. That's a fundamentally different strategy from anything CBS has done before. I'd argue that the Pelley era did the best job of balancing both. It's not a bad program. But is it the newscast of record with news from today? I'm not sure that it is. This is a great show for news junkies and anyone who's already read the major headlines online all day long. I'm not sure if it's a great show for someone who's too busy to keep up with the news and wants to watch a recap of it at dinnertime, and I think most broadcast viewers are probably the latter.

What studio is that? I don't recognize it. I thought we were all speculating that they were moving back into Studio 47 because that hasn't been on the air in a while?

Ratings on Christmas are higher than you'd think. A lot of people are at home with not much else to do, or maybe they get enough of family time after a while. Plus, now there's football on Christmas Day. With that said, a skeleton staff and maybe an hour show in the morning and half hour at 10/11pm is more than enough to suffice on Christmas. Run the yule log and pre-taped specials for the rest of the day. In my experience, the most pointless holiday newscast is the morning news on New Year's Day. That's the hardest one to rustle up content for. Even less is happening then, and even fewer viewers are watching.

I see some chatter online that this is only for certain newscasts (11am and 4pm, plus maybe mornings?) and that KEZI and KDRV still have separate newscasts at 5 and 6pm. Just please don't tell me what's-his-name is also the news director of the combined operation.

When? Whenever I tune in, they're clearly inside these days. It's not like the days long ago when the main second block weather hit was always outside (or started inside and ended outside).

It's been in there ever since they installed this set, what, 8 years ago? It wasn't perhaps as noticeable before this refresh as it didn't really have any weather branding around it. I think it's kind of a shame they don't do weather from the backyard anymore – that was unique.

More of a refresh than I was expecting, though it's still pretty minor. The angled peacocks everywhere are a little odd.

I don’t think they’re building a new set. I saw Kyle Clark say on Twitter that it’s only for a week. With that said, if they don’t replace Daily Blast Live with anything, then it would be nice if they down the line moved Colorado and Company and the Denver Huddle back to Studio B (perhaps even just using the DBL set) and make the main news set in A the full size of the studio again. Probably not anytime soon, but someday.

KUSA is temporarily in the former Daily Blast Live studio. Kyle Clark said there was some work being done on the main set. Aside from the atrocious white balancing on one camera and awful lighting in one shot, I actually don't think this looks that bad....

The whole plan is weird. I'm not convinced it's going to last, and I'm not convinced that CBS management thinks this is going to last. Did Wendy McMahon take Neeraj's place, or is that still vacant? This anchor lineup feels like more of a placeholder idea until there's a clear idea of who's leading the news department. Whoever it is will probably want to put their footprint on it and redo the Evening News, just like what every other former head of the news department has wanted to do. Maurice is a smooth anchor, don't get me wrong, but is he a national name yet? Does he even have any body of reporting outside the tristate area? Dickerson's not awful, but he's never seemingly been super successful with any chair he's been given, and he's now basically been in them all (mornings, Face the Nation, streaming.)

I don't think that's too crazy. Is it really "most" have severed ties? KCBS and KPIX still have their partnership, though it's not as close as it used to be. Literally – KCBS moved into their own facility and had to stop sharing KPIX's assignment desk. It's a little weird that KCBS political insider Phil Matier is the political insider for KGO-TV, though I think that happened before the sale.