C Block

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.

My one complaint is that the color palette and font selection is a little too similar to the KTVU / Fox O&O look. It's not a dead ringer by any means, but it's very very close. With that said, it's quite nice. It looks well thought-out, and it reminds me a bit of the first look KRON had in the post-NBC days. Seeing a bespoke graphics package for just one station is always rare and refreshing these days. I always assumed Nexstar would have eventually forced stations like KRON and KTLA into some kind of half-cooked standardized group look. Oh, one more complaint: a 3:30 pkg on new graphics? KRON really competing with KPIX here on who can regularly self-congratulate themselves all day long.

Looks nice....but also....it doesn't look all that different from what it replaced. I agree with the comments about the home base looking a little washed out. Hopefully they can fix that.

I don't know, I think I kind of prefer the simplicity of the previous opens. These feel like they have a little too much going on in them.

That's sad. He was one of the good ones. You could always count on him to be a class act on weekends with the occasional and unexpected quippy remark.

Those are the standard Fox O&O graphics. I don't spot anything different there. There are I think five different skin types of the Fox graphics with a different set of colors. Each one has an internal name that's a fox. I think the one with the light blue accents is called Arctic Fox.

He’s maybe not bad in small doses, and he was good writing for Cable Newser back in the day, but he was too much and too didactic in how much he was on CNN during the Zucker era. I also still maintain that media journalism is the laziest form of journalism.

Meh. The outgoing look was pretty good and probably could last a while longer. I don't see how this is much of an improvement.

Maybe so, maybe not. Some of the biggest costs with these conventions aren't the travel costs, it's renting space in the arena to work and do live shots. Some networks are charging their affiliates (including O&Os) thousands of dollars a day to use their workspaces.

What!!

They are not dead last or next-to-dead-last across the board like they were five years ago, but they're still not doing great. I'm not sure what the monthly averages are, but they're probably a ~#3 overall. Their bright spots are probably their 6 and 7pm newscasts. The format is fresh, Juliette Goodrich is a good and popular anchor, and those shows are in between the Evening News at 6:30, which also helps. I can see why other O&Os like WCBS are more or less copying that format. Otherwise, they're still basically last place in the morning, and the 8/9pm news block on PIX Plus gets hashmarks most nights.

What's the point of calling that out publicly on air? Bragging rights? All the networks take turns doing pool for all of those kinds of big events.

It looks fine. I suppose it's better than the current standard Nexstar Fox graphics. I don't think I'd say this is better than the O&O BNF graphics.

I'm actually not a huge fan of how Studio 47 looks these days. Outside of the Cronkite-styled map, the whole backdrop looks pretty dark and cluttered most of the time. The anchor desk feels too informal, and the lone monitor standup shot looks cramped. The space doesn't have that commanding feel that the Rather and Couric era sets had. Maybe that's by design, but I think they could do better.