C Block

Looks nice. It doesn't look like they did too much to it. I wouldn't have thought to put the home base in front of the curved monitor, which IIRC was more of an auxiliary position when MSNBC had the studio. I'm even into the virtual extension. The only thing that seems a bit off to me is the sharp angle of the desk – that doesn't really match anything.

New mic flag today — either that, or it’s just one borrowed from another station down at the Super Bowl.

This is what confuses me: the on-air brand changed without thought to the digital brand. If anything, in this day and age, there should be even less emphasis on TV branding. There has also been no explanation on air for the change from what I've seen. I get the sense that this was a reluctant and not super well-thought out change. WABC and KABC still calling themselves Eyewitness News, I totally get. I didn't think WLS' change back to that brand was necessary at the time, but I get they did it for a throwback reason that may have resonated with their viewers. For KGO, the only honest reason for this change is "because New York, LA, and Chicago all do it and it makes sharing graphics easier," and that's a pretty lame reason.

Looks like KABC has switched their logo on-air to the WABC version as well.

As of today's 5pm news, KGO has rebranded as "Eyewitness News." The logo has been updated to the WABC version (minus the mic flags), though the music and everything else have stayed the same. Whenever anyone on here has suggested KGO should do this, I have long dismissed it, as it was KPIX's brand for a long time. Also, it feels a bit contrived and anachronistic to me to consciously choose to start calling your news brand "Eyewitness News" in 2026. I guess group-wide consistency is now more important for ABC, and it has been now more than a decade since KPIX was "Eyewitness News," so maybe people have forgotten about that by now.

It was before then – I think the logo with the ABC in the lower left first popped up in late 2003, when they debuted the first of various graphics packages with Eurostile as the default font.

Updated social media icon for KGO. Hmm.....

I'm not so sure. It all looks so inconsistent and not very well thought-out. Bringing back Didot for only half the logo, and then picking a third font for the lower thirds all looks really sloppy. The open's use of pictures of Tony feels really tacky and self-serving – has any network evening news open ever done that? I love the 1991 theme, but it doesn't match the open or the tone that the overall program is taking. It feels like a really arbitrary choice. The only thing I do like is returning to a newsroom backdrop, and the Studio 47 newsroom has never looked better. It looks much brighter and busier than its most recent incarnation when used on the weekend program. But even the sleek newsroom look is all ruined with the dinky 90s desk taken out of storage.

It's not the 1996 Rather desk, but it has to be another desk from that same era – looks like maybe the Up to the Minute desk? Either way, that desk is for sure a hand-me-down and not new.

Presumably if it's a big story in LA, then it'll also be covered in WCW. Moving the show up to 6:30 now means it'll be live in both markets, and I bet Seattle and Phoenix will soon follow.

Starting next week, West Coast Wrap moves up to 6:30 pm on both KTTV and KTVU. The change is permanent.

I agree with a lot of what has already been said. I'll add this: Dan Rather talked about it a bit in his Emmy Television Academy interview a few years ago. One little nugget I found interesting is when he talks about Nielsen changing its method of recording ratings in the 1980s to a diary system, which harmed CBS in a way. He rambles quite a bit in the interview, but it's a very interesting watch if you ever have the time. https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/dan-rather?chapter=14&clip=5106&full=true#full-interview Toward the ~7:00 mark in that clip, he also talks about a confluence of other issues facing CBS beginning in the 1980s. ABC had finally become a strong competitor at that point, and there was a lot more pressure for network news divisions to become profitable rather than remain loss leaders. CNN proved that television news could become a product on its own rather than just a costly public service. Also, the period of Laurence Tisch as CEO of CBS was pretty brutal with a lot of cost cutting and huge layoffs. I think all of that, plus the 1994/1995 affiliation realignment and loss of the NFL really hurt CBS. Once you're at the bottom of the pack, it's really had to affect change internally. A more recent and overlooked (in my opinion) example of CBS fumbling things is CBSN. CBS beat everybody to the punch in doing streaming news more than a decade ago, but they completely squandered their lead in that space. NBC and ABC have far more compelling and comprehensive streaming products now. I think Fox's Live Now even gets more eyeballs than CBSN (or whatever it's called now) at a fraction of the production cost.

The updated set debuted at 11am today. They added a big video wall next to the weather center for weather, and it looks like they added a similar video wall to the demo/interview set. Otherwise, everything looked the same from what I saw. A picture from Drew Tuma’s Instagram:

This set has been one of my favorites for a long time, and I think it aged really well. It’ll be interesting to see the refresh. Since a new GM has taken over, KGO has taken a more traditional, meat and potatoes approach to news, so I’m guessing the end result will be pretty conservative in design.

Oddly enough he’s also not the first ABC News correspondent to make this kind of move: Jeremy Hubbard did the same thing. He didn’t want to raise his kids in New York (though he is also from Colorado and worked there before, which I don’t think is the case for Lipoff.) Aside from the big time network anchor jobs (of which there are very few), network jobs pay pretty modestly, and the quality of life is terrible, especially for correspondents. Being a M-F dayside anchor and off at 5:30 is a pretty good gig.