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.

I don't think it's a coincidence that this move happened shortly after a new GM came to town. While there's no doubt that Elex is hard working, his problem is that he ends up making everything about himself, whether it's intentional or not. He has gotten used to getting his way with everything at KTTV through the years of a revolving carousel of news managers, and I'm guessing that is coming to an end. I heard that his China Newsom trip a few years ago cost 40k! That's an insane amount of money to throw around for a last place station and at a company that values frugality above all. I'm sure the inauguration trip cost a fair amount of money too. I don't think the new management was going to put up with his behavior for very long. While I admired his attempts to elevate California politics, I personally found his style to be somewhat sycophantic, and for what was ostensibly a statewide political show, he sure spent a lot of time dwelling on LA city politics. I doubt he's staying within the company. It would have been announced in a corporate press release if he were. He also wouldn't be leaking stuff to the LA Times. That "Look at how NICE Elex Michaelsen is" story the day before his own announcement didn't come out of nowhere. As for his replacement, I think it's a question of whether he's replaced at all, or to what degree. Seattle just blew up their PM lineup to basically be a Headline News style newswheel with taped news blocks. The Bay Area has gone to a solo anchor format for most shows.

It's not a bad thing on a normal day-to-day basis, no. It only becomes a problem when the station group still expects stations to churn out sponsored sports shows and specials during football season, or for whatever soccer tournament is on Fox air these days.

It's a FOX thing. Other O&Os have taken a hatchet to their sports departments too. The preference is to have a single dedicated "sports reporter" who turns stories in the field about whatever the biggest sports story of the day is. The days of four male sports anchors in crisp suits above the waist taking turns reading highlights from the anchor desk and a bunch of sports producers are over.

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.