C Block

9 hours ago, mre29 said:

 

This is not a bad thing.

 

Also, I'm guessing stations finally realized that a lot of viewers likely tune out after the weather forecast.

 

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.

5 hours ago, newsdude said:

Don’t be that surprised. WTTG in DC cut theirs years ago, even as the Nationals won the World Series and the Caps won the Stanley Cup. Now, they have a sports reporter who does a handful of sports feature stories a week and then beef up coverage when Washington plays on Fox, esp in the playoffs.

But surprisingly, WRC followed through and did the same thing in cutting a regular sports segment. JP Findlay (formerly of NBC Sports Washington) does segments for them as warranted. He does more travel w/ the team, but the days of George Michael and the 5-minute sports block are long gone.

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.

15 hours ago, 24994J said:

He was in over his head at noon & 5 on WNBC, he was bland as all get out on ABC, so my expectations are low for Tom. I said it over the Discord, but I'll ask here; he was clearly hired to be NBC's Muir, but will he end up being more of a Jeff Glor?

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?

1 hour ago, Recovering Producer said:

Most likely at the local level, the labor cost of the work it takes to clip and upload broadcasts to YouTube is greater than getting video up to existing on-demand platforms and YouTube has lower potential revenue for the station. There almost certainly ways for a sales team to generate ad and monetization opportunities for broadcasts on NewsOn/Zeam/station OTT channels, while YouTube wouldn’t generate much, if any, revenue for past newscasts on demand. Additionally, station group operated streaming platforms are likely easier to integrate into engineering and IT workflows so the clipping/upload of broadcasts there is semi, if not fully, automated and almost instant. 

 

Network likely has the bodies available to manually clip segments and remove any possible restricted video from a newscast before uploading the 30 minute broadcast, and they would upload far less broadcasts per day compared with local stations almost constant around the clock newscasts 

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.

12 hours ago, Jase said:

 

Since the ICE raids started days before and there were no new substantive developments. I agree with them that it didn't warrant much more than a mention. And the following day, they presented a more comprehensive piece regarding the raids. 

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.

12 hours ago, Jase said:

 

I appreciate their measured approach when it comes to 'the news of the day.' Giving viewers the same tired rundown of stories, just like everyone else, hasn't worked. If there was ever a time to re-invent the wheel, it's now. I'm not sure they will ever be #1 (or even #2), but they're fully capable of being the most competitive #3 there is. The question is, will that be enough for them???

 

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.

6 hours ago, Jase said:

Not sure what to make of those comments or if they’re from real people. Comments I’ve read have been mostly positive. 
 

Some have grown accustomed to getting a recounting of events instead of being told what  the implications of said events are. It’s something that will take a minute to get used to.

 

Like others have said, CBS is on the right track. They just have to keep going and block out the noise. 

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.

12 hours ago, TheNewsTV said:

I saw it on X/Twitter, I don't know if we can trust it. But it looks like this is going to be the new set for the CBS Evening News

 

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?

6 minutes ago, MediaZone4K said:

Objectively speaking....Why pay staff time and a half to produce a full schedule of newscasts when little *LOCAL* news is actually occuring, for probably below average viewership?

 

Is there an appetite to hear about the latest shooting/stabbing on Christmas? 

 

And from a subjective POV....What little does someone have going on in their life that they're mad about not being able to watch as much news for one day out of 366?

 

Does any of this actually warrant debate? A major national holiday occurred, and mass amounts non-emergency workers scheduled vacation simultaneously. Its that simple.

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.

1 hour ago, newsn8te said:

Similar to Wisconsin, KEZI and KDRV now have combined newscasts under the brand of Oregon News Now. 
 

 

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.

25 minutes ago, MidwestTV said:

They do weather from the backyard all the time.

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).

5 minutes ago, MidwestTV said:

At least they appear to have an actual (but very dark) weather center in studio now.

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. 

3 hours ago, newsteam13 said:

You know what? THIS news set - that was used by Daily Blast Live - is actually really awesome. Hope they NEVER leave this set in favor of the new one being built.

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.

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.

3 hours ago, DENDude said:

Former KUSA Anchor & Investigative reporter Ward Lucas passed away Sunday at 75, no word on his cause of death.   He was part of a Netflix Documentary on the serial killer Ted Bundy, he worked at KUSA-TV from 1976--2009 when he retired, and before KUSA he started his career at Seattle's KIRO-TV from 1974-1976..   More at the link below.

 

https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/ward-lucas-reporter-anchor-denver-dies/73-d5119198-5c1f-420f-b2f3-d6387cc4faf9

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.

7 hours ago, Chicago2008 said:

I'm sure the expenses the Chicago stations incurred for the RNC in Milwaukee weren't as big as it's just up the road. Likewise I'm sure the expenses incurred by the Milwaukee TV stations won't be as big if they send people to the DNC in Chicago. Again it's just down the road. 

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.