C Block

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.

The new set really appears like something designed for another space (ahem, KCAL) rather than something bespoke like the 2008 set. The new one has a lot of missed opportunities: nothing really to see on that left wall, weather center completely obscures one wall of windows rather than taking advantage of it, and there's seemingly no option to swivel the cameras around and have a standup presentation inside with a window backdrop. Also, is it just me, or are some of the wooden pegs above the main video wall not installed straight??? I'm glad that they're back in that space though. It's probably just a result of them being unable to lease it out to retail, but oh well. Window sets can be really finicky – I know firsthand (who knew studio walls also provided insulation from RF interference of IFBs and mics!?) – but I think they're cool and worth the hassle. Not every station can pull them off, as most stations are in boring midcentury suburban boxes. Complicated studios like these really require the buy-in of a GM to make them happen. It appears that was the case here.

I happened to be watching WHDH last Saturday night and noticed this. Their 10:30 lead was an anchor tracked pkg about a police chase caught on video from Texas that happened several days prior. Wasn’t sure if that was typical for them or not, but I got the sense that maybe it was.

The more you're able to control the coverage by using your own resources, the better the end result will be. If you're relying on a sister station or the network for coverage, then you're at best someone else's second priority, and you'll have limited say in what content they'll gather. The benefits are obvious, but whether it's worth the cost is another question. Even though the story didn't have a ton of big local ties for us, we sent a crew along with one of our sister stations to the Maui wildfires last year, and I'm generally glad we did. They were able to do live shots for us and gather more content than if we'd just relied on the Honolulu stations or the network.

I don't think it's fair to say that Miami is a "serious" news market and that Denver isn't. Miami is big on pacing, style, and breaking news. The Denver market is perhaps plainer in style but with much more community-driven stories. I think the Denver market is pretty similar in style to what you might find in Minneapolis or Seattle. I don't think either approach is necessarily wrong. You're right that plenty of stations tried coping WSVN and failed. In Denver, that station was KMGH. The short-lived "Real Life, Real News" era brought in outsider Natalie Pujo from Toronto. They put her in a short skirt in front of a big monitor and reformatted the newscast with lots of punchy franchise segments ("Burn and Learn"). It didn't work. KMGH has pretty much always been a #3 or #4 station, but the best momentum they had was years later with the Mike Landess-Anne Trujillo pairing and with a more traditional format that was heavy on investigative reporting and weather.

Huh, I was so out of the loop on this that I didn't realize they already picked a specific location and are ready to move in. Looks like the building is an old warehouse that was heavily renovated a few years ago. It's kind of a weird location. It's near so many things, but is situated in a way that almost nothing will be an easy walk, and there's not really any sort of coffee shop or deli that looks easy to dart in and out of. The set does look like an in-house job. It all is probably fine, though certainly not the most stylish or colorful. There's something about that smaller plasma hung on the wall looks not quite right to me. I do think that having at least a handful of different reporter standup positions is important, regardless of the current flavor of the month "nobody is ever live or in-studio" thing. Plus, no matter the set, they have to get the lighting right. Bad lighting will ruin even the fanciest of sets. I guess we'll see how it looks on air. I'd be curious to see what the rest of the building looks like, particularly the newsroom and sales department. Knowing the building is a former warehouse, hopefully it's not all one big open space on a single floor.

Yeah, every station here and there may have a slightly different idea of what has historically been and presently is their flagship newscast. Put most broadly, I think most stations' flagship newscast was probably the late 9/10/11pm 20 years ago. Now, I'd say it's probably the 5 or 6pm or mornings for most stations. I can't stress enough how much late news ratings have dropped for everyone.

I disagree with the 4pm being the most important show. That's still too early to have the big audience, and if a station is giving all of their content to the 4pm and very little new for 5 and 6, then that's either a result of old habits or is just a poor allocation of resources. The 6pm hour is probably the most important with the highest ratings and the most people at home watching. A lot of stations are still set in their ways of having a bunch of dayside reporters all start at 9:30, with one big editorial meeting then, and then everybody's live at 4 or 5 with a straight pkg for 6. Sometimes that's fine, but I do think that things can and do start to not feel as fresh at 6. Some stations have started to stagger reporter start times to be able to be live later and have new content for 6 and 7, and I think that's smart.

I don't know about the Chicago market specifically, though I'd be fascinated to know what their security situation is there. When I was in Chicago a few months ago, I was shocked to see a WBBM live truck with full station branding on the exterior. Where I am, all of our live trucks are unmarked, and without going into too much detail, we take pretty extensive measures to ensure crew safety in the field. While live-for-the-sake-of-live definitely still happens, we try not to do it. Usually, if one of our reporters is live somewhere for the late shows, it's because that's where their story was. It often makes sense for the crew to stay on the scene, finish their story, do the live shot, and then drive back rather than rush back to the station and slam something together to make slot. A lot of stations are also just putting fewer resources into their late news and assigning fewer reporters to it. It used to be that the 10/11p news were many stations' bread and butter, but late news viewership is falling the fastest out of any daypart.

Either that or they just figured that while they had their news set in the smaller studio, it wasn't worth it to try to move to the bigger one. Or, I don't know if KGO operated this way, but perhaps they rented out the larger studio to other outside productions. KTVU did that – KTVU rented out their much larger Studio A to other productions (including the filming of Mrs. Doubtfire) before they finally moved their main news set into there in 2012.

I think KGO's set is really underrated. It has almost everything you'd ever need in a set: a nice home base, a distinct weather area, a unique interview/demo area, and a few different reporter standup positions. The topical graphics that they put in the monitors also always look really sharp. Even though it's pushing eight years old, it has held up very well. If that set debuted today, I think we'd all compliment it. The only thing that's a shame is that they didn't install a larger version of it in the studio that they gave away to KRON instead.

If we’re going to complain about stations wasting money on sets, I don’t think this is the example. This is replacing a set that was more than 10 years old and had very few modifications to it. (Looks like in those pictures too that they are even saving the updated video wall from the outgoing set for something else.) At a certain point, things get old and outdated and need to be replaced. What KCNC just put in there is nice, modern, and not particularly excessive or opulent. Plus, as others pointed out, they probably saved some money on design by reusing the KCAL designs. I don’t think replacing a 10-year-old set with something functional, modern, and not over-the-top like what KCNC did here is a bad decision at all. If we’re going to talk about irresponsible excess, look no further than KDVR. They replaced a set that was what, barely three years old with something that has so many monitors that it probably cost a lot more than it looks. And the end product has terrible lighting and looks worse than what it replaced.