C Block

I happened to notice that KSBY's graphics take a lot of cues from NBC's Look F: The weather setup looks suspiciously like KNTV too:

It's almost/already the start of fall TV, and there's still no official, permanent anchor of the Evening News. I guess ABC was in limbo much longer with the Jennings-to-Gibson era, but still, how odd...

Something bad probably happened in the show is my guess.

That's interesting because the set was still there in the pictures I saw of Scott's goodbye party. The rumor was that CBSN may move in there, which I think would be great. It's honestly the best cable news channel right now, and the rolling news hours could look a lot better than the current setup with only two camera angles and that Early Show throwaway desk.

WBBM 10pm news, 2003. I don't think I quite realized it at the time, but I think WBBM's mid-2000s look is really sharp. I was never a huge fan of that open, that cut of the Enforcer (sorry!), or the bug, but everything else about it (lower thirds, OTS, fullscreens) is very well-executed. It seems like the later update to this look around 2006-ish may have inspired the well-liked WBZ look, too. I think you could plop this look on almost any station today (with adjustments for widescreen, of course) and it would still look great. I don't think the same could be said of their expensive HD-era Hothaus look.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is still the station that runs like a small market station in a large market. They still send MMJs everywhere when all the big boys have a reporter and photog in an ENG truck at the same event, and they still whore themselves out by producing paid programming features during newscast breaks. If Fisher Price ever got into news, their news channel would look a lot like KRON.

I think they could find a way. Where else would O'Reilly go if he's demanding lots of cash? None of the big boy networks will hire him. Sinclair probably has the most amount of cash of any of the bottom feeders who would actually want him.

I, too, have my doubts WGN America would ever actually turn into a conservative network. Though I'm sure Sinclair could find a place to put Bill O, whether as a more telegenic commentator in the must runs or in his own show in a sleepy timeslot back to back with Sheryl Atkisson — or perhaps even daily! Bill O got his start doing, more or less, commentary on local TV, so this seems to be the most likely place for him. No way he'd go to scrappy channels like OANN or even NewsMax. They are the Big Lots of cable news/talk channels.

I am pretty sure she's a practicing Scientologist. She dresses just like one on TV. I don't know if you've ever been in the area around headquarters, but you will see them all over there, all wearing those very neat, tightly-outfitted black suits with white or blue button-ups underneath. Greta also supposedly has a house in Clearwater, which is where a lot of those upper crust Scientologists have their houses too, indicating that she's probably pretty high up in the church. What is odd though is that she has kept it all very hush hush unlike any other celebrity Scientologists, and her sister is a psychiatrist, aka "a practitioner of death" or something... But with all that said, I can't imagine her leaving the church anytime soon, let alone being anywhere near Leah Remini.

This is the one thing I never, ever understood about her. How you can be someone claiming to be a journalist and a Scientologist, I have no idea...

I remember Einstein Bros Bagels used to have something similar. Some of them would have a TV with a mix of weather, stock quotes, headlines from CBS News' website, horoscopes and who knows what other random stuff they found. I don't remember there being video, but maybe there was. This was back in the Katie Couric era. I'm not sure if they still do it — I've been on the west coast for too long, where we get Noah's instead of Einstein's.

Thanks for sharing. That's certainly an interesting article, though I don't see anything in it that shows a "clear sign" that Anderson Cooper would take it over. All it shows is that CBS (specifically David Rhodes) is admitting they fumbled this whole thing without any clear plan for who would succeed Scott. With that said, I would be shocked if CBS went with an outside hire. If getting rid of Scott already hurt morale, then it would be even more demoralizing if everyone from the inside were passed up for an outsider. That did not go as planned for them last time, and all it would do is confuse viewers. Sure, Anderson may not completely be an outsider given his 60 Minutes role, but if you asked most people who watch television, they would probably most identify him as being the face of CNN. I doubt many people are very aware of his 60 Minutes role, including those who watch CBS Monday through Friday. CBS has a deep bench, but no obvious starter.

Thanks for posting. I came across it a while ago but never posted it on here; wasn't sure how much interest there was. That video would have been not too long after they moved into their new building on Speer. It's a little before my time, so I can't believe how awful that set originally looked. What's also interesting is that 3x3 grid design still appears in certain places all over the inside and outside of that building. Sacrilege!

I dug through the Internet Archives to find the very last edition of the Early Show — from Studio 47! Going through other videos from this time period and before, it's amazing what a mess the Early Show was. In retrospect, it's so surprising CBS put that on the air before actually figuring something out. It's also interesting to see how spartan the Early Show was in its final months while they were working on the new (and still-on-the-air!) format.

I'm old enough to remember when JetBlue a/k/a PropBlue switched from black and white to color...

I posted this in the shoutbox, but I'll write it in permanence here. I flew JetBlue the other weekend for the first time in ages (not much use for JetBlue out west), and I ended up on planes that hadn't been touched in about a decade. The seatback TVs were still 4:3 cut, and when I watched WCBS' news, it was amazing to see how much was cut off. Sure, the bug and most of the lower thirds are in the safe zone, but even things that I thought were designed to be 4:3 safe like the OTS are ridiculously cut off. Not to mention too that so much of the shot blocking and the doubleboxes don't even try to be 4:3 safe. It's such a poor viewing experience that I would think for those still stuck in the stone age with a 4:3 TV or in the back of an old JetBlue A320, a 16:9 letterbox signal would be so much better. At least, that's what most other station groups have started doing years ago.

KDVR promo song from 1987. Also cool to see what logo they had back then, as well as the brand — "TV 31." And a full 9pm newscast from May 2003:

Also, seeing as Dan Rather is experiencing some surprising and renewed fame on social media, it's cool to revisit again his very last CBS Evening News broadcast, which someone recently uploaded again to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT9BcuDsPyo Though one of my favorite minor details about Dan Rather's story is one that comes from this profile about him from a decade ago:

This presentation style debuted in 2006, so that counts. But I never thought I'd long for the days when dayside on CNN Domestic looked like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id=9EpBMI5vM8Y;t=52

I don't think she was comparing herself to Oprah. As I remember it, Charlie Rose asked her what kind of show she would ideally want to to. Her response was “a little Charlie Rose, a little Oprah, and a little me all together.”

Yeah, that article was posted yesterday. NBC denied it today and said that they're still working through negotiations. It is by no means official. I still don't know how they're going to get out of this though. The smart money is on keeping your talent that have huge ratings right now. I can't help but think that Andy Lack hasn't really evolved his programming strategy for MSNBC beyond 1996 if he thinks Brian Williams is the future of the channel.

They've already been doing that for a while. It's a little odd, and there's little doubt the station is trying to phase out an old timer when the young blonde starts cutting into his airtime. Though Westword's article interestingly suggests that Ed bad mouting the station in the press may have been deliberately planned. http://www.westword.com/news/how-ed-greenes-slow-retirement-from-cbs4-turned-ugly-9067657

Wow, that's crazy that they built their own newsroom software. And probably smart — iNEWS feels like a dinosaur, and ENPS isn't really any better in my opinion.

Brent Cannon and Laura Garcia-Cannon were a husband wife anchor duo on KNTV's morning show for about a decade before they went through what sounds like a pretty messy divorce. He was taken off the show and reassigned to an off-air role before he left the station; she's still on the air, which makes it awkward for anyone who remembers that they anchored together (her name is still hyphenated after all). I don't really have any connections to KNTV, so I don't know the whole backstory, but I can only imagine what a mess that whole thing was to work through for everyone on that show, let alone the station. Obviously this is a much smaller deal than Joe and Mika. KNTV's morning show has always been pretty sleepy and has never amounted to too much, but there was some aww-shucks viewer appeal that they were married. In both cases, it's arguably the same dynamic with working with someone side by side 40 hours a week, living together, raising a family, not to mention the same employer, and a higher potential for things to go bad (in my opinion) than if you had two anchors not married to, or seeing, each other.

I know it's not really my business what people do in their private lives, but I can't help but think how weird this whole thing is. I would hope that they would eventually come up with a backup plan if things do go bad. You'd hate to run into a Brent Cannon and Laura Garcia-Cannon situation like what happened at KNTV.