C Block

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.

Looks great. You can also see they now do weather on another big video wall in the studio, and there's also a sitting area. Nice to see something different as the 2003, 2008, and 2013 sets all had the same basic layout and designer. Some good pictures of the teardown and build: https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/pictures/cbs-colorado-new-set-construction-behind-the-scenes/30/ It looks like they really used every square inch of what is otherwise a very small and outdated studio. The desk looks clunky, but I said the same about the KCAL set. The lighting looks good, the monitors are new, there are a few different presentation areas - what's not to like?

And those are just the ones you know about!

I don't get what's crazy about that. Comp days for working additional days as a salaried employee is pretty standard. I'm salaried. If I work an additional day, I get a comp day to use either in that pay period or in the future. My paycheck doesn't change. Working late or long hours because of breaking news or elections is one thing – everybody more or less expects that. But I can tell you that people are not coming in on their days off to do extra work for whatever reason without getting compensated for it at all. There are all kinds of work agreements out there. It's hard to know the exact details of anyone's agreement if you don't at least work for the same company. I do know of full-time on-air staff in big markets who are paid hourly. I don't think I've ever heard of an anchor in a big market who isn't salaried, but it's possible that there may be some out there. The point is that people like Maurice and Kristine aren't coming in on their days off to do network news just for the exposure and without anything in return. They are, at minimum, getting paid like it's any other day of work for them. I would imagine they have smart agents who ensure their contracts state that they might get paid a little bonus for doing network anchoring, but I can't be sure of that.

Unpaid work is illegal in this country. They have to be compensated in some way or another for working an extra day. I would guess that they're probably salaried workers and get a comp day to take off at another time. If they're paid hourly (which some on-air people are!), then they get paid overtime. They might also get paid a little extra for anchoring a national broadcast if it's written into their contract.

Funny to see that everyone on here almost universally pans KABC's switch to WABC music. I agree, but I can't help but wonder whether we might all have thought differently had they made these changes 10-15 years ago when CBS was similarly standardizing around the WCBS look. The WABC cut of Eyewitness News has become so recognizable with WABC for us that it feels wrong to hear it in Southern California. But, it's probably one of those things that doesn't matter a whole lot at this point. Most viewers are only watching for 5-10 minutes at a time at most, so who cares what the open music sounds like these days.

The music change is weird and not necessarily a good fit for KABC, though it's not as weird of a music change as what WLS switched to.

It's kind of a silly term that doesn't mean anything, and I don't know whether viewers really care or notice. I usually don't write it in reporter tosses and will instead just write "reporter XXX has the story from XXX" as that's just simpler to say anyway. Stations have all kinds of different types of arrangements with other stations. The most seamless type is under the same owner, at least operationally. Stations under the same station group can share content really easily. Depending on how their IT is set up, they can view and download video directly from each others' servers, view assignment grids, Slack channels, and even entire show rundowns of other stations. Of course, where an owner owns stations can be somewhat arbitrary geographically – it's not like a station in Philadelphia has a reason to pull content regularly from their 'sister station' in Phoenix. Then there are all sorts of less formal arrangements between stations that don't have the same owner, but are located in adjacent markets. These ones might be less noticeable to the viewer. Usually, they're at least the same network affiliation, but not always. Under these arrangements, stations are probably sharing content more often because their content is more pertinent to one another, but the process of sharing content is more manual. These arrangements rely on assignment desks to email out their assignment plans of the day, phone calls to coordinate what content they're interested in and when they need it, and FTP/fileshare downloads to send it. (Of course, back in the day, there was a lot more sharing via microwave, satellite, or fiber.) Are these arrangements 'sister stations?' They obviously have share more interest in content, but operationally they are distinct, and corporate owners will have different policies and practices that will drive newsgathering and editorial tone differently. Also, the whole Nexstar blockade of not sharing any content with any other non-Nexstar station regardless of affiliation for 24 hours has changed things a lot. That whole practice needs to stop, and I don't know why the network feed services (Newsedge, News Channel, NNS, et al) are putting up with that.

He's writing this as if the industry isn't already a revolving door of talent. Has he watched the news at all in the last decade? Even in big markets, it's pretty astounding how much attrition there is on and off screen. I don't think I could name more than a handful of reporters on competing stations. When I turn on Denver TV, there's barely anybody recognizable to me on there. This is nothing but great news for the media industry workforce, and employees can now more freely vote with their feet and escape bad employers who don't pay enough. Not that we have much choice anyway with at most a dozen station groups now. Of course, noncompetes have been watered down quite a bit already. Most stories I hear these days of people breaking their contract involve the station group threatening to sue them, then the employee gets a lawyer to point out all the ridiculous claims. Then, the station group is too cheap to go through with the lawsuit anyway and they back down immediately. There are so many other new laws at play too. Noncompete clauses are already unenforceable in California, but a new law that went into effect in January makes all contracts with noncompetes void *altogether.*

Branding is important in every industry, but there is such a thing as overthinking it. Of what viewers we still have, I think all they really care about other than the news content is that the branding isn't distracting. I think all that most viewers care about is that the news content is of quality, that the anchors and reporters look decent, that the lighting in the studio is crisp, and that the newscast isn't riddled with production errors. Viewers no longer care or have any attachment to anachronistic branding devices. I'll never forget a conversation I had with two acquaintances in Los Angeles a few years ago. They were musicians and did not watch television and thought that "KTLA," "Eyewitness News," and "Good Day LA" were all the same station, and they assumed that local TV news was still stuck in those 70s-era trappings.

Mark Mester is returning to television – as main anchor at KMIR in Palm Springs: https://nbcpalmsprings.com/2024/04/19/welcome-mark-mester-to-the-nbc-palm-springs-family/

Sounds quite a bit like the format that KPIX has been doing for the last 18 months or so.