C Block

You could hire 300 journalists and pay them $80,000 a year for how much Matt was making. You'd even have some money and a helicopter left over too. Matt was overpaid. And he was not worth every penny. This is not just a reckoning in sexual harassment, but this is also a wake-up call that overpaying talent doesn't necessarily correlate with higher ratings. NBC's money could have been better spent employing more people to improve the overall quality of their news department.

Not sure if this has been posted yet, but here's a montage of opens and closes of nearly every Southern and Central California TV station from 1993. That open from KTTV is pretty sharp; I hadn't seen that one before. [MEDIA=vimeo]247655678[/MEDIA]

Whoa. Sexual harassment is not sexual assault.

The best Fox affiliate music has always been the X and X2. It's too bad more stations didn't pick up the X2.

CBS wouldn't do it any other way - all over the place.

Looks like the show is getting another rebrand. I just saw a promo for the CBS Evening News with Jeff Glor and it had a new logo set in Proxima Nova. It looked nice actually.

I don't believe CNN gives stations that power to embargo something in another market just because their parent company owns another station there. I don't think I've ever seen that happen. Typically, something is only embargoed for other stations in the same market or if it includes video that's restricted for one reason or another. In one place where I worked, our sister station one market over threw a big stink at us because one of their competitors (a Sinclair station) ran one of our packages that CNN picked up. The reporter had a stand-up in it while wearing our jacket and mic flag with a logo that's nearly identical to our sister station's. They somehow thought there was something wrong going on, but since it's two different markets, there wasn't any embargo on it, so it was fine for the Sinclair station to run it even though our sister station had access to all of our content internally. Probably a dumb move on the Sinclair station's part to run a package that looked like it came from their competitor, but whatever. Or at the very least, they could have edited out her standup. That's the double-edged sword with being a CNN affiliate. It's great because Newsource has tons of video, including lots of packages, but if there's more than one CNN affiliate in a market, then competing newscasts can end up running a lot of the same content if you're not careful or get in the habit of only checking CNN for wire content.

This happened a month ago but I forgot to post it on here. I'm sure some people would be interested in this. Dave Lougee, the current Tegna CEO, former Belo executive, and KUSA's news director in the mid-90s, was interviewed by Kyle Clark on his Facebook Live show, "Afternoon Delight." He talks a lot about how TV news needs to innovate and change and how they are using a number of different approaches in different markets.

Tom Green, KWGN's longtime morning anchor and KUSA's sports anchor of a bygone era, has been hired to anchor the 4 and 5pm news on KUSA according to his Twitter.

Talk about big market moves. Kristen Rodgers jumps from KEZI in Eugene to WTXF in Philadelphia as a sports anchor/reporter. [MEDIA=twitter]906203638850138112[/MEDIA]

I agree. There's no obvious internal choice, and an external choice would result in the same culture clash issues that happened during the Katie Couric era. I say let people do it a few weeks at a time. Anthony Mason is always great, but why not let others do it too. I wondered if maybe they'd consider Norah O'Donnell and move up Margaret Brennan to CTM; she's been filling in a lot more.

I could see how you'd get KIRO out of that. But looking more at the opens and stingers, I see Look F. It's not a complete ripoff necessarily, but I see some NBC influence.

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:

Tbh that's still better than playing an awful, drawn-out open. At least no open saves time and allows you to sneak in another VO or add a SOT to a VO. What I prefer to do is run the 6-8 second open, then a SOT or a quick VO before a 2-shot. Headlines are a waste of time 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.