T.L. Hughes

Like the KWCH post, this doesn’t really have to do with graphics (since the station is still using the Quincy package for now), but WPTA brought back the legacy “21 Alive” branding on Monday (October 17) after a six-year run under the “ABC 21” moniker. The logo introduced with the Quincy package was modified to replace the WPTA calls with the “ALIVE” moniker and to remove the ABC Circle logo.

Paramount still owns 12.5% of The CW, so they still have a limited interest in the network. It’s not responsible for the day-to-day management of the network, since Nexstar acquired 75% of the equity previously held by Paramount and WBD, but CBSNS could negotiate to keep the CW affiliation on WUPA and its other CW stations once their contracts come up. (Further to that point, CBSNS still has a few affiliates of MyNetworkTV, which is owned by Fox, in its portfolio.)

Depends on what you consider “catching up,” KOCO is still using the 2013 ABC logo in graphics, its time/temp bug and most promos. They did start incorporating the 2021 version in mid-August in promos for its new 4:00 p.m. newscast; when that newscast debuted on August 22, the 2013 logo was still featured in the 4:00 open, though the talent bumpers introduced on all weekday newscasts that same day (the first time that KOCO had used regular talent bumps since it adopted the current diagrid package) do incorporate the 2021 ABC logo.

KOLN/KGIN, KSNB and KNOP have all debuted new graphics. In the cases of KSNB and KNOP, both have switched to different flat variants of the “honeycomb” package. KOLN/KGIN: KSNB (note that the bottom-of-screen ID has KSNB’s city of license, York, listed where its callsign is supposed to be): KNOP:

KWTV has promoted weekday morning anchor/reporter Colby Thelen to anchor its 5:00 p.m. newscast. He will take over that shift from Karl Torp, who will remain anchor of the station’s 4:00, 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. newscasts. (Torp has been anchoring the 5:00 p.m. newscast since Kelly Ogle, now only doing special projects reporting, dropped that shift in April 2021.) Thelen - who has anchored the 4:00 hour of News 9 This Morning since August 2020, along with reporting and fill-in anchoring duties on the 5:00-7:00 block and the 9:00 a.m. newscast - will move to the 5:00 broadcast this Summer, after returning from a special reporting assignment in Africa to highlight the Oklahoma City Zoo’s wildlife conservation efforts in Rwanda and Tanzania, set to air on KWTV soon.

Fierce Video posted an analysis on The Weather Channel TV App: https://www.fiercevideo.com/video/sunshine-or-clouds-ahead-weather-channel-dtc-subscription-service

TWC has quietly launched a new DTC streaming service (known simply as “The Weather Channel TV App”), which is structurally similar to its TV Everywhere app and offers a live linear feed of the channel as well as local weather information (the “My Weather” feature where this is accessible is somewhat similar to the TWC interactive weather apps on DirecTV and Dish) and on-demand content. It is available for $2.99/month or $29.99/year, after a seven-day trial. At launch, it is available mainly as a Smart TV on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Samsung Smart TV, and Xfinity Flex devices. It’s not clear if this is a replacement for the planned Weather Channel Plus service announced last year.

Jim Ramsey, longtime weather anchor and reporter at WGN-TV for 30 years from 1987 to 2017 (and whose career in Chicago began at WLS-TV years before), has died at the age of 69. As someone who watched him regularly growing up on the former WGN superstation feed, all I can say is… we’ll miss you, Jim.

KCPQ has added a third evening news hour at 6:00 p.m. (The TVNewsCheck article about its launch implies it premiered Monday [January 17].) David Rose and Jamie Tompkins anchor the broadcast.

Of course, the reason why Disney couldn’t buy them in the first place is because acquiring the RSNs as part of the 20CF purchase would have given Disney too much market share in sports broadcasting… what with ESPN being the largest cable sports network, and its namesake subsidiary owning eight sister channels in the U.S. alone, a pay-per-view unit, two streaming platforms (ESPN3, then within the now-defunct WatchESPN app, and the then-fledgling ESPN+), two radio networks (plus a Sirius/XM channel), and holding control of ABC’s sports division. So, the only options for 21st Century Fox were to pull the Fox Sports RSNs off the market and retain ownership of them or sell them to a third party (as they ultimately did). Quite frankly, as much as Murdoch selling 20th Century Fox, and the FX and National Geographic networks didn’t make much sense (especially when that library would have been useful to them from a streaming standpoint as Disney was able to do with those properties), selling the Fox Sports regional networks didn’t make much sense either, given that the Murdochs’ deep pockets allowed 21CF to clearly be better able to support the RSNs than Diamond Sports was. At least Fox Corporation wouldn’t be saddled with enough debt managing them to drag it into bankruptcy compared to what Sinclair is now dealing with, nor would they make the same mistakes with carriage agreements that Diamond/Sinclair made that contributed to its financial troubles.

WWNY has upgraded to the KFDA/WALB package (although it has yet to switch to the accordant ticker template)… It’s an upgrade from what they had before:

About Fox Weather’s digital presence, there are some shortcomings. FoxWeather.com, ironically, doesn’t include much forecast content; it’s essentially a weather news-focused site, with the only local content consisting of a widget that shows the current temperature/sky condition, forecast highs and lows, and a five-hour forecast for the user’s location… and clicking/tapping anywhere on it (whether it be the forecast info or the download app banner) only directs to a link to download the app (on iOS or Android, it just opens the App Store or Google Play app instead). The app itself needs to flesh out its forecast content a little. It’s kinda limited when compared to The Weather Channel or AccuWeather’s apps in terms of the amount of local weather content. Neither detailed current observations, health and outdoor indexes (including allergy and air quality indexes), or a tropical tracker is included on the main forecast page. Its FutureView event planning feature is limited to a simple forecast, and sunrise/sunset/daylight length data for the day of the selected event; I think it would be more useful if it included an hourly forecast for the day of the selected event (based on a user-selected time or period of time when the event is being held); it could even include a separate game-day forecast section for upcoming professional and collegiate sports events held in outdoor venues. The radar, for which Fox may have acquired the now-discontinued WeatherLab to utilize its 3D capabilities, lacks a selection of map layers (satellite, lightning data, etc.). The Fox Weather app, for some reason, is also not designed for use on tablets (the iOS version, for example, is only designed for iPhones and therefore maintains the display format meant for iPhone models when used on iPads).

The Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Media and Broadband has begun debate on a bill (HR 4208, an amendment to Section 331 of the Communications Act called the ‘‘Section 331 Obligation 5 Clarification Act’’) that would, in principle, force Fox to adhere WWOR to commitments to offer at least 14 hours of New Jersey-focused local news programming per week (seven of which have to be scheduled between 6:00 p.m. and midnight ET), maintain a broadcast studio in Secaucus (WWOR has been run out of WNYW’s Fox Television Center facility in Manhattan since FTS sold the since-demolished 9 Broadcast Plaza facility to Hartz Mountain Industries in 2018), file local programming disclosures with the FCC (including how programming aims to satisfy the local content requirements), and consult with community leaders on the type of local programming should that would be featured. The bill is backed by four Democratic Congressmen representing New Jersey: it was introduced in the House by Reps. Bill Pascrell and Albo Sires, and in the Senate by Sens. Cory Booker and Bob Menendez. (Menendez, in particular, has been the most fervent critic of FTS’ management of WWOR, particularly since its news department was shuttered nearly a decade ago in favor of the now-defunct Chasing News.) At least two Republican Congressmen seem to be making it about the bill targeting a Fox-owned station: Energy & Commerce Committee ranking member Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio) claimed it was “another attempt by Democrats to disregard the First Amendment, this time telling broadcast stations what type of news programming to distribute,” and Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.) claimed the bill was another Democratic effort to “counter news programming they simply don‘t like.” (The FCC has previously maintained local programming requirements for television stations, and Long made an apparent conflation of FTS with Fox News, despite the fact that the cable-based Fox News Channel offers conservative content by format, while Fox O&O newscasts largely are traditional local news operations, and ignored that the bill aims to enforce WWOR to offer New Jersey-based content it isn’t currently providing and hasn’t for some time and doesn’t dictate that the content hew to a particular political lean.)

The KOKH newscast from 1999 is pretty much a white whale, as nothing from the “News Matrix”/Fox 1999-2000 promo graphics era had been available on YT until now, and that era was the only set of opens that KOKH has used since its current news department began in 1996 that was missing.

To be fair, YouTube’s COPPA moderation system is pretty broken. There’s thousands of videos and some entire YT channels not specifically intended for kids that its AI-based COPPA moderation system mistakenly marked as being for kids and have commenting, download, in-app miniplayer and sharing features accordingly disabled as a result; a glaring example of why social media companies shouldn’t rely on AI for content moderation unless its fool-proof against false positives. One similar example is the YT channel of the Lawrenceburg, Tennessee-based Tennessee Valley Weather service (both the stream for its 24-hour live channel and all uploaded videos are mis-marked for COPPA feature restrictions and have the YouTube Kids banner ad).

WYFF weekday morning anchor Geoff Hart announced that he has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and will not be returning to the station (effectively announcing his retirement from broadcasting). Hart has been with the station since 1993, serving as sports director before transferring to the news side in 2011 as anchor of WYFF News 4 Today. He had been on medical leave from the station since December.

The National Desk is already getting a prime time edition. Sinclair has announced it will add an evening version of the program (airing live from 10:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. ET) starting September 27, primarily airing on the 68 CW and MyNetworkTV stations already showing the morning edition as well as on STIRR and Sinclair station websites. It will likely act to compliment existing prime time newscasts on some of the slated carrier stations. It should be noted that some of the CW stations slated to carry the evening National Desk are in the Mountain and Pacific Time Zones, where it will air from 7:00-9:00 PT/8:00-10:00 MT; this means, since parts of the program will fall into The CW’s designated prime time slot, Sinclair’s Pacific Time CW affiliates will only be able to air the first hour (as hour #2 runs into the first hour of the network’s prime time lineup there) and its Mountain Time CW affiliates will only be able to carry the second hour (as hour #1 runs into the second hour of the network’s prime time lineup there). Ironically, The CW Plus (from which a few of the company’s small-market CW affiliates source the network’s programming) doesn’t currently allow local programming opt-outs for news on weekdays. (It does have an early evening local news opt-out slot on weekends.) Something might have to be worked out there, given Sinclair’s CW Plus stations in the Pacific Time Zone will be carrying it as a network prime lead-in.

I see your "FITZ! SANCHEZ!", and raise you a "FITZ! SANCHEZ! DANIELS! LOVETT!":

We talking in the vein of Joel Cheatwood's "if it bleeds, it leads"?

This newscast has a different video headshot of Steve Alvarez (at 0:44) than the version I've seen elsewhere on YT. Compare the Summer/Fall(?) '91 version to the one of him seen (at 0:52) in this newscast from May '92, with him giving a friendlier smile: I'm guessing viewer reaction to the first version of his talent open headshot might not have been favorable, prompting it to be reshot; the way Alvarez grins in the '91 version looks inadvertently like how you'd think a serial killer or Bond villain would smile.

So... what was the point, then, of shutting down Ion Plus and Qubo? Knowing it was in the planning stages of launching two additional diginets, Scripps management should have kept Ion Plus and Qubo operational temporarily until its new networks bowed, and repurposed their transponder space to transmit DefyTV and Doozy. At this rate, it seems like the only place to put Defy and Doozy on the Ion/INYO stations is on the slots housing HSN or QVC, or just cut deals for the new networks to replace the duplicate Katz Networks affiliations on the non-Scripps and non-INYO stations in markets where either group owns an Ion station.

Seems strange that CBSTVS elected to have WWJ be a 3.0 participant, but not have WKBD sign on a 3.0 signal as well.

KOKH weeknight anchor Wendy Suares revealed on Twitter that she and her husband have tested positive for COVID-19.

Looks like WKYT took a couple of cues from WNBC in the talent portion of the open.

Tubi has added a live News 12 stream as part of a new "News on Tubi" section, a new FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) channel offering that will also include NBC News Now, Black News Channel, WeatherNation TV, CBC News (the curated stream already available on Xumo), Bloomberg Television, Cheddar, fubo Sports Network, PeopleTV and content from parent network Fox Corporation (individual Fox Television Stations O&Os, NewsNOW from Fox and Fox Soul). Not explained is if the News 12 channel is a curated stream featuring content sourced from each of the News 12 Networks (Bronx, Connecticut, Westchester, New Jersey, etc.)--which is probably the case, a la CNN's AVOD streaming channel--or a feed seen by Altice subscribers in the New York metropolitan area. "News from Tubi" is only available on Tubi's Google Play, Roku and Amazon Fire TV apps; curiously, they didn't bother to roll it out to its other apps, most glaringly, its Apple app.