MidwestTV

Not a big fan of that desk, but props to WPSD for providing renderings.

Looks like they've done a lot of work for ABC.

It's a good open but my goodness is it long

I never understood the appeal of concert series. Even as news junkie kid/teen I thought they were weird. Honestly surprised they haven't been canned altogether by now.

That bugged me too. Someone created typed that out, looked at it, and said "yes this is good."

“We did not eliminate the sports department — we eliminated the sports anchor position,” Keane said. “We’re still going to cover sports extensively both with a reporter in the mornings and we’re going to gather and distribute sports content across all sports whenever there’s breaking news." Typical corporate jargon speak. They did eliminate the sports department. If you let go of people whose job it was to do a very specific task, you eliminated the department and shifted the workload elsewhere. Also, specifically covering sports with a reporter in the morning? When nothing sportswise happens? Those reporters aren't going to have the same connections and relationships that the sports department will.

Wild that an O&O in such a major pro (and college) sports town would cut the entire department.

This is precisely what the problem is. They took the lazy route and copied WNT's format, especially with the excessive use of breaking news for stories that are sometimes days old. Feeling the need to make changes is fine and necessary, but directly copying your competition is the easy way out, especially if you aren't taking their ideas and trying to improve upon them.

From how I understand it, CBS has been demanding an extraordinary sum to affiliates to keep CBS on their channel (tens of millions of dollars in markets the size of 60-70, so imagine how much they wanted for Atlanta). Gray basically told CBS to F off, we're not going to pay you that much. CBS's response was 'ok that's understandable' and went to WUPA (which CBS already owned!). Good thing channel numbers don't matter much anymore (WUPA is channel 69).

I've always wondered how it's decided which station gets stuff like this first and why others have to wait so much longer.

Technically that was RenderON specifically for WPTV. I doubt corporate had much say in that and it was before the days of standardization. But I still agree and it's one of my favorites.

I like the look (7 day is gross). Music could use more "umphf" to it I think. But it's definitely an upgrade. Wasn't the current package (Scripps v3) purposely designed to only last a few years? I thought I remember that being a point of discussion here. It was new for the sake of new, but done quickly and cheap, and not meant to last 10 years.

I'm willing to bet it was also designed in house. Hiring dedicated firms is not cheap. An unfortunate consequence of that is station engineers and graphic artists (if they have such a department) aren't set designers but do what they can.

A meteorologist shouldn't be calling the hub to tell them to get on or off the air at all. If there's severe weather their focus needs to be on the weather. A producer, manager, or director should be the ones calling the hub (and frankly there should be a producer in the booth during extended severe weather coverage anyway). However, given how poorly staffed and inexperienced many newsrooms are nowadays I wouldn't be surprised if some mets in some markets have had to take up that responsibility as well.

Doesn't WCAU have an infamously small studio? If they still do then there's only so much they can do with the space available.