Rusty Muck

I am not trying to be snarky in asking this, but what makes a station logo “unchangeable”? And why should we hold a television station to unrealistic standards when practically every other business in existence either refreshes or redesigns their logos or branding every X years? Stations logos and network logos are meant to be changed and to adapt with the times. NBC and ABC did what they did for practical and functional reasons. CBS **finally** adopted a design standard among the network and O&Os for the same reason. WKYC debuted their current logo—which is above and beyond the garbled mess that their prior logo became—for the same reason. Change can hold promise and potential. When WOIO rebranded as “19 News” in 2019, then-GM Erik Schrader said, "we have to stand out. Action News was an effective brand for its time, but time moved on and we had to move on, too. And tastes will change. As much as I like this brand (19 News), it probably will eventually change."

inb4 ION rebrands as “Scripps Sports” and ION Mystery casually drops “Mystery”…

The way I see it, Briella isn't wrong, but neither is nycnewsjunkie, and neither are you. It's the old adage of "perception is reality"... or more accurately, perception can become a person's reality.

The thing about nostalgia-driven posters is that they’re usually the loudest people in the room. It’s easy to see how the perception takes root. Said posters can have their opinions on CBS going for unified branding and music not Enforcer being A Bad Thing but CBS is doing this because they see it in the best interests of the network and their station group. The execs in charge have determined that The Old Way Of Doing Things is no longer going to work.

Its almost like everything that happened between 1985 and 1995–Chris Crane dissonant chord music, sets with corrugated metal panels and video walls, flashy flying graphics, crime-crime-crime-all-the-time—needs to be ensconced in amber and abided by for all eternity, and any deviation from this by a station or owner is Somehow Very Bad. cough cough Tegna cough cough To be honest, WSVN (the station that is seemingly subject to the most nostalgia) is still its old flashy self because Miami is an outlier of a market. An aberration. WFOR under this CBS revamp would be taking a position unlike any other station in town, which I’d prefer over having them be Another WSVN Knockoff or Another Generic Newscast (as took place with Dunn-Friend) and languishing in obscurity.

There was never a “CBS Mandate”. In every aspect, the station group was a total mess design-wise, with inconsistent branding, inconsistent logos, a music package (Enforcer) that kept getting worse with each passing generation, an okay-ish graphics pack by WCBS forced on everyone because past leadership was too miserly and didn’t care. And that’s not counting WJZ and the garish mess they deteriorated into. What is happening now is a TRUE CBS Mandate. Every station is on board… even KCNC, and they’re one of the few bright spots in the entire chain. This is not only here to stay, I expect that ramifications for branding conventions to occur at the affiliate level before too long. (PS: be sure to click the link )

I’m getting WCCO vibes seeing that...

The KPIX box screams “tacked on for a few weeks so the ‘KPIX 5’ brand can be retired completely”. I’ve seen this before…

The Maag family is just trying to stay afloat in a market that's had its' population halved over 50 years. There's far too many radio stations in Youngstown and 1-2 too many TV stations. Even the Maags gave up on the city's lone daily newspaper. WFMJ's biggest weakness is the fact it remains locally owned; thanks to the M&A mania, WKBN-WYTV have the bigger advantage of economy of scale. WFMJ doesn't have the resources to compete with those two long-term, and even launching a 5pm news felt like their resources were being strained. The better question to ask is when do the Maags throw in the towel with WFMJ and sell the NBC affiliation and station IP to Nexstar.

I’d put my money on WCCB moving MeTV to 18.1 and selling off their program inventory to Nexstar.

It might be out of sheer ego and resentment towards Fox that WCCB still trudges along under Bakahel but they aren’t exactly in the best shape. WJZY flopped so badly under Fox ownership that Nexstar completely blew up the station’s identity in a bid to be competitive. WAXN is owned by a private equity firm so the obvious outcome is them doing it all on the cheap with no investment, extending already strained resources at WSOC. When you add in WBTV doing More Local News under Gray (and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try a 10pm news again somehow), something is bound to give. If WCCB and/or WJZY were to throw up the white flag and concede a battle for ratings that amounts to diminishing returns, no one should be surprised in the least. This is not 1993 or 2003 or 2013. The landscape today is not the same as in the past and people have every incentive to abandon OTA TV if the content they want no longer exists. Having nothing but cheaply-run local news with practically no distinction between them is a recipe for trouble, especially with a finite audience that risks shrinking—even ever so subtly—regardless of the market size. Why would I want to watch the “attack of the clones” that is the same late-evening local news on a plethora of stations, with the same music from SAM or Gari, the same format with emphasis on Bad Things with minimal Actual Local News of Relevance, the same minimal sportscast and the same 10-day Super Doppler Googleplex Extended Outlook? Am I saying the audience for OTA is dying? No. At least not for a few decades. But it’s absolutely eroding; even if it is a small erosion, it is still a needlessly self-inflicted wound for the industry.

They used to have four with KCOP in the mix, and KCOP struggled for years before Fox ultimately subsumed everything into KTTV. Los Angeles is almost an anomaly with three 10pm English-language newscasts battling it out against each other. If such a thing were to be tried out in Memphis or Jacksonville or Omaha, the results would be beyond disastrous. There is such a thing as too much local news in Anytown, USA. When you gripe at operators “cheapening out” on news and graphics and music, muse about off- and on-air talent resigning and getting out of the industry, or insist MMJs are a pejorative for Something Bad, maybe it's because the economics of More Local News doesn't exactly add up the way you want it to.

Good luck if you’re in Billings, Montana or Alpena, Michigan or Wheeling, West Virginia, or any small market that can’t support one 10pm news, let alone two or more. Or in any market that is not in a political swing state (Wyoming, Mississippi, etc.) and won’t get that easy money. The pending death of syndication and the presumed death of scripted primetime will inevitably result in the death of local news programming for television stations, many of which will simply become relay stations for large-market stations and/or O&Os. And those stations may be reduced to being nothing more than a turnkey diginet or rerun farm. If the audience no longer exists for syndication or scripted primetime programming, how in the wide wide world of sports is it going to remain for local news???

Good. It doesn’t help the affiliates to be forced to program an extra hour of primetime in an environment where syndication is an endangered species.

WarnerMedia sold the building in 2021 and even with a lease agreement, WBD has every incentive to move everything back to Techwood as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Huh, it's like the world changed in 2020 and no one noticed. Golly gee, imagine that, so baffling...

It was the only remaining news program that originated from Atlanta. Without it they could proceed on moving everything back to Techwood and do all the stuff @Weeterstalked about just a few posts earlier. Which of course will result in quite a few of those 1,500 people losing their jobs, which sucks. My point still stands.

He’s not on a mission, he’s stuck in a bad position related entirely to the creation of Warner Bros. Discovery at the hands of AT&T. Plus a lot of this (especially CNN leaving Atlanta) had already been in place under Zucker. Robin Meade and her show’s staff were for years the only ones that justified the Atlanta facility remaining open this whole time. Please, in the name of all that is all and holy and good, quit giving Chris Licht, David Zaslav and John Malone supervillain powers they don’t have and never will.

KOCO was a Combined-Gannett station (5 Alive) until the trade to Hearst in 1997, so this wasn’t exactly derailing anything here.

Paramount Global owns the EWN trademarks, which Disney pays royalties to use for some of their O&Os.

It's made more complicated by Investigation Discovery having a much better brand and name awareness despite a smaller nationwide cable footprint. Plus—per Stelter—the simulcast of CNN This Morning is explicitly due to carriage contracts with cable companies that require HLN air a bare minimum of news programming. Stelter’s background working for CNN makes him very unlikely to simply make up an urban legend.

That montage all but encapsulated Stelter's piece in the Atlantic. The channel in it's original format was not only rendered obsolete, the truly ugly parts that came thereafter (Nancy Grace and her obsession with Casey Anthony) ultimately and irrevocably destroyed HLN's reputation en route to becoming a true crime rerun library channel. Meade's show felt increasingly out of place and to be blunt, I'm shocked it lasted as long as it did. Because HLN was already a zombie network and had been for years. Even with Meade, it had no identity, no direction, and honestly, no purpose to even exist as a cable channel.

Brian was badly—and I mean BADLY—miscast in his on-air role at CNN, but his written reporting and nightly online newsletter were highly, highly respected, @HulkieD often referred to the newsletter as indispensable. Hopefully he has a recurring role at the Atlantic.

CNN+ never should have been launched in the first place. It was doomed when the architect and highest-profile backer (Zucker) was forced out, and felt like it was given the green light in spite of the incoming Discovery team. It didn’t really have much to distinguish itself from CNN, it wasn’t a redo of Headline News… just a bunch of wayward niche fare. Given the crippling debt load that AT&T inflicted on WBD, the shutdown of CNN+ in retrospect should have been a warning sign for us all.