Rusty Muck

With all due respect, how is this “alienating KCAL’s current audience” when it had always been a news-heavy indie? If anything, it’s finally showing people that KCAL’s news and KCBS’s news are one and the same. It’s literally doing the same thing KPIX is doing, just in a different path but the same end result.

Yet again, this is not indecision. It’s a fairly calculated move and entirely a transitional one. It’s brand evolution for KCAL as their brand is being refitted to the CBS branding conventions. It’s transitional because the entire operation is being renamed outright and “KCAL” will be retired in less than a year. And yes, big-picture, it is a rebrand for the obvious reasons. All they have to do is literally swap out “KCAL” with “CBS”. And in the end, the viewers will not be confused. This AGAIN is not complicated.

For this debate about how long a brand should last, WJW used the “ei8ht IS NEWS” name for 10 months, then hastily renamed themselves “Fox 8” after the network bought New World. (The newscasts went from “ei8ht IS NEWS” to “Fox 8 Is News” to “Fox 8 News” in less than a month.”) No one ever accused WJW of indecision. ei8ht IS NEWS lasted through three sweeps periods and a ton of promos incessantly intoning the brand.

It’s brand evolution. Businesses in practically every other industry do it.

This is also an atonement for the infamous “NewsCentral” setup 15 years ago in which **both** KCAL and KCBS were de-emphasized right out of the gate. It was a marketing nightmare and confused viewers. Take the KCAL name, use it for both stations as a long-term transitional brand, then creep in “CBS Los Angeles” and retire the KCAL name in a year. Boom. Done.

People are assuming this is a permanent situation and it is most clearly not one at all. In less than a year, “KCAL” will be gone, the name “CBS Los Angeles” will be on both stations, and no one will call either station to complain about being confused over “where did KCAL 9 News go?”

KCAL is a brand. WJZ, WBZ, WCCO and KDKA are also brands, but the latter three are brands now confused openly with radio stations which also still use those brands for their own purposes. (KCAL doesn’t have that problem because virtually no one confuses them with KCAL-FM in Redlands.) Call letters are not “meaningless” but they are increasingly unreliable in order to make your station stand out in a digital world. Same with “CBS 2” or “Fox 5” or “ABC 7” or “NBC 4”. KCAL AGAIN doesn’t have that problem BUT they have to reconcile their brand legacy with what has become a streamlined branding convention among CBS as a whole. That’s all there is to it. We aren’t talking about rocket surgery.

That’s exactly what I said. They’d be foolish to drop the KCAL name right away and risk confusing viewers that still view 2 and 9 as separate news departments.

Because it’d be solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Rebranding KCBS as “CBS Los Angeles” makes the station easy to identify and distinguish. KCAL has been a news-heavy indie since Disney signed it on in 1989 and the brand was never de-emphasized under CBS ownership. KCAL’s news department (despite being one and the same as KCBS) has a better reputation and standing as Bill Applegate, quite frankly, dragged KCBS into the mud with a tabloid format that would put WSVN to shame, and they’ve never recovered from it. My hunch is that you’ll see the KCAL brand get slowly phased out over the next few months, if not a full year. It’s capitalizing on their existing brand equity while associating it with the “CBS Los Angeles” branding.

In every aspect it’s an outright failure that has been both continually rejected by the marketplace AND bested by other broadcast chains with better now non-cable concepts… and yet it still makes money. Only In America…

Would Nexstar be able to accommodate her with an Atlanta facility? tbh I wouldn’t be surprised Gray hired her for WANF-WPCH once her noncompete ends. She’d be ideal for an old-school lifestyle talk show that can be syndicated throughout the chain and they’d have the facilities for it.

CNN acquiring the Beeb’s rogue robot cams might just result in the UK’s most significant cultural export since the Beatles.

Ratings for cable talk channels in general deserve a massive asterisk. Yes, they (and Fox News in general) have a large audience, but when the bulk of it is over the age of 54, does it even matter? Maybe that’s why FNC only needs direct response ads, because they get hefty retrans fees from cable providers. NewsNation’s continual failure remains on two points: the audience rejected the original intent of a generic prime—time newscast in resounding fashion, and the channel isn’t able to peel away any viewers from Fox News. Scott Jones may call it “Fox News Lite” and call Chris Cuomo “Fredo” (which isn’t even an original insult) but to be honest, no one really cares. Viewing patterns are difficult to break, which isn’t helped by not doing anything to differentiate from the competition.

I mean, WPVI kept Jefferson Kaye for far longer than necessary out of traditional alone. The last VOs he recorded for them were borderline tragic to hear.

Not that I want to toot my own horn, but I redid the history of channel 23 on Wikipedia. @Samantha redid the history of WBPX in Boston (which as WQTV was an unprecedented financial failure for the Church of Christ, Scientist, and as WABU had a good amount of local programming attached to it; it just struggled to find viewership at any point in its existence). WPXN and those two stations—and to a lesser extent WOAC, which indeed was sold to “Whitehead Media” and LMAed to Paxson—are the only ones in the Paxson chain that genuinely had history attached to them. The others were struggling or failed U indies which never had a chance in their respective markets, but were bought … mostly for the broadcast spectrum and must-carry on cable, which in 1996 hadn’t been upheld yet by SCOTUS. Inyo is a shell operator that explicitly exists so Scripps can continue to operate at the 39% national ownership cap for OTA stations. Ion Media didn’t have to worry about an existing chain of network affiliates (having sold off WPBF in 1996) when they set up their chain that also corresponded to the 39% limit. It’s the only reason why WVPX-WDLI was “spun off”.

Scripps spent all that money for the broadcast spectrum, not the content featured. Replacing Ion Life (nothing but CanCon drama reruns) Ion Plus (an infomercial farm) and Qubo (the only Pax diginet that had some bit of care to it but ultimately felt neglected and didn’t have a chance) with Scripps’ Katz diginets absolutely constituted an upgrade.

Even in the 1980s there was minimal difference between the two brands. Look at Bill Bonds at WXYZ with Action News, and it was basically all centered around Bill Bonds and his on-air presence. Ditto with Irv Weinstein at WKBW; they used the EWN name but it wasn't anywhere close to the Al Primo EWN. The brands were never uniformly applied and mean different things to different people. @HulkieD has brought up how CapCities slowly (even if unintentionally) morphed WABC into... if not a Xerox of WPVI, then obviously a station with WPVI's Action News in its' blood. It still used the EWN name, but it wasn't the EWN pre-1986. WOIO's usage of Action News is mostly associated with the "last-place, last-chance news" uber-populist format that Bill Applegate---the same person who presided over WABC's late-80s changes---put in, almost out of desperation by Raycom, having admitted to overpaying for WOIO/WUAB when they bought out Malrite. It is a tainted brand in the market. EWN means nothing in Cleveland and hasn't meant anything since WEWS gave it up in 1990, and even then, NewsChannel 5 meant nothing when they gave it up a few years ago, aside from people likely confusing WEWS with WPTV on social media. If WOIO used EWN, it would feel tacked on and meaningless. (Yes, channel 3, then KYW-TV, originated EWN from 1959 to 1965 but it predated Al Primo or even Westinghouse's full treatment of the brand. Because of the passage of time, few are alive to actually remember when it debuted in Cleveland.) It actually says a lot that none of the stations in Cleveland have a so-called "brand" for their newscasts: 3 News, News 5, Fox 8 News and 19 News. But does it matter? I'm from Cleveland and I can tell the four news operations apart fairly easily.

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…