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Their weather lineup isn’t exactly a group of world beaters…

To not examine what has been and take lessons from it that you can use because they are simply good ideas that make logical sense is foolish. I understand that times change… but folks under 35 or 40 or something aren’t the only ones watching (actually they don’t really watch)… sometimes it really is the details that matter. Being in first sometimes doesn’t indicate greatness… just being the least bad option.

Actually everybody who is in second or third did market research that said what they were doing would work great so there are limitless numbers of examples across all industries of market research not doing a heck of a lot for companies or biting them badly… I would recommend not trying to use this angle. Market research asks the folks you see walking around that make you wonder what rock they came out from under answer questions about what they want to see. The idea that those folks can speak for everybody accurately is preposterous. In the end if you had 4 stations in a town and absolutely had to watch one you’d pick what you believed was the best. That doesn’t mean you are head over heels in love with the product… you might want to make 25 changes to it. But it’s the least bad option. Some people might have it as appointment viewing because they just can’t get enough of gods gift to News but the biggest winner is… shutting the thing off and doing something else. Consistently.

Breaking news in this market isn’t what it used to be… the area is improved markedly from where it used to be and crime and such is down as a result. I figure they record it in the 9pm hour if they do… they need the studio at 10 for the WMYD newscast. I’ve also seen some that were live and only sports seemed to be recorded so it’s inconsistent. The field reports are never live unless there is breaking news and that goes for the flagship 6pm newscast too. They are 100% live in studio for that one with everybody at the anchor desk. Same for the 5.

Are you a proponent of change for the sake of change or something? You come off as some sort of apologist for the way things are done right now being somehow superior and anyone who thinks otherwise has something wrong with them…

Perhaps… but the folks who gave us “New Coke” went on measurable info too.

It’s also not the way people talk normally. One of the things I remember being endlessly bombarded with in college was the need to make it conversational… well… nobody holds a conversation in active tense about something that happened last week. But I have a couple of simple production issues with WNT too… the tease needs to be 30 seconds with the top 3 or 4 stories and a sentence or two about them. Instead we get an explanation long enough to be its own story about everything they are gonna talk about. It’s dangerously close to being able to watch the tease and shut it off knowing what happened. The other thing that bugs me is they adopted the old music and then the rest of the newscast everything goes to break in silence and they end the newscast in silence. It looks a bit unkempt and thrown together that way. I don’t get it and I don’t think it’s some broader trend in news.

Some of that may be true. On the other hand they may have alienated a bunch of people and attracted a bunch of different people or fewer people by changing the format as radically as they have. The times “straight news” has been tried incidentally the marketing for it wasn’t very good and the execution was poor. Think CNN. You have to do the FOX style pro wrestling thing… by calling out FOX on a daily basis in a less than statesman like way. But you have to use facts as your weapon. Not only that but FOX has slick marketing and is extremely polished and flashy… that’s execution and not content. You see that in which local station is number one in a given market. Often times it’s flashier and more polished and just feels official. It’s kinda like a sports team.. the good teams LOOK good and do things well. But mostly my biggest gripe is why Muir talks the way he does. If someone walked up to you and started talking like that you’d try to either run or have them have some sort of evaluation as their mental well being would be a primary concern. Second gripe… why in the world is “those powerful storms, millions under the gun” news? Keep the weather off the national news as a daily thing. The local stations already cover it so unless a school bus with 50 kids gets washed away in a flood or something just gripping and tragic it’s a waste of a reporter and 2 minutes and that’s not time they exactly have to waste in a 30 minute show. To keep this relevant to the thread… local news hasn’t changed so much that I want to scream. That includes WABC. It’s more or less what it’s always been with different people, graphics and segments.

And one of the most cited reasons people don’t watch is because it isn’t the way it used to be. Just because times change doesn’t mean you need to throw the baby out with the bath water. The 90’s weren’t radically different from the 70’s really. But now is radically different from the 90’s. Legacy media is as ignorant of what ails it as the American automakers were while they declined for 30 years.

Is it that hard to watch some old newscasts, take notes and then do that? It’s a hell of a lot easier than losing viewers by reinventing the wheel and annoying them endlessly.

Go watch any of the big 3 evening news programs from 20-25 years ago and then ask yourself… why don’t they do that anymore? I remember when Peter Jennings was anchoring World News Tonight it was news from all over the world. They had stories from civil wars in various countries and other things that had nothing to do with the U.S… in a world where we are more connected than ever and information is endlessly available that should have increased not disappeared. Not to mention that David Muir has the most bizarre speaking style in the history of anchoring. It sounds like William Shatner is reading the news and speaking in bizarre flowery meandering sentences. “That crash, those victims screaming in terror, the first responders rushing into danger pulling the victims to safety.” Speaking straightforwardly is so very much better.

The 11pm Newscast on WXYZ is now fully recorded except for the weather which is live. On the one hand it’s really polished and probably the best it’s been in years. On the other hand there are no interactions with the sports or weather anchors… they just show a weather or sports intro graphic and there they are. It’s rather jarring. It also leads to the editing not being perfect and the anchors start the next story faster than they could possibly stop one story and start the next. I get that Scripps is trying this out but there are ways to make it work better. The good old fashioned fully live newscast isn’t really so bad. They’ll probably back off this eventually. Their 6pm is the newscast of record and it’s fully live still I imagine for that reason. The update show (it literally was once called Action News update) is an ok place to do this I suppose.

That is partially because there were never clear distinctions and much of any independence on the part of MSNBC. They have mismanaged that place repeatedly and not let it really stand on its own while it’s supposed to be separate but together at the same time. They’ve never really handled it right. A place like FOX is the only one in the family doing News. They don’t have some kind of other entity to tiptoe around. Had they been smart they would have rebranded it without references or logos of NBC and changed the slogan to some permutation of “where liberals have a voice” or something like that and programmed accordingly.

It’s also pretty commonly released and of course folks are gonna want to know. We may never find out but trying to slam that door shut like this is overkill.

It should and on say news radio it absolutely does. But being a visual medium the elephant in the room is looks and presentation whether that’s good or bad.

It’s not so much being a certain age… but there comes a time when you just look at them and listen to the delivery and you can tell it’s probably time to hang it up. We had several legacy O&O people at WXYZ in Detroit get forcibly retired that way as a cost cutting thing. But several of them just weren’t themselves anymore and couldn’t read the room apparently. Most were pushing 60-70 at the time. The downside to that is if you don’t plan well and end up with no real established second line of people. The ratings never recovered and that was 15 years ago now. ABC’s stations seem to avoid that particular pitfall fairly well.

Going past 65 isn’t uncommon. Neither is staying past your expiration date.

They do own the property. And in fairness to Scripps WXYZ moved from Downtown Detroit to Southfield and had Broadcast House built in 1959 so you do have to do routine Maintanance and upkeep sometime.

ABC would be buying a fixer upper and I don’t mean Broadcast House itself. All those Scripps mandates have done a number on the format and presentation. I know ABC could probably fix it… I don’t know much about Hearst… are they a decent owner?

Sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do to pay down debt. Scripps isn’t doing very well I don’t think. The $64,000 question is who would buy them cause presumably WMYD would be thrown in too.

It seems every time one of the stations here has shown some veteran talent the door there are folks who say they will never watch… they seem to not follow through always… the ratings have been rusted in place for 14 years now.

That’s too bad, I always thought that was a nice touch. I’m leaning towards saying they should abandon it.

Are they still doing the outside crowd waves at the camera at the end of the show at all?

Having the blinds drawn all the time defeats the purpose of the thing…

They really need to go back to letting style and content decisions be made at the local level. They can control the budgets still but each station knows more about how to connect with its area than some suit in Cincinnati. If they decided to do hard news emphasizing breaking news and investigative stuff it would go a lot farther. The business doesn’t need to be reinvented. It needs to get back to the way it was 20 or 30 years ago. And a lot of that is style and writing. That stuff is nearly free.