dkipcl

What was in the box?

I meant to specify just the loop around Boston, the bits north of Peabody and south of Canton do get called 95 by us Massholes.

The channel number has been gone in effective branding since 2007 (when they picked the 'BZ name back up). The CBS logo is literally less prominent in their graphics than it's been in a long time, and the website is back to wbz.com. I fail to see how this is indicative of any kind of transitional brand (at least in any kind of short term). It indicates how the market will react. The same thing applies for other things in Boston too--Route 128 hasn't been signed properly for ~20 years by federal requirement, and yet people are no closer to calling it I-95 than they were in 2000 (even on places that are officially not Rte. 128). I have to assume CBS/Paramount are aware enough of this to not want to really push it again.

I feel like that would be more of an iHeart problem if they choose to do that, so why would CBS care and kill off a brand that they've already had to resurrect because the CBS branding hurt them? People know the station as WBZ. Look what happened when NBC tried to launch a station or when WFXT rebranded and killed their news ratings. I can't see the WBZ brand, especially given its increased prominence, going anywhere.

I really don't think iHeart cares. Matt Shearer from WBZ Newsradio went on WBZ-TV's morning show to talk about his shortform content. I think both stations are fine with each other (and even being mistaken for each others news departments). And as long as the Sports Hub doesn't start calling itself WBZ Sportsradio I think they're happy.

WBZ's 8pm newscasts on WSBK-38 now seem to be running as a relay of the online CBSN Boston feed, full with the CBSN graphics instead of WBZ. As an aside, I don't think that having 2 different brandings of news for the same team really makes sense, especially in a market where the calls and station identity is important. Edit: I've linked what the 8:30 open on WSBK looked like (standard CBSN open/graphics) https://youtu.be/iq7zAP-Yw1I