News from TVNewsTalk

Stephen Arnold Music Unveils Latest Image Campaign Kit

Wed, 16 May 2012 23:31:47 +0000

Stephen Arnold Music has debut yet another great "image campaign in a box" today. "This is the Place", being marketed as "hyperlocal" is a uplifting, inspiring campaign which has a summertime feel, just in time for stations planning for the upcoming season. SAM's image campaign kits have proven to be popular, many stations across the country adopted the "It's All About Early" campaign, often ordering custom lyrics or even using entirely locally-shot video in place of the stock video included with the package. "This is the Place" won't only be a image campaign jingle - Stephen Arnold's website says that a full music package based on the campaign will be available later this summer.

New Service Makes Pushing Social Media Interaction To Air Easy

Tue, 08 May 2012 06:57:47 +0000

With demand to integrate social media into newscasts at an all time high, a new web service aims to help stations accomplish that using an easy-to-use interface and, perhaps the best part, cheap hardware. Vidpresso is a web startup that allows stations to push social media interaction, whether it be on Facebook, Twitter, SMS or even from Email, directly to air with only a few clicks of a mouse, complete with the person's name and avatar attached to the post.

Although the service seems to be primarily marketed towards use by a producer, the interface is simple enough that even talent could use it. I know of at least one station who's anchors are responsible for putting social media interactions on air... using a poor quality, standard-def hookup to the computer built into the news desk. The clean, easy to use interface (coincidentally, built with Twitter Bootstrap, the same UI toolkit we use on TVNewsStreams and we plan on using for TVNT) allows users to pull comments from Facebook posts and search for Twitter messages, even allowing search by hashtag or keyword. This could come in handy not only for general interaction, but during breaking news or severe weather outbreaks.

The cost of a Vidpresso system is pennies compared to the tens of thousands of dollars it costs for your standard Chyron or VizRT systems, as all Vidpresso requires is an off-the-shelf desktop computer and a scan converter (Things that some stations might already have on hand). The subscription fees for the service range from $400-$900 a month, meaning an average sponsorship deal could pay for the system for months, or even years.

The system has already debut on KSL in Salt Lake City and on KTXL in Sacramento. You can see how those stations are using it here.

Discussion is ongoing in this thread. Thanks to TVNT member Neilium for the tip.

A New Home for an Old Set

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 05:08:28 +0000

When it's time to replace a set, many sets end up in the dumpster, pieces taken off and stored away in the off chance the station may need an old news desk someday. Other times, pieces may be sent to a college. Even with network sets that have a lot of history behind them, their pieces may ultimately end up shoved into a news nook, out of sight of the public eye.

That's not the case for the Tim Russert-era Meet the Press set that was replaced in 2010. Recently, several pieces of the historic set were donated to the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago. The Museum posted a video featuring the unloading and assembly of their newest exhibit.

The set pieces the museum received include one of the iconic Meet the Press logo lightbox walls, duratrans, and of course, the table and chairs. The donation of the set is part of a partnership between the museum and NBC News, which includes almost three million dollars of financial support from Comcast/NBC as well as additional artifacts and video clips from NBC News and local NBC O&O WMAQ.

The set will be on permanent exhibition at the museum, located in downtown Chicago. It's slated to open later this year.

Server Move - 4/8/2012

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 09:38:07 +0000

Update: Maintenance will be performed overnight tonight (So early morning hours of 4/21) which will resolve the DNS issues. Maintenance complete and we're back up and running on forums.tvnewstalk.net. If you experience any problems please email support at tvnewstalk dotnet.

We've moved TVNT onto a new server. There seems to be a problem with DNS so in the meantime we've rerouted everyone to a temporary subdomain of TVNewsStreams. This is expected to resolve itself in the next couple hours.

Please post any issues you may run into here.

It's possible Facebook and Twitter login will not work correctly until DNS updates and we are back on the TVNewsTalk.net domain.

EXCLUSIVE: TVNT obtains Journal Broadcast Group "Station Hub" plans

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 05:50:03 +0000

Thanks to an anonymous tipster, TVNewsTalk has documents from Milwaukee-based Journal Broadcast Group regarding an unannounced project. According to the document, which is 300 pages in length, the company is in the advanced stages of planning for a two billion dollar construction project called the "Station Hub".

Architectural drawings inside the plans show that the "Hub" is a building 15 storeys tall, located on what is presently an empty lot the size of two city blocks. Inside the massive building, Journal's 10 television stations and 32 radio stations will be "hubbed" in a cost-cutting move the likes of which have never been seen before. Featuring 15 television studios and 50 radio studios, the Station Hub will be the largest combined television and radio broadcast facility in the United States.

A memo inside pitched the project: "With the Station Hub, we can finally consolidate all of the operations that have been inefficiently duplicated at every one of our stations for the last 50 years. Instead of paying to duplicate Weather departments across our Television portfolio, we need only invest in a handful of Meteorologists for the entire station group. Plans are already in the works to downsize the Hub Sports department to six people, who will pre-tape reports for each television and radio station during the work day." The memo went on to say that "The Sports department will be the most efficient department in the Hub. State-of-the-art automation capabilities will allow producers to build a sports segment out of individual clips anchored by that day's sports personality. Now, we won't need to pay two anchors in different parts of the country to talk about the same Super Bowl."

A plan is also in place to eliminate photojournalists and local reporters. A program called "The [station name] Shooter Squad" is in development to encourage residents to submit their own video of news-worthy events for "NewzPointz" that can be exchanged for various promotional goods. Each day, producers will post a list of stories they need video for, which users can claim. Once they upload the video and a producer approves it, the "NewzPointz" will be deposited in the user's account. Breaking News will be worth double points. "Finally, submitting video is fun and rewarding!" said a document explaining the program. Twenty "pointz" gets you a light-up pen, while twenty thousand gets you tickets to a Celene Dion concert. A similar program called "Roving Reporters" will exist, and participants will be partnered with a member of the Shooter Squad. Roving Reporters will have no age limit and each story submitted and aired will reward the reporter with $15.

To further save money, every station will have an identical set, built by FX Group. On the technical side of things, It's expected that the entire facility will allow for stations to broadcast in 3DHD, with the ability to broadcast in 4D in the future.

This is the second massive building project announced in the TV industry recently. As you recall, last month NBC announced plans on building a large dome-shaped studio outside Hollywood for a "groundbreaking new reality TV program" being developed. Inside the dome will be a self-contained town with state-of-the-art environmental controls. The town is rumored to include five thousand miniature hidden cameras.

Server Issues - 3/28/12

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:03:53 +0000

We're currently investigating why the server has had trouble with actions like "posing a new thread".

In the mean time, we've turned on "performance mode" which disables a number of features of the site, including search, the shoutbox, and avatars. In our tests, performance mode seemed to fix the problem, reducing the time it took to submit new posts from seven minutes (!!!) to a few seconds.

We hope to have everything resolved and performance mode disabled ASAP.

Weekend Round-Up - March 26th

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 09:48:06 +0000

Going to be trying something new around here, at least as long as I remember to do it. Traffic always drops off during the weekend, so I thought posting a summary early every Monday would help people who may contribute to the drop catch up with things they missed.

Firstly, KABC rolled out new graphics on Saturday, based on the "Witness Life" promos the station has been running for a number of months. Hothaus Creative did the promos, but some people think some parts kind of look like the Giant Octopus designed graphics seen on WABC.

Another update concerning WNBC's new set: we're told a new monitor wall and new flooring have been installed. Still no sign of a launch date.

Philadelphia's WPVI has expanded it's weekend late news programming, following in the footsteps of several "Big 3" affiliates around the country. Viewers can now catch "Action News Extra" weekends at 11:30.

Meanwhile, at the TVNewsTalk Global World Headquarters Content (and Information) Center, we worked hard over the weekend continuing development on TVNewsStreams. Now, when you select a stream that takes you off the site, the bar at the top of the page tells you where you are (in case you forget) and how to get back to the stream listing. Lots more exciting features are in the works. We've also been pouring over our NBC New York Tour Manual from 1966, and hope to be scanning that in and adding it to the brand new TVNT Museum "real soon now" so we can share this neat piece of television (and radio) history with everyone.

And that's you're weekend in review.

Chicago station publishes Primary results... a day early

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 06:20:39 +0000

It appears that Chicago's ABC O&O WLS either has a time machine or a sweet hookup with the New World Order.

Late Monday evening, results for Tuesday's primary elections in Illinois appeared on WLS' website, about 9 hours before polls even opened.

This oddity quickly made it's way to Twitter, where an account providing news about the group Anonymous tweeted the link to over half a million followers.

Is ABC is secretly composed of time lords? IL primary results released 1 day before the primary actually begins: abclocal.go.com/wls/elections/…
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) March 20, 2012

More than likely, this is filler data that was accidentally published during a rehearsal for tonight's coverage. This is one of the reasons it's never a bad idea to clearly label sample data, "just in case".

WNBC "Look F" Graphics Leaked

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 04:28:28 +0000

The new graphics for WNBC have been discovered on Vimeo, thanks to the "NYNewsWATCH" Facebook page.

(The video was taken down, but screenshots are available on the NYNewsWATCH Facebook page)

TVNT is able to confirm that the rendered set images seen in the video are similar to the set that was built and then thrown out at the last minute. It's not known if this is a new, revised version of the set, or if the video is just using very early draft renders of the discarded set.

Discussion is ongoing in this thread.

WWJ-TV becomes CBS 62

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:56:47 +0000

On Thursday, CBS' Detroit O&O WWJ-TV, officially dumped the "WWJ-TV" branding and "CBS Detroit" sub-moniker and rebranded as "CBS 62", putting it in compliance with the CBS Mandate, and is now using a logo similar to Sacramento sister station KOVR with the channel number in Helvetica type.

This ends a 10-year stretch of WWJ avoiding using the over-the-air (virtual) channel number for its on-air branding, which was a bit understandable given that the station (even in the modern DTV-era) continues to have a higher virtual channel number than other Big Three stations and the highest virtual channel number of any station owned by the four major networks (WWJ's CW-affiliated Atlanta sister station WUPA and Fox-owned MyNetworkTV O&O WRBW/Orlando are the only English-langauge network-owned stations overall with higher virtual channels than WWJ-TV); not to mention that its sister station is CW owned-and-operated WKBD, that has the lower virtual channel of 50.1.

WWJ-TV had called itself "Detroit's 62 CBS" from about 1995 (around the time the network bought the station, shortly before the completion of the CBS-Westinghouse merger) until 2002, when it rebranded as "CBS Detroit" (which it used as a main branding until 2008, when it started just going by its callsign; the WWJ callsign actually came from CBS-owned radio station WWJ AM 950, although NBC affiliate WDIV was the first in Detroit to use the WWJ-TV callsign from 1947 to 1978).