Weeters

Oh, this again. Fun fact: It's been longer since WPVI tried changing music (27 years) than it was from when they started using MCTYW to when they tried changing it (24 years.) Only on TVNT will a graphics package or set that's older than 5 years be declared "ancient", but a music package used for 50+ years is something that shouldn't be touched. A lot has changed in the last 27 years (namely declining viewership!) and I suspect that a subtle modernization of the music (the 1996 version was anything but subtle, it was a drastic change that tried to make MCTYW into a serious, The Mission-style orchestral news package, which it is definitely not) wouldn't result in the "riots in the street" people around here like to imagine happening. We know they have selection of 615-made cuts they've been using for a few years now, I would imagine most viewers are now used to hearing "the music" that's not specifically the 1972 version.

This came up in the Discord the other day and isn't even true. Sinclair executives have a base salary close to or equal to that of most of their peers, and even with stock grants are lower than others. Compensation in 2022 (Source: salary.com) Chris Ripley (President and CEO, Sinclair Broadcast Group): $9,632,015 total compensation, $1,379,700 base pay. (David Smith has an identical pay) Perry Sook (Chairman and CEO, Nexstar Broadcasting): $39,318,892 total compensation, $1,995,193 base pay. Hilton H. Howell Jr. (Executive Chairman and CEO, Gray Television): $7,922,375 total compensation, $1,350,000 base pay. Adam P. Symson (President and CEO, E.W. Scripps): $15,043,797 total compensation, $1,200,000 base pay. David T. Lougee (President and CEO, Tegna Inc.): $7,271,601 total compensation, $975,000 base pay. Any of these 5 could take a symbolic salary of $1 and live solely off their stock grants (which makes up the majority of the difference between base pay and total compensation) and all it would net the company is a little wiggle room for a handful of station's CapEx budget. The FCC is not going to revoke anyone's licenses because they canceled local news and replaced it with a regional newscast. That's insane. It would be a political nuclear bomb that would likely end up gutting the FCC of those and other powers. How long have New Jersey politicians been complaining about WWOR's news coming from New York City? Literally nothing has happened there and it's been going on for almost 15 years.

6 years later, we have an answer. In the past 6 years, the promos in question were re-uploaded and, going down a rabbit hole in the Copyright Office search tonight led me to So... There we have it.

It's a base graphics package that both stations' meteorologists have customized for their needs. If you don't like the way it looks on KTRK, well, that's the way their meteorologists have decided to use it. It's essentially a LEGO set. They were sent a box of parts, and this is how they've assembled them. There's nothing more that can be said about this.

I think we've gone over the weather graphics debate enough. People love to claim on here that viewers will switch away from Channel X in droves because they adopted the Tegna music, or because the weather graphics aren't "weathery" enough, and are almost always proven wrong. It's not even worth my time to rebut the absurd claims being made.

Those are generic WSI icons as well. Here they are being used on a WTOC weather map from 2019. It's extremely rare for a broadcast graphics package to have entirely custom weather graphics. Most stations just go with whatever defaults are available on the system (WSI Max, Baron Lynx, Accuweather) they have for stuff like high/low icons, hurricanes, etc. I used to have the "menu" of icons WSI licensed out (to prevent multiple stations in the same market from using the same icons, there were 4-5 default packs that get exclusively licensed in each market) but I don't think I have it anymore.

Daystar's YouTube thumbnails are all high quality design work, it wouldn't surprise me if they did that all in-house and WWJ just went with it. The logo is probably official, because someone had the common sense to refuse to slap anything with the word "News" on this show. Don't get your hopes up that they'll start rolling it out elsewhere... I'd wager this was done specifically to distance this from their news product, regardless of what time it airs.

Firstly, blue for high pressure and red for low pressure is the NOAA standard marking. Also, I'm fairly certain those are both just generic graphics that came with the systems... That KTRK one was designed in the weather office if it isn't a generic one. No broadcast designer would have made that. For what it's worth, WLS is using generic WSI high/low pressure system icons...

Thread cleaned up and unlocked. The user that initiated the disruption has been banned. In the future, I humbly ask members to use the "report post" function and the block tools built into the forum over "backseat modding" users disrupting a thread. -Weeters

There's not many things I dislike about this package. I'll agree the opens are a little busy, it will be interesting to see how they evolve over time. The music though... The music is bad. I am sure some people are going to love that previously unheard cuts of the "classic" music are being used, but hoo boy, they are 22 years old, and you can tell why they were tossed in a drawer in 2001 and forgotten about. My understanding is these might not have been their first choice, but for various reasons this is what they ended up with. It would be nice if they find the money in the coming years to commission something new. It's past time for some of these Gari packs on the O&Os to be put out to pasture, or at least updated to not sound like a bunch of 90's synth work.

A lot of Gari's work (especially around that time) borrowed heavily from other Gari works... You can find parts of Eyewitness News in Empire and parts of Making a Difference in News Watch. It's how all the "Package with other signature" packages exist, they just drag 'n dropped the sequences around as needed. It certainly helped with marketing the packages as having "500 cuts!" even if a handful of them were noticeably identical to other packages. Nobody would have noticed or cared, and if you did find something that sounded too similar to something on a different station in town, you moved down the track list one or two tracks, and there was a version that sounded different enough.

I could have sworn the WBBM streetside studio was going to become some kind of weather center annex, not a full news set...

It's in the same place as the WPIX control room was when they were using that newsroom. The windows are obviously much larger now, though! Hard to believe that area was this mess 12 years ago (and this was after they fixed it up with those wavy panels, it was just plain black walls before that!)

This constant debate is getting nowhere. The gaslighting and ad hominem attacks aren't constructive. Both "sides" here are making compelling points, but some are less rooted in the reality of the situation than others. Folks, we can sit here and scream about "market research" and "freedom to brand as they want" until we're all blue in the face, but that doesn't change the material facts being offered up at this point in time. Every station (with the exception of KCBS/KCAL, using a modified variant) has adopted the "CBS News [location]" co-brand, which is, in essence, the dominant brand in the graphics. Most, but not all of the stations, have also begun verbally using only the "CBS News [location]" brand, with the co-brand being regulated to nothing more than an image on the screen. If there was truly as much freedom being offered to the stations as some claim, I cannot imagine a world where every single station has adopted the same exact branding strategy with minimal to no variation. The rumored KYW co-brand is the first one that seems to have been designed for the branding scheme developed here, however even it is confined to the co-brand box. Either every station is on-board with the strategy CBS has developed (likely!) or there's now a real "CBS Mandate" that they stick to the one size fits all "cram your co-brand in this square" strategy. Otherwise, I'd suspect we'd be seeing stuff like this or this. "Brand equity" and "market research" is just a snapshot of consumer sentiment at one point in time. Many of these stations, with a few exceptions, are only visually co-branding. KTVT may still show the old CBS11 logo in their bug and certain graphics, but every single on-air mention, every promo, every reference to what the station is, calls it "CBS Texas". What's that mean for "brand equity"? It means that, over time, more and more people will connect "CBS Texas" to the station than the "CBS11" brand. This could happen six months from now, or maybe six years from now. Who knows! In the case of KTVT, the SVP of Brand Strategy and Development for the CBS O&O group is on record as saying "I think it was a no-brainer that while you’re trying to make a position around CBS New[s] Texas, that [the CBS11 logo] remained.” A very interesting choice of words, as "while you're trying to make a position around CBS New[s] Texas" seems to imply that the CBS11 logo will stick around as they build up the CBS News Texas brand, but not forever. Yes, older generations are going to refer to these stations however they damn well please until they ultimately depart this mortal plane. I still have family members that call WITI "TV6" despite the fact they haven't branded as such for almost thirty years. WITI smartly used the long-dormant "brand equity" for the TV6 brand on their Antenna TV channel, which appeals to those same people. This same demographic has also long aged out of the demographic these stations are largely trying to appeal to on their primary channel. All of this, all of it, is at the whim of a few managers at each station and a few people at corporate. The understanding is that the News Director at KCBS/KCAL fought for the "KCAL News" brand. What happens if he leaves? What if viewership and impressions decline? Whoever comes in next could easily blow up the whole branding strategy and decide to brand as "CBS News Los Angeles" in an attempt to change things up. To claim any of this is "permanent" is disregarding how this industry has worked for the past 40+ years. Nothing is permanent in this industry. There's been graphics packages that have lasted less than a year (some that have never even launched!), sets that get re-worked within months of debuting (look at what became of the very expensive WBBM Streetside Studio set...), brands like "Ei8ht is News" that lasted all of a handful of months. NewsNation launched with a bright "WGN America" plexiglass panel on the front of the desk. Surely, someone at Nexstar knew that the channel would be renamed "NewsNation" in the future, yet they paid for that WGN America panel anyways. @Myron Falwellis free to have his own opinion as to when this will happen, so is everyone else. I'm a bit more conservative with my guesses, I think it could take some stations years to move away from their co-brand, and I think a handful (KCAL, maybe WBZ) could keep their co-brands indefinitely (though the co-brand box is super awkward for a long-term brand.) Fighting about it isn't constructive. It doesn't have any effect on anybody's day-to-day life, unless you're in one of the aforementioned positions making these decisions. My opinion? Folks, we're not in 1995 anymore. The local broadcast TV industry has long resisted necessary changes, and we're now on the precipice of needing to do some once "unthinkable" things for it to remain viable. People who actually work in it were telling me 6 years ago that they expect it to utterly collapse by 2030, and that was before we had a global pandemic that showed these companies that you can have your reporters file packages out of their home and pipe in newscasts from the other side of the continent. Nothing lasts forever, and that includes retrans fees (which, I should add, largely became a "thing" when stations started seeing ad revenue fall off a cliff) and political ad dollars. At some point, the proverbial gravy train is going to come off the tracks. These station owners, large and small, are going to have to cut costs more than they already have, and that could come in the form of working with the networks to have more national news programming with local opt-outs (Similar to how the BBC handles regions, which the US morning shows kind of already do, and NBC News Daily does precisely) or the companies will just opt to do it themselves (Nexstar is in a position to do this with NewsNation, Scripps with Scripps News, etc. Why pay for a network news service when you already have your own?) The "CBS News [location]" strategy accounts for this while also giving each station a unique brand, which is more important in the digital age than ever before. There are a lot of "CBS 2"s out there, but only one "CBS New York"/"CBS Chicago"/"CBS Los Angeles". If the local media landscape looks the same in 2033 as it does now, some terrible mistakes were made.

There's also no lights... so my guess is whatever is set up in there is temporary and just meant to fill the space.

They are running promos that state "CBS 11 is now CBS Texas" while animated stick figures lower in the "channel number box" to sit next to the new CBS Texas logo. Seems to be another sign that the "logo box" is, as theorized, a temporary and transitional thing. .

KCAL might honestly be the only one where the "transitional" branding can function long-term. I do think it's just a matter of time until the "CBS News" portion gets put back into the OTA broadcasts. The rest of them, though? There's no way something like the WCBS and WJZ lockups, with the current logo in the box next to "CBS News New York/Baltimore," are viable long-term. The "channel number logo" gets shoved into a small box in the corner, dominated by "CBS News (location)". Two distinct logos advertising the same product. Same goes for the call signs. They accomplish very little, simply existing to reinforce the fact that this is the local news and not the visually identical network news. They're not even following the way the stations currently use their call signs, if the KDKA image is any indication... They want you to "Expect More from KDKA-TV News" for a reason. KDKA will keep that call sign box until the day someone on KDKA radio decides to say something controversial again. Some of these call signs aren't viable long-term because CBS management made a huge mistake not requiring call sign changes on the majority of the former radio cluster. As for stations buying stuff with the logo, KPIX is still using mic flags with the CBS 5/CBSN Bay Area branding on them. Just think of how good that square "KPIX" box would look on a mic flag... But maybe there's a reason they haven't bothered to order new ones yet? Waiting until they can get away with simply putting "CBS News Bay Area" on them? Perhaps. Why do I think the "call sign box" is a transitional brand? It looks and plays the part. It's one size fits most, grafted onto a different logo in an uninspired manner. It's also not universal, and only seems to be rolling out at stations that have some kind of long-term branding history using their call sign. @ChesapeakeTVrecently shared a news article in the Discord that had some interesting numbers in it. CBS knows that people by and large (over half of all people, at this point!) are moving away from over-the-air television being how they primarily consume local news. This is why Detroit was launched as a "streaming first" operation. If this company truly felt that call signs and channel numbers were still relevant to today's consumers, we'd be seeing them on WWJ CBS 62 News Detroit. Those boxes are transitional. This is a fact. The question is, how long will this transition last? At this rate, what relevance will channel numbers or call signs have in three years? Five years? Ten? The digital renascence is here, folks.

Once and for all: Rey Rodriguez of Linear Drift is the Art Director for Nexstar. In fact, his LinkedIn shows his "employment" at Linear Drift ending in 2015 when he started at Nexstar. Technically speaking, none of the Nexstar packs are "Linear Drift" graphics.

That desk is 8 years old, recycled from the 2015 temporary set.

The general consensus seems to be that box is a transitional element, so I'd not expect them to brand as what is essentially "CBS 4 WBZ CBS NEWS BOSTON" forever.

It has been longer since WPVI tried changing the music (1996-2023= 27 years) than it was between MCTYW debuting on the station and the attempt to change (1972-1996= 24 years). This is a fun piece of news lore, but it's also ancient history, and things are a LOT different today than they were in 1996. They have been sneaking in new cuts of music for a while now. I can almost guarantee "modernizing" MCTYW would not get the same response as it did nearly 30 years ago. It would probably take days for anyone but the oldest, rustiest dial viewers to notice.

Thread closed. Literally a list thread as defined in the guidelines:

Firstly, CBS owns the trademark to "Eyewitness News". Secondly, no. Both "Action" (which is owned by Cox!) and "Eyewitness" are cliché and ancient brands that do not need to be picked up by anyone not already using them.

The studio pipe grid is noted in the plans as having a height of 13' 2" (The portion of the building the studio is in is physically incapable of having a grid height higher than this), and remained in place during the demolition and rebuild. That seems about right for pictures from the early 2000's set. The last set did seem a little shorter, so perhaps the lighting was brought lower by way of stirrups, but it's hard to tell. The scale on the plans also show the studio pre-renovation as having dimensions roughly 65' by 46', which would be roughly 80' by 49' after the remodel, with the removal of the technical and mechanical rooms. There was also what appears to be a noise trap along an exterior wall (The same wall that features windows in the newsroom) that was removed. The early 2000's set had a "soft news" morning show portion not visible in the above screenshot, but if you look closely, it appears you can see part of the floor pattern for this area under the center and right camera. The camera taking that spy cam shot was probably mounted near the top of the set wall, either on the set itself or from the grid. I wouldn't be surprised if the news desk platform slid backwards to give the cameras more space to move when shooting the opposite direction. The set being "large" was 100% an optical illusion, like most news sets. The second floor newsroom wasn't touched much through it's life. After they moved news into the studio, the former studio portion of the newsroom was tiled over until the iPad Graphics debut. The real mystery is what they originally planned to do with the space once the 10th floor Newsroom opened a few years ago. It's possible the general concept of renovating the space was a long time in the making, and started under Tribune.

Yeah, both the pre-renovation and post-renovation floor plans are in this thread. The studio is actually slightly larger than before, thanks to the deletion of a mechanical room and tech room along the eastern wall. The new NewsNation studio sits in the footprint of the old WPIX newsroom, and also includes the space previously occupied by a control room.