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Weeters

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Everything posted by Weeters

  1. Please keep the wishcasting for a sale to Hearst in the Speculation board, please. Most of the groups seem to have reported less-than-impressive recent business results. This isn't a Scripps problem. Returning newscasts to "traditional" shows vs. Scrippscast isn't going to drastically change how people consume media, nor will it change the political landscape to drive up political advertising.
  2. If ABC was truly that concerned about St. Louis, then the affiliation would have been taken elsewhere a long time ago. ABC could have even bought a station and started their own news operation if they were that concerned. But, I think they know St. Louis is news saturated and doesn't need another newsroom. They don't have to be "happy" about it, but they also know there's a slim chance that the affiliation would end up on any of the existing news-producing stations, and it's not worth building a new one.
  3. Not sure if this is is a harbinger of new graphics... WISN has a very competent Creative Services team, and this is pre-produced. This seems in line with their recent promo work as well, and if you look closely, there are still a lot of the design language of the current "diagrid" package within those. Plus, WISN has a history of straying from the standard graphics """mandate""", so...
  4. Studio 31 has made a rebuttal to the rebuttal. Studio 31 alleges that I claimed "that The News Center hasn't disabled invites" despite my post reading "TNC previously allowed any user of the Discord to create their own invite links. This was disabled..." and further explanation about the process we have to join The News Center in the absent of user-generated invites and the current lack of a discord.gg link. I don't know what is so hard to understand about this. I specifically outlined the join process and he completely brushes over it because it's not "open invite". Studio 31 responds to my claims that I am not competing with anybody with a long paragraph full of a bunch of ego-stroking numbers and stats about Broadcast Plaza. I feel like, perhaps, my message was lost, so I'll reiterate: I do not care what stats Broadcast Plaza has. I do not care what stats The News Center has. I am not playing this "competition" game. He then creates a quote that I called this a "TV graphics fandom" out of thin air, I never said this is a "TV graphics fandom". Reading this section of his response kind of made my eyes glaze over and made me realize further engagement is pointless. I do not have time to argue with someone who has an ego the size of the moon and resorts to gaslighting to try and prove a point. The rest of the post is his personal beefs with Rusty, Emma, and Jess, which I cannot respond to. Best wishes to Studio 31 and Broadcast Plaza moving forward, Weeters
  5. Addendum #1: Involving Studio 31's involvement with Broadcast Plaza: A few people have informed us that Studio 31 is no longer the "owner" of Broadcast Plaza, and merely a "partner". This is, and has been, known. It appears some attempt is being made at distancing Studio 31's actions from the Broadcast Plaza server itself. This, however, fails to explain why (if Studio 31 was acting solo on this matter) another video uploaded by a Broadcast Plaza "partner" also featured the same in-thumbnail ad, and why that video, as well as a third, featured a large "FIRST on Broadcast Plaza" watermark through the duration of the video. This appears to show that Studio 31's "marketing" techniques are being adopted by the other server "partners". If this truly does not reflect the position of Broadcast Plaza, then perhaps the current management of that server needs better oversight and control over the actions of their "partners", who inherently represent the server while acting as one. Standing by as your "partners" "market" your community by demeaning other community members is tacit support of their methods. Commentary: I remember when this was a fun, nerdy hobby. You'd have to wait weeks, months, maybe even years for someone to get a good high-quality copy of some new news open. A station just debut HD news? You'd get a quick "HD" (probably a SD feed cropped to 16:9) upload and some HD screenshots if you were lucky. Things took time. We waited. We were excited with whatever we got. Streaming has upended that. Now everyone has access to every TV station at a click of a mouse. What was once a fun hobby has become gamified. It's a popularity contest. Who can get the open up FIRST? Within 30 minutes of the WABC graphics debuting, there were at least 5 uploads of the same exact open. Several of these came "branded" by their respective channel, as if this is some kind of contest to be the Mr. Beast of News Opens. Watermarking your content is one thing, but slathering it with "marketing" is absurd. It's not your content. You get nothing for being "first". It's a pointless exercise. Even watermarks can be defeated. I once (probably 10 years ago) upload a HD "This is CNN" ident to the old TVNewsTalk YouTube page. It had a small watermark in the corner. Months later, a bit on Letterman used the same ident with a strange blur where the TVNT watermark was. I was defeated in the best possible way. I thought it was neat that some video file I uploaded ended up broadcast on Letterman. There was no point in getting mad they took off the TVNT bug. It wasn't my content to begin with, and there was nothing I could do about it. The community growing through YouTube has unfortunately caused several aspects of "YouTube Culture" to spill in. Create content at all costs. Have a big flashy brand for your channel. You can't just be bob9753 uploading news opens, you need to be The Glendive TV Open Archive with a flashy logo and thumbnails exclaiming you were the FIRST to upload something you recorded off a stream, even though 4 other people were recording the same stream and also uploaded claiming to be "FIRST!". It's been very sad to watch what was once a fun hobby turn into a popularity contest over something as trivial as news opens that don't belong to any of us.
  6. NMSA has a broken web configuration. You are trying to access it over SSL, and they don't have SSL configured. Make sure the url starts with http:// instead of https://. Some browsers try to force https:// by default now.
  7. We've been having unrelated service issues with the site for much of the day. They're upstream from our server, so they're out of our control.
  8. Yet again, Studio 31 Media Archive is issuing misleading statements regarding (and, apparently, on behalf of) the "Broadcast Plaza" Discord server, directed at both TVNewsTalk and our partner Discord server, The News Center. As before, these statements misrepresent the reality of several different subjects. For reference, these statements have been saved below. Rebuttal #1: Regarding joining The News Center Discord: Studio 31 misrepresents our policies regarding joining The News Center by claiming The News Center has "disabled invites". Since we entered into our partnership with The News Center, we have loosely managed public access to the Discord via these Forums. Similarly, we have long managed access to the Forums via Moderator review of new Members. While this restricted immediate access for the general public, there have been alternative ways to join for some time. For at least the past year, TNC has maintained a Discord.gg short URL that allowed access to the server, available for anybody to use, if they knew where to find it. The Discord.gg short link turned off automatically in the past few days, after the server dropped a "boost" level, but appears to have been used as recently as this past Thursday. This is not something the Discord administration have direct control of. TNC previously allowed any user of the Discord to create their own invite links. This was disabled after numerous bad actors (several of whom were previously or later banned from what is now Broadcast Plaza) utilized this feature to either invite other problematic users into the Discord, or evade bans with sockpuppet accounts. Despite all of this, access remained available to anybody with an active and reviewed Forum account, which is the same process Studio 31 would have used to join the Discord. TVNewsTalk believes this claim to be misrepresentative of the situation, and made in bad faith. Rebuttal #2: TVNewsTalk and The News Center "literally censors any mention of [Broadcast Plaza]": Studio 31 misrepresents community policies regarding advertising. TVNewsTalk has maintained (since at least 2015) the following rule regarding advertising: Studio 31 has attempted to evade this rule several times, by integrating advertisements for Broadcast Plaza within YouTube Thumbnails. We believe this is to take advantage of the large thumbnail embeds present on both this site and Discord. Studio 31 has claimed this is "marketing", however, this form of "marketing" appears to be unique to Broadcast Plaza, as not even YouTube creators with large followings and merchandising place "marketing" materials like this within their thumbnails. In fact, most popular YouTube creators seem to use very large, very short bits of text within their thumbnails, due to how small these thumbnails can be across devices. In addition, YouTube provides a number of tools for channels such as Studio 31 to market their own websites and communities within the platform. When this "marketing" tactic was first used during the Summer of 2023, TVNewsTalk and The News Center decided that the best course of action, should this continue, was to continue to allow the links, while deleting the thumbnail/embed. We also made it known to Studio 31/Broadcast Plaza that we were upset that they chose this route to "market" their community. For some time, the thumbnail-embedded ads stopped, but were reintroduced this past Saturday with the launch of WABC's new graphics, which we believe was a targeted attempt at, once again, getting the ads onto our respective community platforms. In response, the embeds were removed, however, the link to the videos remain for anyone to click. This claim misrepresents and exaggerates the advertising policy enforcement actions being taken by TVNewsTalk and The News Center. Rebuttal #3: Regarding alleged "competition": (A TVNewsTalk.net Editorial presented by Operations Director Weeters) Several times, Studio 31 makes references to "competition" within our communities. Let me be perfectly frank: neither TVNewsTalk, nor The News Center, is in competition with anybody. This is a niche interest. It is a diverse community of individuals who are interested in the various aspects of TV news and broadcasting. "Competing" with Broadcast Plaza would simply be competing with ourselves, and that only serves to cause division within the larger community. Studio 31 claims that TVNewsTalk and The News Center are the only people calling this a "war". This is incorrect. The only one who thinks this perceived "competition" (another term we haven't used previously) is being seen by the other side as a "war" , is Studio 31 and Broadcast Plaza. Despite their accomplishment at becoming "Discord’s Largest Media Community", Studio 31 and Broadcast Plaza indicate that is not enough for them. That they must continue to grow their own section of the community through deceit, gaslighting, and personal attacks against members of our staff and member base. This is not how you build community. This "us vs. them" mentality is how you drive a wedge into an existing community for your own personal gain. Why do they feel the need to "grow"? I can't come up with a good reason. There is no prize awarded for being "the largest media community" other than bragging rights, which they have already attained. These videos cannot be monetized. The content being shared is not the property of the people uploading it. I have zero interest in fighting these stupid battles. This alleged "competition" is not worth my time. I will continue to enforce our existing policies regarding advertisements. If Broadcast Plaza and their "partners" feel the need to "market" their own slice of the community to the rest of the community in an attempt to "grow", their advertisements will be dealt with accordingly, as I would any other type of advertisement placed on this board. I have zero intention of "competing" with Studio 31 and Broadcast Plaza, but I will not stand by as they attack the community, our Members, and our Staff. Merriam-Webster defines "competition" as "the effort of two or more parties acting independently to secure the business of a third party by offering the most favorable terms" and "a contest between rivals", I am not putting in effort to secure anybody's allegiance. I do not see Studio 31 or Broadcast Plaza as a "rival". It's about time they start acting that way, too.
  9. Closing this thread as it's gone wildly off course from the initial topic. Folks, it costs nothing to create a new thread... Just Saying...
  10. I really like the overall lower thirds/OTS/boxes/etc (though there are some questionable choices in certain aspects). You can really tell a lot of thought went into making this into a comprehensive package where everything works with everything else. The in-show graphics remind me a lot of the original NewsNation graphics and the ABC O&O package being rolled out. But... and I know this is a tough pill for some to swallow, but the 3D stuff ruins it. They look like they came from a graphics package that debut 12 years ago. The opens being a bunch of 3D text and logos flying around with no reason is completely out of place in this package where everything else is designed with some thought and order. It honestly looks like they debut a mashed up old and new graphics package. Did two different firms work on this or something? Did they change course halfway through and not want to pay to redo the opens and interstitial stuff? The very first transition out of black and into the show in that WAXN video seems like it "fits" better. You can have some 3D, but stuff like the logos flying in and the letters twirling around has been a news graphics cliche for at least the past decade (where it should have been left.)
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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...
  19. 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
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. I could have sworn the WBBM streetside studio was going to become some kind of weather center annex, not a full news set...
  23. 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!)
  24. 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.
  25. There's also no lights... so my guess is whatever is set up in there is temporary and just meant to fill the space.
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