Weeters

NewsNet made a big deal about airing Trump's Covid press conferences live. Today, Biden held his first Covid press conference, and what is NewsNet airing while the President signs Executive Orders about the virus? Ah, of course.

There's nothing anywhere that says the copyright needs to reflect station ownership. It's a Nexstar-produced newscast, featuring people paid by Nexstar, airing on a station that Nexstar has a contract with to provide services for. There's not much difference between this and a news share agreement where one station provides news for another owned by a different party.

The ground floor lease that included the streetside studio also includes the current studio as well as the control room. There are floorplans on the site for the streetside studio space. Anyone leasing the old streetside studio would sublease it from CBS. From what I understand, they lease the ground floor studio space and the first two floors of space above it, plus the garage below. There are 12+ years left on the entire lease according to the streetside studio listing. Fun fact: The elephant doors to bring large items into the studios (i.e. set pieces) are actually in the mall entry immediately north of the streetside studio.

NewsCentral was before its time. Technology has changed so much that it's impossible to compare with what we can do today. We have meteorologists working from home covering severe weather. What's the difference if they're 30 miles from the station or 3000?

I'll summarize my thoughts from the Discord: I don't think this is an attempt at a new OTA weather channel or anything close to WeatherPlus. I think this is a vehicle to enable the hubbing of weather. The press release says "Fox Weather will feature local, regional and national updates... [Drawing] on more than 75 meteorologists across 17 stations and Fox News Channel’s news gathering teams." and makes no mention of affiliate stations. This is a project that involves only the O&O group. Rebrand all the local weather departments under the "Fox Weather" banner (Which would be similar to WeatherPlus) and now you have a unified brand that anyone can appear in front of. Do you really need weekend meteorologists at both WITI and WFLD? Or can you just "regionalize" these markets and do both out of one station from time to time? Oh no! A Tornado warning has been issued on a Sunday morning, and nobody's at the station! Not to worry, the Mothership in NYC has somebody on duty, and they were going to cover the Tornado warning anyways, so they might as well just simulcast Fox Weather on the local FOX O&O. I would not be the least bit surprised if midway through next year, they announce they're "streamlining" the O&O's and are taking advantage of "operational efficiencies" presented with a network of meteorologists and suddenly some stations lose their weekend/fill in mets. I've said for some time now that Weather and Sports were ripe for hubbing, and I think this might be the start of that.

They've been on the same tower for years, and WDJT relays them on 58.3. Problem is Weigel has so many channels relaying on WDJT's main signal that none of them have a decent picture quality.

WTMJ "News Force 4" promo (An apparently short lived designation for their ENG teams) from 1980 WTMJ News Open from the same era as the above promo: And last but not least, a complete WTMJ 10pm newscast, with commercials... from 1968! Includes a few minutes of The Tonight Show at the end.

Please keep set discussion in the set update thread:

Let's check in on how NewsNet is handling its first national election. Oh.... Yesterday's news.

After seeing it for the first time online nearly 15 years ago, they're finally using the "Kitebox" logo on at least the mic flags. They're looking pretty good. Waiting for the weather graphics to get updated to match...

CBS and Fox News Channel have had a content share agreement for a while. It's just not very often used, and when it is, it's usually transparent to the end viewer. For example, a Fox News satellite truck may uplink live signals for both FOX and CBS. Additionally, WFLD, WBBM, WGN, and WMAQ have had a news share agreement in place since 2009. I know everyone on here likes to think there's all this in-fighting behind the scenes between stations like a scene out of Anchorman. That couldn't be further from reality. Stations share content with each other all the time and work together frequently, regardless of affiliation or ownership groups, and this has been going on since TV started.

That's their Investigative unit package. They've had it for a while. From what I've heard from people "in the know": -The weather graphics were only changed to the CBSN local package because most stations don't have the resources to maintain two looks. -Any plans for new graphics are indefinitely on hold due to the Viacom takeover and COVID. I'm considering closing this thread, it's becoming a "graphics speculation" thread where people just point out any random oddity as a "sign" of new graphics.

KMTV had the Scripps v.2 weather graphics for years and never used the full package. Scripps doesn't seem to care if the weather computers jump the gun.

KTVA itself no longer has a news department. Everything but the license and transmitter now belongs to Gray. More than likely, the KTVA signal will go dark once it's fully integrated into KYES. KYES is essentially airing a news product named "KTVA 11 News" right now and simulcasting on Channel 11, from the way it's described in the announcement.

The NMSA isn't some magic site that is 100% accurate. It's more than likely someone sent in a wild assumption and the operators just put it up since they are unable to verify it.

This was the original stated purpose of NewsNet. The original concept seemed to hope that affiliates would start their own small local news departments, that would insert 5 minutes of local news twice an hour. But, surprise, very few stations actually did that. Most stations ended up being low-power stations with 10 other "throwaway" networks that just ran NewsNet national and collected whatever tiny amount of ad revenue they could. The new model seems to be convincing stations to replace most of their existing local news departments with an hour of the NewsNet feed with a few minutes of local news sprinkled on top. What that tells me is the original concept is a failure, and they're now moving on to Plan B. They have to make this work. Eric Wotila is riding the already-in-freefall rollercoaster that is local TV news, and is now working on pulling out the brakes.

Last night I was having trouble getting to sleep, and decided to put on NewsNet for a while to see if that would help. Thinking about what is happening with KTWO, I ended up logging an hour's worth of what they aired and figured out where it came from. I wanted to know just how much they rely on CNN. The answer? In the hour I watched, approximately 27 minutes, or 45% of the hour, was ultimately from CNN. A package from WISH also aired twice, with a large "wishtv.com" bug in the upper right, but otherwise clean. This doesn't seem to have come from CNN, but the bug being there was a little odd. Those 9 minutes of actual content from NewsNet include: 5 minutes of Weather (2 minutes and 3 minutes) 2 minutes of news headlines (Nothing substantial, just teasing stories about to air. 1 at top of hour, 1 at bottom) 2 airings of an approx. 1 minute package from California where the reporter/VJ had a NewsNet mic flag.

What this part says is that Sinclair cannot apply for "assignment or transfer of control" (broad enough to include any purchase or divestiture of a station) without the applications being approved by Sinclair's legal team, and that any such application must also be accompanied by a certification from the designated Compliance Officer enforcing compliance of this order, stating that the application is accurate and that it's following all applicable laws. They must also submit an explanation as to why it was certified accurate and lawful. So, in other words, for the next few years, any time they buy or sell a station, they will need to certify that they are following the rules and not trying to pull a fast one on the FCC. The text applicable to the retransmission agreements is:

This is a bunch of nothing, really. The two largest parts of the Consent Decree deals with sponsorship identification and retransmission negotiations. Basically: Sinclair must have their lawyers review all applications to the FCC, and said lawyers must certify them to be compliant with all communication laws. Sinclair must set up policies to ensure sponsored content is properly labeled as sponsored (they are not the first broadcaster to end up with an FCC Consent Decree with this included) Sinclair is not allowed to see, or be involved with, retransmission negotiations for stations they do not outright own (i.e. they are not allowed to see or know about the agreements negotiated by Deerfield Media stations)

This. The Graphics Hub hasn't really scaled with the number of stations they own. The only reason they were able to get the Journal stations onto the v2 look in any reasonable amount of time was because Journal was already semi-hubbed through WTMJ, and they were able to offload some of the work for some of the stations onto the graphics team there. They've since then, what, doubled (?) their portfolio, mostly in smaller markets, where, let's face it, neither the talent nor money exists to expect the stations to render their own 3D. They needed something that could be done on a normal computer, with as little extra software as possible. This looks to be 100% After Effects. It's also easily ported among different CG systems. Viz, Chyron, maybe even the Tribune in-house system and whatever else their newer acquisitions have. You could probably run this look on a first generation HD Chyron if you wanted to.

"Major disappointment" probably describes their choice to work at Scripps. I have yet to see more than a handful of viewer complaints about this package, and viewers love to complain about everything they can. In fact, I used to see more complaints when stations were switching to the (much beloved by TVNT) over-the-top 3D swoosh in-your-face packages than I have seen complaints about the new Scripps gfx and music. Yeah, they're really basic. Yeah, some stations probably hate them because they don't fit the news director/creative services director's "vision" of their station (which is usually some crazy 90's Joel Cheatwood-esque concept of what local news is.) Viewers don't seem to care at all, which is what actually matters.

Some of these sets were likely built in-house. Lots of stations still had their own carpenters through the 80's.

Nothing new. The current graphics package was supposed to launch with Aerial. That didn't happen for some reason, but they apparently paid SAM for the rights to the package, so it pops up randomly.

The channels are not full-time affiliates, but it looks like they're using NewsNet as some NewsCentral-esque replacement for their local news operations.

That's just one of NBC's chime sound effects provided to affiliates, played on top of C-Clarity.