Getting lost in all of this: A couple of alarm bells about the health of some of the media companies in smaller markets. 1) GCI is *the* cable company in Alaska. They provide telcom and other services to a vast majority of the state's residents. They should have the cash flow to continue operations... 2) ...Especially when you consider that GCI is a subsidiary of what was formerly known as Liberty Interactive--of John Malone/Liberty Media. GCI should be healthy enough to own television stations in general, let alone a competing, news producing station in the market. So what's changed where they're tossing it all?

BRC was one of those legacy Raycom stations that had its own art department - at least as of a few years ago - but who knows today. If VizRT is part of the upgrade, my guess is they'll get something standard.

In fairness, if News Nation stumbles out of the gate, given all they've invested into the operation and the current operating climate in general, there's no guarantee they don't "pivot" to the current cable news style others employ.

I don't know what the art/creative staffing arrangement is at the legacy Gray stations given the hub, but at least in some of what were the Raycom stations, you typically have, or had, an art director (or equivalent) and a subordinate or two. That is still the case at WAVE if I'm not mistaken, and at most stations these days, that's enough to do a lot.

There was a period of time where KYW was opening their 11PM news basically cold with this theme--it's not *that* different from the base package from Music Oasis, but it may be worth looking into whether Monster made it given how removed it is from the debut in '91.

It really is. That view overlooking the entire city is something else. WBRC has a decent amount of studio space too - so I'm pretty pumped for what their set will look like.

Not bad! Looks classy and modern.

They're really banking on sports coming back in earnest, aren't they?

PIX is officially going back to Nexstar, for all intents and purposes: Scripps seems to be doing a lot of selling of late, between this and their podcasts. And while most would concede this was probably the end game for Scripps and Nexstar/Mission, $75M still seems abnormally low for a station in the top media market.

Sounds like they might have picked up 360 also?

Another "newsroom" style set gone. Sigh. I never realized WREG had all that studio / newsroom space. It never looked like it was utilized well on air.

My mistake on UMG - I must be thinking of another production company I'm pretty sure NBCU does own, just not UMG. RE: Graphics - different universe. Also a fair bit more complicated than it would appear on the surface.

If you need, say, production music, as a service, and you buy almost all the production music companies to perform work in house, and leave other consumers little options across the free market, that by most definitions is anti-competitive.

The same reasons the NBC O&Os shop around while having Universal Music as a subsidiary, or Disney shops around having several music publishing labels under its fold - because they can, and because there likely are antitrust issues to consider.

You could say it was.... Deep-sixed.

What could Sinclair possibly want with a couple of LPs? ATSC 3.0 test stations?

WTXF had bumped Chasing News out of 12.30 for some time - it had been running at 3AM for the past year or two.

I believe this has happened only once before in Norah's tenure - and when it did, the weekend show was properly branded as CBS Evening News.

It's a nice theme, but it lacks a lot of the metropolitan melody of, say, WCBS's Man Made rebrand. I suppose with WTOP in Washington it doesn't need that same flair - this package does carry a bit more authority to it.

You can't really expand news at the local level to fill any possible national gaps with all the cuts that have been happening on and off the air this week. Using CBSN to fill the gap makes sense in theory--remember, CBSN effectively produced much of the Weekend News before all of this and they kinda sorta did again when the Evening News melted down a few days back--and then the coronavirus hit. They're as much on pins and needles as anything else right now. The easy solution to that would be for the parent company to boost CBSN's resources and reach, and there absolutely was a time when merger talks where in their infancy where there was an appetite for that. I'm not sure that's the case now. Evening will never go away. Ever. But because we've seen it happen before in CBS's history, you can't necessarily say that for Morning--or at least its current incarnation--although it does make money for the network. It would be fair to debate what a national morning news from CBS would look like when Gayle retires.

O_O https://www.ftvlive.com/sqsp-test/2020/5/28/over-a-dozen-gone-in-philly

So WTSP's new look, retro logo and all, was farmed out to an ad agency, per FTVLive. They also did WXIA.

I'd argue it's probably the best time for set redesigns to happen with very few working in the office. The question becomes how that set is going to look for the new normal, and when talent will be able to use it. Britain in the 90s had huge desks (or at least the camera tricks made them so) on local news sets. Almost wonder if we'll start seeing behemoth-type sets again to account for social distancing, like SVN or late '90s era WWOR. It certainly looks like WFLA has the space to do something like that if they wanted to.

I think that's a situation where you consider 2 packages - one for small markets and another for the larger ones. You sort of see hints of that with the 4PM opens in some of the larger markets (Tampa, Detroit, San Diego, Cleveland). Scripps's hub may not be large enough for that, but it can be done - FOX is moving back toward a single look on its stations but its last-gen look afforded a lot of options for stations.

CBS, in general, is not having a good night. WBBM's OTA signal is down. https://twitter.com/EdCurran/status/1262893209979621381?s=20