noggi

Not sure if this means anything but WJZ is using the little black box on LinkedIn… maybe they’ll launch Monday with this new show? Edit: Looks like this didn't happen, and the other O&O set to launch today delayed due to issues with their new Chyron setup.

Watched a bit this morning… sounds like the set isn’t really finished yet as they kept teasing showing it off “over the next few weeks” and didn’t show anything beyond that very flat 2-shot. In the 6a hour they went back to using a live tower cam in the background and it looked pretty bad.

No.

I mean their work has been straight out of the late 2000’s / early 2010’s and has never evolved, so…

They tried to drain the swamp at CBS News & Stations but based on their recent hires… kinda feels like they’re right back where they started. In some ways, I hear it’s actually worse.

So apparently the key to building ratings growth is: new set confusing/mediocre branding more hours of news than anyone else

they were busy with a photo shoot.

They have their own promotions producers in each market.

When did OKC become such a hot spot for pursuits?? I’ve just noticed a ton of videos on YouTube from KOTV these last few months. Radars have some utility. Storm chasers have absolutely none in most markets. They don’t have the skill to actually use them as they’re intended… but they look nice in promos and parades!

Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett Named Co-Anchors of PBS NewsHour https://www.pbs.org/newshour/press-releases/amna-nawaz-and-geoff-bennett-named-co-anchors-of-pbs-newshour Nawaz and Bennett to Succeed Judy Woodruff on Monday, January 2, 2023

Very gray, very poorly lit, very little depth or texture. It’s definitely a new set!

http://nbcarthouse.com/20/

Launching a barebones local tv news operation in an already heavily oversaturated market and producing an out-of-home marketing campaign featuring a bunch of nameless stranger's faces and giving people absolutely no idea what or where your "new local news" product even is... not sure if the question is if they've found an audience but can the audience even find them?

I think the biggest farce here is that most of the general managers, news directors, GSMs, and marketing directors are all white and mostly male. But hey… whatever

Sales team in the newsroom? Yikes…

This would be an awesome chance for some great local prime time programming. But I’m sure we will just see a ton of very mediocre local newscasts.

What is with this weird fetish for speculating about transactions that never could have / never will happen? Edit: Might as well contribute my two cents to the ANF conversation: what they just did is one of the reasons behind why I left local TV news in 2020. So many that have ascended the ranks of local news management have absolutely no idea what a “brand” is. It’s so much more than a logo. No one is addressing the issues with content. Look at a newscast from 1980 and compare it to one today - the format is almost identical, even the presentation… and that’s a huge problem. You want a younger audience? They don’t want to hear a 4 minute weather forecast from a guy older than their grandfather. There’s a station in Milwaukee that’s running a promo that says “DON’T WATCH US” and claims that they aren’t going to cover the car crashes and endless crime stories and they’ll focus on local storytelling… but guess what, I watched them and that was a lie. They can’t live up to that brand promise. I had the same reaction as some who saw the lead story on Atlanta News FIRST was the hurricane that was not coming anywhere close to Atlanta. So what does that new branding even mean? I don’t think there’s anything deeper here than just dropping a ridiculously high channel number. Changing call letters is incredibly stupid. I mean, go ahead and do it, but I don’t think it’s worth mentioning. Working in TV news was my dream, but looking back on it… I look at the product the stations I worked for put out and I ask myself: “Who is this for?” I give ANF a couple years before it’s dropped for another meaningless rebrand.

It's a huge pain in the ass and most stations don't have a large enough digital staff for something like this. There's probably automated systems for publishing too, but most local stations also don't have the budget for this. We had to do them by hand at WUSA with a designer making a template, only to find that news management refused to get the digital team Adobe licenses.

Trying to make Scripps into a household name: https://tvnewscheck.com/journalism/article/scripps-news-to-debut-on-jan-1/

WETA is making a PBS NewsHour special on the Queen available to stations this evening.

It’s definitely a much needed improvement. But it looks like a package that may have been good about five years ago. And some of the templates are a little sloppy.

Cool! Looks like every set that’s ever been made in the last 15 years! Nice work gang. Clearly spared no expense!

Yeah, but wasn’t that just a branding device for their combined newsrooms? Not an actual content play?

The race to the bottom continues.

Looks great!