EastCoast

I had a similar thought this morning that Morning Express would have been perfect for the 7-9/10 show on CNN Max and HLN. It was already an Atlanta based morning show and would have brought more consistency to Max over of the Walker/Whitfield/Acosta shared block. The schedule changes aren’t that dramatic. In the early 2000s Daybreak ran 5-7 and American Morning ran 7-10. It’s only an hour later than the 4-6 and 6-9 schedule from the mid-late 2010s. While it feels weird to get rid of Early Start and have News Central at 7, I can see the logic. 5-7 is for the workers who are getting ready to be in the office by 8. 7-10 is for the late starters, families, and folks already at work. You aren’t going to win the family crowd watching Today or GMA or win back the partisan politics crowd watching Morning Joe or F&F. That leaves you with doing just the news. The only thing I don’t like is that the News Central graphics are a bit cold for 7am.

Going through the archives, News Central had typical intros and standup segments the week of December 11th. The weeks of December 18th and December 25th have all had desk shots. While the PM edition has gravitated towards the desk more often recently, I’d reason that most of this is due to the holidays. CNN News Central is a very graphics intensive program, which means increased staff to program all of the graphics for each segment. Switching to a Newsroom style format for a couple of weeks allows more staff time off around the holidays.

I wouldn’t expect Mark to wait until October to pull back the curtains. He’ll get caught up to speed and will likely provide feedback and direction as new shows and CNN Max launches to save the embarrassment of getting CNN+ed.

The two line lower thirds in the “regular” weight font look so much better than the one line versions. If CNN stuck to the two line format I’d be willing to admit that this graphics refresh is an improvement.

Laura Coates’ Sirius XM show recently switched from 3-6pm ET to 7-9am ET. I think this might be a factor into why we haven’t seen Laura on air as much. 7-9am and 11pm-midnight would be a very long day,