Almost two months ago, Joel Connable returned to the South Florida TV screens in the form of Travel TV News. Check out his brand new and updated site here: TravelTVNews.com.
Archive for the 'Links' Category
WFOR's New Doppler 4D
WFOR CBS4 just launched a new cool weather radar this Thursday! They call it Doppler 4D, and it’s like nothing else in the South Florida TV news market. According to Craig Setzer’s Inside Weather Scoop Blog:
“A typical radar view is two dimensional. It is also typically the lowest “slice” out of a thunderstorm and indicates the intensity of rain (or possibly hail) falling out of the storm. If you loop the image you add the dimension of time and how the storm is changing over time. This, in some respects is three dimensions. We can also look at a radar image in the form of a “range height indicator” or RHI. Then you not only see a horizontal slice of the storm, but a vertical slice as well.”
“[…] So simple intensity of the storm is important and that’s what most radars show, but Doppler 4D shows the entire depth of the storm, revealing details we rarely see. Potential hail, extreme winds, even tornadoes show up when viewed in this much detail.”
With hurricane season already a month old, and a tropical weather system inevitable, this may be an edge WFOR needs. It seems to be common knowledge that WTVJ doesn’t have a chance in hell of gaining any viewers this hurricane season with their (small) all-star weather team – but WFOR has a chance. Read more of this personal opinion in the SFLTV Forums.
A new concept for national news? The technology is called Auto-Tune, and if you’ve ever listened to modern day artists like Kanye West, you’ve heard Auto-Tune technology. A 24-year-old Brooklyn musician named Michael Gregory has combined a number of TV news clips, and turned them into rather catchy songs. For those not “in the know,” Auto-Tune is a software program that alters singers’ voices to achieve perfect pitch.
“So in addition to making fun of nightly news coverage, Gregory has also shown us how ridiculously easy it is to make someone sound like a C-rated pop star (this also explains the musical “careers” of Brooke Hogan and Heidi Montag).” TIME Magazine’s Claire Suddath says.
Here’s two videos demonstrating how entertaining Auto-Tune can be:
Doesn’t Katie Couric sound great? Very catchy. View their full channel here.
This newsletter went out to all the NBC6 folks about their new NBC Miami site. A note: NBC Miami was pushed back one day, and is now set to launch March 17th.
“Hi,
We are writing to let you know about some great news!
www.NBC6.net is getting rebuilt from the ground up with an entirely new infrastructure, design, content plan, and more, including a new name and url: www.NBCMiami.com. We expect to launch NBC Miami on March 17, 2009.
In the meantime, you can take a quick tour of some of the great new features we have built out for you here. We’ve been working on our new site and hope that it will provide you with a richer experience and connect you closer to your local community.
Everything you love about NBC6.net will be on the new site along with much more, but things will shift to new places on the site so make sure you try our new search function (that works!) to give you what you want, how you want it. Also, during this transition you won’t be receiving our daily newsletter because our email service will be down for a week to make way for our new sites. But, don’t worry, we’ll be up and running on March 23, 2009.”
Let’s hope they have integrated more video features then previous O&O sites. Launch date is only 6 days away!
/thanks, e-mail tipster/
news biz stories that caught our eye(s)
- Networks ever closer to leaving local stations for younger, sexier cable channels?
- 3 Phoenix stations, 1 chopper. Sharing toys like your momma learned you
- WBAL Scrotum Loving Reporter who doctored video, gets bounced. Buh bye!
- WCBS gets captive, will be capturing eyeballs in NYC taxi cabs
- NOLA anchors dress for Mardi Gras as Sony, Cher, Bees… Pff, wake us up when they do Bourbon street beads girl and beads boy, with assless chaps. Or maybe not.
Announced today by NBC News president Steve Capus Weather Plus will be history by December 31st.
And with good reason, NBC (over?)spent $3.5 bilion on The Weather Channel in July. Then put WTVJ and WVIT in Hartford, Connecticut on the chopping block to help offset some of the cost.
Post Newsweek won the bidding war for WTVJ but in late September NBC took WVIT’s for sale sign off due to the bad economy and not getting as much as they wanted for the station.
WSVN’s sibling in Boston is turning the HD switch on Moday at 4pm (or tuesday at the latest) according to Boston media blog The Scoop and btvn
They just got done re-modeling their newsplex. The video wall behind the anchors with all the little monitors was shortened a bit and in their place are several large flat screen tvs.
The 2nd floor has a projector screen like WSVN’s with blue columns on each side.
The light boxes in the middle between the floors are now all red instead of blue! And the anchor desk has received a rather nice update.
WSVN is expected to probably do similar changes to their newsplex, but unfortunately couple weeks ago I was told they’ve pushed their HD transition date from August into the fall. I don’t know what caused it or if it’s definitive delay or what, yet.
MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, announced the winners of their 6th annual MADD Media Awards program today and WFOR took home one.
CBS4 News was awarded an Award for Excellence for Broadcast for their series on alcohol-laced energy drinks. The Pensacola News Journal won the print award.
Nationally ‘Inside Edition’ picked up an award in the National Television: Underage Drinking Issues category. CNN Headline News Nancy Grace won in the National Television: Drunk Driving Issues category.
MADD will host a luncheon in Dallas, Texas on September 5th, 2008 to honor the Media Award Winners during their National Conference.
- Because your cable bill isn’t high enough already: Univision to abandon its must-carry status and negotiate retransmission-consent deals for affiliate stations; CEO Joe Uva says being the top Spanish network carries a $1/month per subscriber value. Will be 2nd to ESPN as most expensive.
- New York TV stations look to Nielsen ratings alternatives; say Nielsen sample is not big enough
- Did KYW main co-anchor talk to the media after accessing Alycia Lane’s Yahoo Mail account?! FBI wants to know if he leaked messages from her lawyer
- Broadcasters fight localism rules; proposed rules will force stations to locate main studios in the city for which they are licensed; the TV station would also have to have community advisory boards; staff the station whenever its broadcasting and display evidence of local content
- Former MSNBC anchor Randy Meier gets dissed by former station; and literally pushed off camera by radio co-host
- Dr. Phil in HD this fall because he wants to give his audience “the best viewing experience I possibly can”
- WNBC reporter turned co-found of Blip.tv Dina Kaplan profiled
- A young CNBC director David van Dyck dies after a long battle with cancer
New Site Twitters
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