[media] And Was His Stump Speech Written By Jim Steinman?

2877.Today in our somewhat-involuntary chronicling of the Death of All Media, we stumble on this.

Actually, If I can digress a moment (well, usually I do) I've got to blandly admit that I'm surprised at how easily things like this are to find. I don't go looking for them, truly I don't. The impression I'm coming to is that media orgs are so desperate to put out content, and do so in such a blind frenzy sometimes, that they just don't look. Copy-editors and caution have clearly become a thing of the past, or or going that way even quicker than even I had suspected.

That out of the way, today's morsel comes from the Global Post, yet another news organization that strives to keep us informed (or at least distracted) by posting everything all the time. It would seem that Meat Loaf, that memorable exponent of 70s-80s tract-home and trailer-park down'n'dirty rock'n'roll (I say this having lived in a tract-home and a trailer-park, so I know whereof I speak) has endorsed Mitt Romney for President, a development that manages, in a a Möbius-strip way, to be both unexpected and completely unsurprising. And the caption on the photo can't seem to get straight just who it is they're talking about.

No, you aren't misreading it. The caption says that's Mitt Romney, not Meat Loaf at Mitt Romney's rally, but Mitt.

If so, he's had work done.

On the other hand, you could have the makings of a new movie here:

The Romney Horror Picture Show. [1]

Try not to worry. It'll just get you old early.

[1] Yeah, I ripped that one off. It was too good to leave alone.

[media_world] It Sure Looks Like Retaliation

1320. A missive from a a member of the WTF generation. Time for amateur deductive logic:

1. Montel Williams goes on FOX and Fiends to jaw with the hosts about the death of Heath Ledger.


2. Montel, in an earlier life a Marine and Naval officer who served with unquestionable honor, as some point Has Had Enough™ and sideswipes the show's hosts, pwning them over their obsession with celebrity twaddle and disregard for small things like servicemen dying in certain foreign wars.


3. Montel is gone from the show after the next break.


4. Montel's show is suddenly cancelled after a successful run of 17 years.

Everyone can play their Whiskey Tango Foxtrot games to thier hearts content. I don't think the question is whether or not the people behind these events decided to punish Montel so much for stepping out of line as why is it they were content to let the whole danse macabre play out where everyone could see it.

The solution to that question is also left as an exercise for the reader.

Myself, I never had much use for Montel. Made a completely undeserved celebrity out of Sylvia Browne. And I wonder if he ever asked himself, while he was stumping for the Partnership for Prescription Assistance why we, as a country, need a Partnership for Prescription Assistance.

Oh, Montel will probably land on his feet.

I worry about Sylvia though.

Tags: Montel Williams, media world

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[media, teh_funnay] WKRC Newsers Throw Down! Shut Up and DANCE!

1251. Baby, if you've ever wondered / Wondered, whatever became of me / I'm dancin' on the air in Cincinnati / Cincinnati, WKRC.



This is The Neatest Thing In The World So Far™. That traffic hottie can sure bust it, can't she?

Some local station (are you listening, KPTV?) ought to take up the challenge.

Credit where due: this place (with some Frankencode embed that works not for me) and The Wife™.

Tags: WKRC, teh funnay, media

[media] Channel Surfing: That Was the WEWS That Was

1181. WEWS is on of the old-line stations in Cleveland–it's been around forever, like the old guard hereabouts. And like local stations here, they have to market. In the 70's, for example, they wanted you to tune into Eyewitness news and Catch 5...



(thanks to Kevin Allman for the tip). This is such an amazing period piece–even though a lot of us lived through those times, I'm sure you can agree with me that we can't believe that that stuff was ever fashionable. Kevin describes it as a combination of The Electric Company and Peter Max and I can't think of a better way to describe it. I do, however, have a compulsion to seek out episodes of Mary Tyler Moore now.

They sure knew how to have fun at WEWS. In this clip, the weatherman (with the obvious complicity of the control room staff) make fun of the sports anchor's hair:



And in this one, legendary Cleveland broadcaster Dorothy Fuldheim isn't sure what she is, but she's certain it isn't bisexual:



Occasionally bloopers happened on Portland TV, but I don't remember anyone in Stumptown having this much fun with it.

Tags: Channel 5, WEWS, Gib Shandley, Dorothy Fuldheim

[media, notebook] This Post Is Brought To You By The Letters K and W, and by the CBS Mandate

1179. From The ZehnKatzen Notebooks–TV Station Call Signs, or the letters we call our TV stations.

We know that all the broadcast stations in Oregon begin with K; in fact, it's a truism that broadcasters west of the Mississippi start with K whilst those east start with W; and some stations have three-letter calls (KEX, KGW, KXL) though others four (KOIN, KATU, KPOJ). Strangely, however, there's a KDKA in Pittsburgh-hundreds of miles west of the Mississippi. Ever wonder why?

I did, found out, filed away the info, and then forgot it. Now, in collecting TV Station logos, I found I wanted to know again and now, thanks to Google, the answers are but a few minutes away, perforce, the following, capped with a few words on corporate style (the CBS Mandate).

The following is a thumbnail of what I found out. A web-bibliography follows.

The Story of the Ks and the Ws

A long time ago there were only a handful of stations broacasting anything, of course. They began to multiply, and it was decided by the international broadcasting community that a indentification standard would be A Good Thing Indeed.

Prior to 1912, a station could call itself anything it wanted. After this, however, the precursor of the International Telecommunications Union established a system that would evolve into the familiar K/W dichotomy that we know today.

The original plan for USA was to simply allocate A, N, K, and W. The US lobbied for A and N for Army and Navy, and the reasons K and W were chosen for civilan broacasting are unclear and are usually characterized as arbitrary and reason-less, but one of the sources I read pointed out that K and W are easily obtained by adding a dash to the Morse Code symbol for A:

• Morse "A" is • –
• To get "K", put a dash in front of the "A" ( – • – )
• To get "W", put a dash in back of the "A" ( • – – )

We're not sure either, because the actual reason does not seem to be recorded, but this seems to have the right ring to it.

Once established and agreed upon, the appropriate authority started meteing out the calls. When first established, though, there was no requirement that a W or K be anywhere in relation to anything. A W could be in the west, and a K could be in the east.

As a matter of fact, that's what happened. One of the pioneer broadcasters, the legendary KDKA, was established and still broadcasts from Pittsburgh, PA; KYW is a station in Philadelpha, and WOAI broadcasts from San Antonio, TX.

As broadcasting spread west, however, it was deemed that a further territorial division would be Another Very Good Thing. Sometime between 1912 and 1920, the first dividing line was established, but due to the relative scarcity of broadcast outlets in the west, a line based on the New Mexico-Texas border would be appropriate. Existing K stations in the east were grandfathered, and that's why you have K stations in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Soon enough, as broadcasting realy took off, it was decided that a line that far west was optimistic, so in January 1923, that demarcation was shifted to the Mighty Mississppi. W stations that existed before that shift had thier calls grandfathered, which is why you find W stations in San Antonio and Waco and Oklahoma City, amongst other places.

The map, hotlinked from one of my sources, tells the story.

One current exception happens in states like Minnesota and Louisana, where the Miss cuts through, they are allowed to mix it up. Both K and W calls exist in the NOLA, Twin Cities and Duluth markets regardless of thier relative positions to the Mississppi thalweg, and are not considered anomalies But all new stations outside those grey areas must adhere to the K/West, W/East rationale.

The Drawing of the Three ... Letters

Another mystery is why some stations have three letter calls while most of them seem to have four.

This can also be explained by expediency of the then-exploding broadcasting market. Originally three letters were thought to be sufficient; originally, the letters were randomly assigned.

By 1922, though, the applications began to flood in and the demand exceeded the supply of three-letter calls, and the answer to The Times-Picayune's application for the New Orleans market were the four-letter string WAAB (the station today is known as WJBO in Baton Rouge).

This would also explain why the three-letter stations in any market seem to be the ones that go back the farthest, that have the most "history"; they simply have been around, first in radio form then video form, longest of all. Portland's KPTV (1952) may have been the first Portland television station; to radio KGW (1922), and KEX (1926) it, as a broadcast outlet of any stripe, was a johnny-come-lately.

I Have a Mandate

The other thing we noticed in our looking around was that some stations had a common treatment to thier logos. This is more than a coincidence.

Even today, in this age of media consolidation, not every station has a non-network owner. Some networks themselves own and operate stations; these are the "O&O's", the network Owned-and-Operateds. Stations like WCBS in New York, KCBS in LA, and WBBM in Chicago all happen to be CBS O&O's.

In the interests of consistent branding, CBS Corporation (then known as Viacom) established what's now called the CBS Mandate. This mandate simply said that the station's call sign would be deprecated except when the FCC requires it to be announced in favor of the network name (CBS) followed the the channel number followed by the city, where appropriate to prevent ID confusion. Thus, WBBM typically identifies as "CBS 2" (as do the other stations; as it happens, they're all on channel 2). The CBS station in Philadelphia (coincidentally, KYW) identifies as "CBS3"

Visually, the mandate ordains a limited color palette (blue white and yellow) and the presentation of the CBS eye and name in an equal point size as the channel digit.

Not all O&O's obey the Mandate; there seems to be no penalty for not hewing to it. But many do, and that's the reason why some TV Station logos seem to have the common look that they do (NBC has no mandate of which we are aware but some stations seem to echo the theme)

Reading For Further Illumination

• Where did the "W" and "K" letters Come From? at OldRadio.com
  
• North America section of the Wikipedia entry for Call Sign
• Wikipedia entry on the CBS Mandate governing graphic presentation of O&O Station IDs
• Short Call Signs and K and W section of the Wikipedia entry for North American Call Sign
• Mystique of the Three-Letter Callsigns at EarlyRadioHistory.us (which is where I also nicked the map–kudos to them)

And that's all for this go.

Technorati Tags: media,broadcasting,K,W,call signs,ZehnKatzen's Notebook

[liff, media] And Since It's FOX, We Know It's Fair and Balanced

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[bloggage] If You Surfed Over Here From Oregon Media Insiders...

1043. ...welcome!

Actually, I'm remiss here. I've been getting some hits and surfers since I started visting and posting regularly over at O.M.I., and I appreciate the attention. Today's blog post that I made (which was promoted by the admins there–blessings upon ye) has brought over a bumper crop for me.

I try not to take my visitors for granted. I love design and I love logos, and TV graphics design has proven to be an unexpected boon as far as just interesting things to talk about.

So if you want to egg me on, leave a comment–if you want to tell me I'm full of fnord, go right ahead too. KVAL have been big sports about my poking fun at them, and in the end, there's a lot they could teach me about doing whatever it is they do.

I still plan on moving on to comment on local stations–I think I'm setting my sights on KPTV's look–but will get under way with that after a few days of palate-cleansing woolgathering, so bear with.

Once again, thanks for hitting my blog. You could have gone anywhere else; you came here. I am thankful and honored.

Technorati Tags: bloggage,KVAL,OMI,Oregon Media Insiders,Samuel John Klein,ZehnKatzen,self-promotion,news design,news graphic design

[design, logo_design] KVAL's New-Look News Logo

1022. Nicked from a still on the KVAL website, this market's first look at the new KVAL News logo:


Which is nearly identical to the news logo sported by KBCI, and all but identical to the ones now used by KIMA, KEPR, and KIDK.

Notably, they didn't call it Eyewitness News or Action News or even Triple-Later Death-by-Chocolate Action Eyewitness News. Just "News".

Technorati Tags: design,logo design,KVAL,Fisher Communications,The Flag,news logos

[media, design] KVAL's New Graphics: First, Fair, Accurit

1019. As I've said, we've not seeing the complete graphics for The Flag's Eugene outlet, CBS affiliate KVAL, broadcasting on Channel 13. But we have glimpses. And much as KATU has the new tagline On Your Side (promoted from segement title), KVAL's is First. Fair. Accurate.

So unintentional humor is supplied by pictures like this:

And this:

So what's wrong with these pictures? Look reeeeeal close at the graphic in the Vanna boxes. First @ at 6. First @ at 11. Yep. Read cold, that's "First at at 6", and "First at at 11." That they are directly over the First•Fair•Accurate tagline (note the similarity in type to much of KATU's new house graphics font) and the jest becomes infinitely ironic as well.

Remember, reading is fundamental. Proofreading moreso. But I wonder if proofreading would have vetted that. People do tend to read somewhat on autopilot–even I looked right past the at-sign followed by the word "at" a few times, because the point was to highlight the similarity between that graphic and this one:

This is the lead "Big Story" graphic for the headline piece, which is used by KIMA and KEPR (and the other stations we've been following, Boise's KBCI and IF's KIDK). The similarity in graphic approach needs scarcely be pointed out. These second-tier market stations are going for a unified approach–it could be a matter of economics, it could be they just all like the look (it does work pretty well) and go with the fashion.

Back to the funny bit, though; this is another case of where even a practiced eye (being CBS, it's ironic, neh?) can look right past an obvious problem. We've all read right past obvious gaffes in our own writings because our brain does a bit of preprocessing when ever it reads, and an @ sign, being a symbol rather than an alphabetic glyph, can be reduced by the mind to the status of an ornament and deleted from awareness. of course, this is why one must be so careful when crafting things like this. I call it a "Paris in the the Spring" problem, after the famous visual gotcha that has those words arranged in a triangle such that there is a line break between the two the's; your eye and mind see just one "the" unless you take it carefully.

Another possible problem is that some uppity smartass blogger with graphic and type proclivites would spot that and gently (and respectfully, we hasten to ad) mock you over it.

So, actually this discourse works on two levels.

They'll probably want to adjust that graphic, though.

Technorati Tags: KVAL,Eugene TV,News Logos,News Graphics,Oops!

[media] A Radio Ad Trend That Must Die Screaming

1017. No, I'm not taking about those ads Frankie Avalon is doing for dietary supplements, tho' they be horrid enough.

No, I'm talking about this trend that attemps a cinema verité approach by having some voice talent act as though they've got copy to read during a programming break. I've heard them lately for everything from "Medigap" plans to sketchy Intermets income schemes, complete with earnest tones and rustling papers.

I listen to a good deal of talk radio, and it's an insult to the intelligence to have voice talent I've never heard announce that "we'll get back to the music in a moment" then proceed to read about a product or service I'd have to be tripping to fall for anyway.

Regrettably, I've got no examples to link to, but if you listen to syndicated nationoal AM radio content, you'll hear it soon enough–most likely at :15 and :45.

Technorati Tags: advertisting,radio advertising,goodwill,trust

[media] iTunes Competition? Not Again!

957. I think someone's figured out that the quickest way to generate buzz is that you think you're going to be some sort of competition for iPod (in which case, I fell for it too. However!).

Tipped off by this post by b!X at Furious NADS!, I read the NYT article attached to the link. What I think the core of it is is this (emphasis mine);

NBC first contracted with Amazon to offer its programs for sale to downloading devices like MP3 players. Now it is establishing its own downloading service, which NBC executives say they expect to become a viable competitor to iTunes.

“With the creation of this new service, we are acknowledging that now, more than ever, viewers want to be in control of how, when and where they consume their favorite entertainment,” said Vivi Zigler, the executive vice president of NBC Digital Entertainment. “Not only does this feature give them more control, but it also gives them a higher quality video experience.”

The idea of a free download with an expiration date is risible in the extreme, and I laugh upon it. How having a show you can't skip though the commercials gives one more control is a mystery. Higher quality video experience? My iPod's screen is nice, but it's not that big...actually, even most crappy video content looks good on it.

But why even mention being a competitor to iTunes when they offer a limited range of content with an expiry date? They aren't really even the same thing. However, saying they feel they have a viable competitor to iTunes will get people talking about it. Maybe they're working on the "any publicity is good publicity" model.

Something tells me the should have just stuck it out with Apple, and kept selling things though iTunes. How this is going to put them ahead is anybody's guess.

Technorati Tags: iPod,NBC,digital media,downloads