WLOSers debuted their new set on Monday. We’ll get some pictures up as soon as we get our screen capture technology hooked up again.
They basically did away with the city scene and splashed a bunch of Pepto Bismo up on a wall behind the anchor desk, then added some paneling for wainscoting. It looked like the set that WTVD dumped back in 1982.
In a note to us, RadioLongAgo describes it thusly:
“Who would have thought that they still had the 1977 set still around in storage? I can almost envision Tom Sweeney and Hoyt Harris sitting at the desk…and hey, Pamfilis would be there too…and Ken Bostic with the weather…Jerry Mayer on the weekends…wow…”
Yeah, we’ll second that emotion. The set is crap. The new graphics look like the graphics WLOS used back in 1977, too. Ugh.
The other big news for WLOS was the launch of the new 6:30 newscast on WMYA, Channel 40 (channel 9 on Charter cable). It was basically a reshuffled version of the 6 p.m. news. Same set. Tallahassee Tammy Watford and Pat “Simple” Simon doing the news reading. Pretty boring.
Scary school incident
WLOSers were all over a story about a girl at Glenn Marlow Elementary School reporting that a strange man tried to get her to get in a car with him.
The girl was with a couple of other girls after recess. The man told the one girl that he was her uncle and she was supposed to get in the car with him. But the man mispronounced her name, and she didn’t listen to him. The stranger knew the girl’s name because mom had written the child’s name in big letters on the backpack because the girl had lost a backpack last year. Now mom is rethinking that move.
Kinkajous on the loose
WLOSers latched onto a report of a missing kinkajous as a way to keep the lame Animal Logic story on the news. As you’ll recall, this is the “animal education center” that police are investigating after one animal activist complained about some dead animals found in the Dipsy Dumpster.
The activist whined that no charges have been filed yet. The cops told WLOS that they’re still working on the case. But the cops added the kicker – that one cop chased an excaped kinkajous over the weekend. We don’t even know what the hell a kinkajous is, but we’re sure that it won’t live long down in Hooterville with temperatures the way they’ve been of late.
Woody still on the run
Here’s a good indication of a slow news day: On Monday, Michelle Boudin did a story about people who watched America’s Most Wanted on Saturday and saw the profile of John “Woody” Woodring, who shot and killed his estranged wife in a Jackson County domestic abuse shelter two weeks ago. Now that’s one slow news day.
BTW, Woody is still a fugitive.
Politicians and pages
WLOS did a local angle on the big Washington story about U.S. Rep. Mark Foley resigning after writing dirty e-mails to young pages on Capital Hill, asking them to measure their members and masturbate and send him photos. WLOS noted that 10 years ago, a state representative from Alamance County was censured for inappropriate contact with a page. But there are plenty of rules in place now to keep something like that from happening again, said state Rep. Susan Fisher of Buncombe County, who, by the way, is up for re-election this year.
In other news…
Buncombe County Schools superintendent Cliff Dodson said his system is prepared for a school shooting. WLOSers put the question to him after school shootings in Colorado and Pennsylvania the past two weeks… Diva Darcel was caught giving a weird look at video of somebody getting a tattoo to honor the death of the girl killed in the Colorado school shooting… The body of a dead man was found in a stairwell leading to a parking deck on the hospital campus. The 26-year-old was living in a group home and cops said people who knew him said he wasn’t feeling well over the weekend… And Kassandra Pride says people are complaining about all the traffic on Rockwood Road off of Airport Road. A new Carraba’s restaurant will open soon down there, and a Cracker Barrel is on the way, both of with Special K says will make traffic even worse.
2 Comments
They should be embarrassed about they new set. It’s cheap and makes them look less credable.
Darcel’s face after that tattoo bit was classic. It had me and my girlfriend in stitches.
I caught the Early Edition at 5am to catch the new set and logo stuff.
First of all, wow, Jay really has a hard time reading the prompter. He looked as though he was going to fall over the desk.
As far as the logo stuff, the bug in the corner for the 5am show had an orange rectangle to its right with the time inside it, however the time displayed was 4:28 and it remained that way until someone decided to remove it (around 5:28). They had it back and running properly at 5:46.
Unlike the other 3 stations, WLOS doesn’t have a current temperature displayed with its bug. The temperature only shows up when the ticker is going. The funny thing about the ticker was it also had a News13 bug and a clock, but it’s time was 5 seconds behind the one on the left side of the screen. Sometimes the bug on the ticker switched to a Sonic logo, so it didn’t always look awful.
In a nutshell, it looked sorta like this:
News
(abc)13 [5:57]
News
(abc)13 ———————–/ 5:56 / 59*