While doing Lincoln Highway research for Nebraska, I discovered that Elm Creek, a town along US 30, replaced its 100-year old school in 2022-23…
…and had an amazingly well-preserved time capsule*…
…and then I looked into what “NTV” was — it’s the Sinclair-owned ABC station, which is really KHGI, for Kearney-Hastings-Grand Island (note the call letters)…
…and somehow I bounced to finding out that CBS is switching affiliates in Atlanta (to Channel 69?!)…
…leaving Gray Media’s station in Atlanta to become independent…
…and eventually I got to an Iowa angle: How long does KCRG’s current graphics package have to live?
Gray Television, now Gray Media, closed its purchase of KCRG in September 2015. Nine and three-quarters years later, Gray has a station in every market touching Iowa except Des Moines. The others — WOWT, KTIV, KWQC, KTTC, and even WEAU — are all NBC stations. There are two half-exceptions: a joint operation of KDLT/KSFY in Sioux Falls, which is ABC/NBC/Fox, and KYOU, which started as Fox, added NBC as a subchannel, and has its newscasts done by KCRG on sets without visible ABC branding.
All of them except KYOU have gone to a graphics package that Gray is implementing across multiple stations — and all of their logos don’t include network affiliations. It might not be immediately noticeable, but study them for a few seconds, and they look kind of naked, don’t they? Not only that, but according to a “News Music Now” Facebook post from Nov. 1, all of Gray’s NBC stations were supposed to eliminate theme music that included the nearly century-old NBC chimes. Also, the graphics packages use a font that, to me, looks close enough to Sinclair’s font as to not be immediately distinguishable.
This combination image of chyrons from WOWT and KGAN show the typefaces for Gray-owned and Sinclair-owned stations, respectively.
KCRG has used a blue-and-yellow color scheme and the beveled “9” with slight tweaks for ages. If and when things change, will it be like KWQC, which has a mild palette, or WOWT, which announced its branding change in November 2024 and switched to a heavy use of red?
I have no inside information, I’m just someone with a day job in journalism who has spent decades studying coverage maps. I also may or may not be a robot based on my use of long dashes, but that’s a different story.
Starting after Memorial Day, KWWL’s weather graphics package changed. It’s better than Allen Media’s plan from earlier this year to eliminate local weather departments.
Sometime not too long ago, Nexstar stations, including WHO, resumed livestreams of their news after discontinuing them in January 2023. This means I can watch WHO more easily now, and I hope that misspelling “Massachusetts” in the sports segment Saturday night is not a harbinger of things to come.
(Seeing typos on KWWL is shooting fish in a barrel just after the barrel got filled at the Manchester Fish Hatchery.)
* Note to the reporter: “Alumni” is a PLURAL noun. Use “alumnus” for masculine, “alumna” for feminine, or even “alum” for neutral even though that’s an English application to Latin, but one person is not an “alumni”.