I’ve been telling you since April and now its approaching fast. The new “content center” for WNBC’s News 4 New York is here. First it was the new NBC New York.com website, now the new studio and newsroom, and next stop will be the 24 hour newschannel which is expected to take the Weather Plus channel sometime by the end of the month. NBC announced earlier this year that it will close the Weather Plus unit by the end of December. This means that WNBC will now move the news operations from the historic studio 6B, where once Johnny Carson hosted the Tonight Show, to a place where it “used to be a conference room,” according to Janice Huff on air, that is known as Studio 7E.

There several cons and pros with this move. First is the graphics, which appears to be great. There is even a new music package, which seems to be okay but not as good as the previous one. A big problem I noticed that is going to bother me is that… there is NO GREEN SCREEN FOR THE WEATHER! Instead, a 103′ inch plasma screen is used. I sent a feedback to WNBC saying that a green screen should be used for the weather. I understand it is “faster” to put it on a plasma because of their , but not using a chroma key for the weather can be rather difficult for the users to see. And you will notice that the $3 million projectors are no longer behind Sue and Chuck projecting the animated city skyline, but instead the new newsroom replaces it.

The opening though made me laugh. The new announcer is the same announcer who did the WCBS-TV announcements saying “Now from Studio 46″ in the openings in 2007, this time its “Live from Studio 7E” for WNBC. The announcer is no longer at WCBS-TV.

Overall this $15 million dollar project seems to be working well, and then again this is only the beginning. At WRAJ Internet Radio and Vidgle, we are in the similar process to bring a news and content division by 2010 for Long Island, gathering news and information from Long Island media. A set is already in the works, though most of it will be chroma key because of the small space we have. Beginning in 2009, Vidgle will be covering more video reports, expanding the AZ Tech Talk and Cruzin’ Hollywood franchise, which will also expand to WRAJ’s on-demand unit, the WRAJ Internet Radio Podcast. Of course, thats the upcoming stuff coming to Jenthony beginning in January 2009 as WRAJ’s website gets a makeover.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 9:28 am and is filed under WNBC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.