These prints predate to digital, and I had visited the Tristate area the weekend of Labor Day 2001. My aunt and I visited the island that Saturday, and visited 30 Rock touring the NBC facility (and yes she violated the no flash photo policy) when I was doing the chroma key demo. We also visited Central Park. Obviously who would’ve known what would occur more than a week after. It wasn’t until my twenties I realized I cheated death, despite not going to lower Manhattan that day.
The last time I visited The City was as a vacation, the first time ever in October 2017. (all other trips before were day trips) My mother and I came back home to New Hampshire on October 21st. Nearly 10 days after that, a really shallow terror attack in TriBeCca (in the psychologically metaphoric sense), where a box truck deliberately drove into children and families on Halloween. The shallowness was like, you’re taking a special day that’s for children and ram a vehicle to a pedestrian only street to carry a grudge, 15 years after plane hitting the tallest structure on the East Coast? That’s how low we are going for “terror attacks”? Unlike 9/11, the oh-my-gawd effect had more impact, perhaps because I was closer to the range of the mayhem, like in blocks, not miles.
This was a close from November 2001. Actually this was a standard practice to pan the citycam (do you see the old I93 in the sweep?) and run lengthy cuts of their theme. This is when Jeff Barnd had credibility. He soon became a sucker to Sinclair at the flagship WBFF. Leave it at that.
WLVI was also a station that used WMAQ’s original Newswire theme package. I didn’t like it because it was too theatric and filled of drama.
I believe in late 2000, 615 Music actually composed a series of updated cuts. I felt the WLVI versions lived up to it’s title. When 615 Music makes newer cuts for various stations, they added a V and a number, to signify an update. 56 got another update in 2005, just a year and half before the sale to Sunbeam. Those cuts would’ve been V3 to Newswire
Which means jamming to a WCBS Grand theme that I found somewhere that I don’t think was Edd Kalehoff’s site is now banned on my device (unless I resync my iTunes library and ensure my iPad doesn’t attempt to phone home to Apple to update my library’s metadata…
In the late summer of 2001, the graphics artists at the Fox News Channel introduced a new “bug” (industry lingo for the logo that’s featured in the lower third of an older TV set) to basically confirm what never had ever been confirmed before it. TV Sets can burn in.
It was well known for computer related screens that if a certain type of text would appear in the same area for hours and days on end, that the bulky cathode ray tube screens would burn in. In fact over time, near the end of CRT TVs, “flat screen” which means no bulging or rounded curves on the corners, this effect was less harmful.
But the issue began for many Fox News Fanboys (and maybe some fangirls) when the network launched in 1996, nearly 5 years after major TV operations moved to Paintbox, Chyron’s iNFiNiT!, or Pinnacle’s Deko, and the advancement of Adobe’s Photoshop and the popularity of Apple’s Macintosh systems, this lead to the first time in television history that modern computer generated graphics would appear for longer periods of time. As a result, many reported burnins, and as a result Fox News Channel, created a 2-dimensional cube of it’s iconic logo that would rotate slowly, on a 10 second cycle.
Sometime in the last few years, FNC dropped the cube, and returned to a “static bug” on the lower third. The Fox Business Network would launch in 2007, but didn’t have a bug that would rotate, other than some glow effect. FBN shared FNC’s look in late 2018 or early 2019.
That’s the timeless Bridgette Quinn who had a stint at FNC and MSNBC before returning to New York newsradio! Her looks and voice has aged mavhusly! 🙂
Can LCD or OLED flat panels be burned in? The answer is yes. And it can cost you money, even News Corp’s money. When Fox owned WFXT, they built them for all intensive purposes a new facility for their news in 2003. Three years later, Roger Ailes had ran the O&Os and introduced the O&Os the cube logos for their stations to mimic FNC. They paid $10 million in 2001 dollars to build out the expansion (2001 was the time of the project, while the fall of ’03 when they launched it.) News Corp is known to be stingy, but they kept their flat panels in their newsroom studio, even when the news wasn’t on, so you could see the old horizontal logo when the logo changed in ’06. The Beacon Street Studio also got damaged from the lack of proper brightness controls or just for the love of god turning the screens off when there’s no news programming!
In short: FNC’s and FBN’s creative people should research maybe doing a “dark mode” for their crazy primetime yakkers to prevent this from happening and prevent what happened 20 years ago to happen again!
Rebuilding Local Media with building bricks and minifigures as the subjects. Also the King of Simulating Live events in Post Production™.
