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Unusual newscast titles

D

dustintv

In the late 90s KRQE and its satellites KBIM and KREZ titled their newscasts as "CBS Southwest News". I just find it odd they did so, rather than the station id, and they used CBS in the title even though they weren't an O&O.

KWGN in Denver currently calls their newscasts News on the Deuce.

Any others?
 
WGCL in Atlanta used "Clear News" when the station changed call letters from WGNX in 2000. It didn't last very long. ??? :eek:
 
In the early 1980's, WEWS Channel 5 in Cleveland offered a short-run Friday night-11:30 show called "Cleveland Comedy Company." Basically a copy of "Saturday Night Live", with Cleveland-Centric jokes..They had a "fake newscast" called Eyewitness Action Center News..
 
Mike said:
For a time in Detroit, WJBK merged the "Eyewitness News" and "Newscenter" names to say "Eyewitness Newscenter".
Click to expand...

WTHR/13 Indianapolis did the same thing in the late '70s/early '80s. WRTV/6, in the same era, called theirs "The News," while WISH-TV/8 had "The Big News" going back to around 1970. No, WTTV/4 did not call their newscast "The Really Big News." ;D
 
Firebird said:
WGCL in Atlanta used "Clear News" when the station changed call letters from WGNX in 2000. It didn't last very long. ??? :eek:
Click to expand...

You left out the best part. The news theme was based on "I Can See Clearly Now".

A couple others that are a bit off the beaten path:
- Pulse (WTVT Tampa; CITY Toronto as "CityPulse"; CFCF Montreal; none of the 3 still uses it)
- Reports (KCRA Sacramento; also used by former sister station KCPQ Tacoma/Seattle in the late 90s/early 2000s)

CFTO Toronto had "Noon Beat News"/"World Beat News"/"Night Beat News" until the 1990s. Quite a few CBC O&Os also had quite unusual monikers for their local news pre-2000: Newfoundland & Labrador had "Here and Now", PEI had "Compass", and Vancouver had "Broadcast One". All were dropped when CBC cut back local news to 30 minutes a day and bundled it with a 30 minute early evening national newscast together as "Canada Now"; the network has since re-expanded local news, and "Here and Now" and "Compass" have been brought back, but other O&Os (including Vancouver) have completely generic branding in the form of "CBC News: (region) at (time)".

From what I've seen, British regional newscasts have/had similarly wonderfully weird titles:
- BBC Southwest: "Spotlight"
- BBC Scotland: "Reporting Scotland"
- Border TV (ITV for England-Scotland border region): "Lookaround"
- Anglia TV (ITV for East of England): "About Anglia" (1960-1990)
- Tyne Tees TV (ITV for the Northeast): "Northern Life" (1976-1992)
- TVS (defunct ITV franchise for the South): "Coast to Coast"
 
radiorob2.0 said:
I always liked WJW's City Camera News. Bonus points for using the break from Hugo Montenegro arrangement of "MacArthur Park".
Click to expand...

Speaking of WJW-TV, their newscast was called "Ei8ght is News" in the mid '90s.
 
Tim L said:
In the early 1980's, WEWS Channel 5 in Cleveland offered a short-run Friday night-11:30 show called "Cleveland Comedy Company." Basically a copy of "Saturday Night Live", with Cleveland-Centric jokes..They had a "fake newscast" called Eyewitness Action Center News..
Click to expand...

Steve Allen had a short lived comedy show in the late 70s or early 80s. A frequently repeated skit was a fake newscast called "Eyewitless News. If you remember, in those days, many local newscasts had a gimmicky opening in which the various anchors would walk hurriedly onto the set and sit down while the theme music played. In Allen's Eyewitless News, the reporters would waddle in like penguins and bump into each other.
 
KeithE4 said:
radiorob2.0 said:
I always liked WJW's City Camera News. Bonus points for using the break from Hugo Montenegro arrangement of "MacArthur Park".
Click to expand...

Speaking of WJW-TV, their newscast was called "Ei8ght is News" in the mid '90s.
Click to expand...

Right..The logo used was a revival of the television "ei8ht" logo used from 1966-77.

The "City Camera" name started being used in 1959 for some newscasts because of the practice of reporters taking Polaroid pictures out in the field and putting them on corkboard during the newscasts..
 
In Rockford, then-ABC affiliate WREX's newscasts were titled "Dateline Thirteen News" in the '70s through the late 80s. They became "Eyewitness News" around 1987, and lasted a year or so after the affiliation change to NBC in 1995.

Here's a couple ads...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgmTThgPq0g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gjuzzeadxl8

You want to extend this to slogans, KCBS in the late 90s to early 2000s, had one of the cheesiest of all-time IMO..."Station of the People". The anchors and reporters had to sign-off with that slogan each time they went to a break.
 
Channel 6 in Paducah, Kentucky, had the "News Beat" slogan for many years, with the year following it during the '70s, as in "NewsBeat '73," "NewsBeat '74," "NewsBeat '75," "NewsBeat '76," etc. finally dropping the year beginning in 1977, and calling it just "NewsBeat 6," although it took their reporters some time to accustom to. Their logo was the "heartbeat" blipping across the bottom of the screen. They continued to use the "NewsBeat" theme for another 20 years or so.
 
...in the 1960s, WFRV/5 Green Bay called their newscast Report to Wisconsin. When WFRV added WJMN/3 Escanaba as a satellite signal in '68, the title was clumsily lengthened to Report to Wisconsin and Northern Michigan. Anchorman Don Sidney got so tired of it all that he eventually convinced the WFRV/WJMN brass to change the name to Eyewitness News by 1971...
 
Ultimajock said:
...in the 1960s, WFRV/5 Green Bay called their newscast Report to Wisconsin. When WFRV added WJMN/3 Escanaba as a satellite signal in '68, the title was clumsily lengthened to Report to Wisconsin and Northern Michigan. Anchorman Don Sidney got so tired of it all that he eventually convinced the WFRV/WJMN brass to change the name to Eyewitness News by 1971...
Click to expand...

Northern/Central Wisconsin was big on "Reports" in the '60s and '70s. WAEO-TV/12 Rhinelander had "The Channel 12 Report to the North." WAOW-TV/9 Wausau had "Report to Wisconsin" after splitting off from WKOW Madison and starting its own newscasts. At the same time, WSAU-TV/7 Wausau had "Channel 7 Reports."
 
Back in the '60s Channel 13 in Toledo (Then WSPD-TV) called their news "Deadline" and now in Detroit, Channel 2's 11PM newscast is called Fox 2 News Edge.
 
The most popular local newscast in Los Angeles in the 1960s was The Big News. on KNXT - now KCBS-TV. It was anchored by the white haired and often satirized Jerry Dunphy. We didn't think much of that title at the time, but in retrospect, it's kind of off-beat. It was LA's first 60 minute news broadcast, so I guess it was bigger than the others.

News anchor Kent Brockman on The Simpsons looks like the late Dunphy.
 
WRGB-TV 6 in Schenectady , NY, the worlds first TV station once called it "Total Information News". WTEN-TV 10 Albany, NY at one time called their early news "The Big News" (I think a 2 year old could have come up with that), and their late news was called "Nightbeat"
 
All four McGraw-Hill stations (KGTV, WRTV, KMGH, and
KERO Bakersfield) used "The News" title.

WLOS Greenville/Spartanburg/Asheville used "Dateline
13 News" in the late '70s. In the '60s WFMY Greensboro's
6 PM newscast was called the "Channel 2 Evening News"
(to tie in with the "CBS Evening News") while the 11 PM
was called "Nightbeat."

And while I think it's been mentioned elsewhere, let us
not forget WTVR Richmond's "News 90" (local news at
6 and 7, CBS News at 6:30).
 
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