Channel 7's Nancy Chen just checked in from a hill in Worcester. Drink! Then she bent down and picked up some snow to make a snowball. But, darn, the snow was so dry, it just disintegrated. So we'll rate than a half drink.
WHDH
Nicole Oliverio at WHDH tweets the driver of one of the station's news vans had just gotten on I-93 south when she realized somebody was on the roof. Seems somebody with places to go but no way to get there had climbed on somewhere between the station's Government Center offices and the I-93 ramp.
The guy surprisingly wasn't hurt. Said he needed a ride, but didn't have $$
Compare this screen grab from WHDH's report on the annual L Street plunge with this photo of the same swimmer.
WHDH's Ryan Schulteis just did a report from Bridgewater, where he shoveled some slush to show us that, yes, it's wet. He was followed by the station's standing-on-the-side-of-a-highway reporter, Victoria Warren, who held a snow brush throughout her report, but didn't use it.
For some reason, reporters stationed at Gillette Stadium are doing their reports without hats on. Only Channel 4 weatherman Joe Joyce was dressed sensibly, with a hat on, as he stood in front of the WBZ Accuweather Mobile Weather Urban Assault Vehicle with the LED readout.
Includes the now infamous death-defying rescue of a Channel 7 reporter's hat from the angry seas in Marion Harbor.
Anne Allred at Channel 7 tweeted this morning:
1,000 teens show up on Carson Beach to watch rival gangs fight. I just can't get over that.
Really? Word got out on the street a major showdown was on and everybody dropped what they were doing and rushed right over to Carson Beach?
I don't buy it. There is no Cyrus of Boston gangs Pied Pipering everybody to a war council.
So why would 1,000 teens show up at Carson Beach? Because it was hot. And a holiday. And you can get there by subway.
Were there troublemakers getting into fights? Yes. Did a lot of the kids stand around and watch? You bet. Does Boston have a gang problem? Yes.
But when some moron runs onto the field at Fenway, we don't accuse all 35,000 people in the stands of being complicit, even though a lot of them are cheering him on. We shouldn't demonize every last person on that beach yesterday. Where is the outrage about the two young men who were shot to death and the four others who survived getting shot over the weekend?
Let's them work the kinks out. Here's Channel 7's Matt Lorch from his days at KHQA in Quincy, IL:
Via Deadspin.
After the computer models changed, again, and weatherfolks said we were no longer facing another perfect storm, the Channel 7 weatherman tweeted:
Let's see ... been called a moron, goat, loser ... all in one night. (Plow guys are a little bugged.) And winter hasn't even started!
While Harvey Leonard was only calling for 6-10 inches on Wednesday in tonight's forecast, Pete Bouchard was telling us could get up to 15 inches: "Wow! We're going to get hit pretty hard on the South Shore!" he said - adding Boston is also in that big band.
Harv did get points, however, for mentioning the Blizzard of '78, although he was referring to the Washington storm the other day. Pete, meanwhile, was pooh-poohing the 6,000-person snowball fight in DC: "You won't see us calling it 'Snowmageddon,' he said.
Justin Silverman discusses the legal banhammer Channel 7 is using to try to remove every last copy of the infamous Pete Bouchard measurement video - the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act:
California Fire News tries to get a rise out of Our Pete with this message on Twitter:
Boston weatherman Pete Bouchard we wish you well in your new endeavors at WalMart
Pete refuses to swallow the bait:
Stick to the flooding and fires folks.
Earlier:
In case you missed it.
The Herald catches up with Channel 7's general manager, who says what appeared to be a Magnum moment was actually Bouchard getting tripped up by a technical glitch:
... "It clearly wasn't intended the way people are portraying it," Wayland said. ...
UPDATE: YouTube has taken down the clip because of a "copyright claim" from Channel 7. Fail Blog still has it up, link in the comments, but in case it disappears from there, it's a capture of Bouchard talking about snow totals on Jan. 18. He points to a listing for Princeton and says "the biggest amount that I could find, almost as big as me, about nine inches." And then he glances off to the side, as if he's expecting a giant hook to come pull him off the set.
Pete Bouchard puts together a pretty impressive weather package:
As I type this, Channel 7 STORM FORCE warns:
Light snow will literally materialize overhead this evening.
Now that is scary stuff! Why can't we just have some nice figurative snow, materializing right on the ground?
New at 7The tabloid-news station ports a much cleaner look this week, no doubt in preparation for the impending landing of NBC Boston, which will compete with its own affiliate because, well, you know about Ed Ansin and Jay Leno and all that stuff. Interestingly, they seem to be downplaying their on-air personalities:
Old at 7No more pictures of Kim and Frances right at the top - and the toolbar puts the "Flu Team" ahead of the "News Team." They're enabling comments on news stories (hmm, will they get a different brand of commenters than, say, the Herald?) and getting all socialish, with Twitter and Facebook badges all over.
Meanwhile, there's a new addition to the local political blogowhatchamacallit.
Rob Sama is one of those outliers who still relies on a traditional antenna to pull in TV. So he was surprised to discover that Channel 7 is moving to Channel 42:
... None of this bothered me terribly, except for the fact that I now had to reprogram my DVR to record off of 42 instead of 7. But it also seems as if at the same time they made this announcement, they turned down the signal strength on channel 42, so that now it doesn't come in smoothly like it used to, but cuts out periodically, making NBC basically unwatchable. ...
Interesting: Max Slocum talks to the folks at NBC affiliate WHDH and reports they have nothing to do with the brand-new local news site that NBC is building for Boston and, in fact, have no intentions of shutting down their existing whdh.com. Slocum adds NBC officials declined to comment.
UPDATE: Could be that NBC is going to compete with its own affiliate rather than revamp the Channel 7 site.
Looks like a major overhaul is coming for Channel 7's Web site. NBC Local is advertising for a city editor for an entirely new Web site that will look something like this:
![Subscribe to WHDH](https://www.universalhub.com/misc/feed.png)