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WBZ
Dan Kennedy relays the news that Jon Keller, the Mikey of Boston punditry (he doesn't like anything, at least, judging by his morning denunciations on WBZ-AM), will start blogging on Monday, somewhere here. He'll be blogging several times a day, the station says.
Is there any other city in America where people celebrate the day the local baseball team's equipment truck leaves for spring training?
And why can't you buy a replica at local Hess stations?
Spatch, meanwhile, wonders why 'BZ Radio this morning mentioned Truck Day only after the Cheney shooting and the Benchley death:
Things that Suck decrees that one thing that sucks is local newscasts pimping for shows on their networks:
Rachel, Neil and Lillian - Don't click on the Lillian Rose link if you don't want to get really sad.
In the media-criticism angle, raspberries to bostonherald.com for running an entire story about the site without linking to it. Update: They've since added a link. Channel 4 linked to the site in its online story. So did Channel 5. Even the Globe (yes, the Globe) linked to the site. WBZ-AM has the link, although not clickable. Channel 7 did not link to the site, but what do you expect from them?
Ahhh, there's a giant spider climbing up Pauline Chiou's shoulder! Can the Channel 4 Extreme Team help her in time?
![Brown recluse spider grown to mutant size?](/images/pauline2006-01-21.jpg)
No more medialog_2. Now Mark's at thephoenix.com/medialog. First post: Optimism that the revival of Jack Williams at Channel 4 means Big Personalities are back at local anchordesks (hmm, does this mean somebody will be unfreezing Tom Ellis?).
Finally, the news you've been waiting for: Channel 4 has a new chief meteorologist. Ken Barlow, currently at some Minneapolis station, is a Newport, RI native and has a meteorology degree from Plymouth State College in New Hampshire, so he knows the importance of keeping us constantly updated on the temperature and snowfall amounts atop Mt. Washington.
This morning on 'BZ, Jon Keller said only a few kids came to his house for Halloween. He concluded from this that kids today are too fat and lazy to leave their Gameboys to do something fun like trick or treat.
Our neighborhood was full of trick-or-treaters (as it is pretty much every year). Maybe, Jon, the kids in your neighborhood were terrified you'd explode on your doorstep in a blinding flash of hot, gaseous death and stayed away.
Makes as much sense as your explanation.
WRKO's announced a new morning lineup that'll feature more news as well as "traffic on the ones." That oughta put the fear of God into WBZ - imagine, traffic reports a whole two minutes earlier!
"Boston This Morning" features "Traffic on the Ones," with Boston's premiere traffic reporter Grant Moulison providing road updates before anyone else on radio.
Will 'BZ be forced to retaliate with traffic on the zeros? Will they hire some world-renowned traffic reporter from L.A.? This could get ugly quick.
For a medium that thrives on visuals and graphics, local television stations have sure done a miserable job on the Web.
Take Channel 5 (please!). The site is packed with information, and Channel 5 does a great job of quickly posting breaking news, but the home page looks like a head-on collision between two paint trucks and should come with a bottle of extra-strength asipirin. Channel 25? Could somebody tell them frames are so 1997? Now, to be fair, this is hardly unique to Boston - local-TV sites across the country are mediocre at best (in fact, many of them use the same godawful toolbar and throw-everything-on-the-wall design as Channel 5). But still: Ick.
So it's amazing to see the new cbs4boston.com.
How awful is it that Channel 4's 11-p.m. newscasts now get lower ratings than the 10-o'clock news on at least one UHF station (yeah, dammit, I remember when we had a separate dial, yes, dial for UHF and you had to get off the couch and click the dial and move that weird circular antenna in the back - AND WE LIKED IT)? John notes that Tom Ellis, the station's anchor in the seventies, is still kicking around on NECN:
Why not give him a shot?
Tom Ellis? Why not bring back Tony Pepper?
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