For years, Canal 9’s newscast was Nuevediario, a program that in the late 1980s achieved infamous notoriety (and ratings success) for its crime and paranormal reporting. Here’s most of an edition from December 1992 where a large portion is devoted to soccer coverage.
By 1995 the program was going through a crisis due to falling credibility and ratings: it was briefly reformatted as a serious newscast, but ended up moving to a watered-down tabloid style in 1996.
As we’ve mentioned in another thread, ATV was partly Australian-owned in the 1980s and used a station image campaign (theme and slogan) familiar from Australian regional TV:
… which, well… less said about the relaunch the better, although gaining Mike Neville apparently was a coup for them. But it was telling that they inflicted that on Tyne Tees, yet got cold feet at trying to rebrand a much stronger brand (in name and with the chevron) in Yorkshire with it - they did one version that combined the “3” with the chevron, but that got chopped pretty quickly afaict. Even got cold feet removing the Tyne Tees name completely. So why bother, almost.
Bruce Gyngell was involved in that too, after his time at TV-am… which may explain why he thought re-branding it as a channel number a la Australia might’ve worked [of course the Thatcherite reforms had long meant ITV was called “Channel 3” licence-wise, so the name was hardly “new” technically]… but what they did was half-cooked at best - their image promo had nice ideas; I’d seen suggestions where they could’ve cut it up and had a similar idea to the ITV “TV from the Heart” idents from a couple of years later. But they didn’t; they just filled time to the news with it. More’s the pity.
Instead they got comparisons to Europe (and, well, Viasat’s TV3 network looked better :P). Almost have to look at the last look of Irish TV3 [before they became Virgin Media TV a few years ago] to find something less imaginative.
Not that C3NE would’ve lasted anyway even if it stuck; Yorkshire-TTTV were hardly big enough to resist Granada’s siren call, no matter what they were branded.
And the idea they came up with on Yorkshire, although it would never have been used like this much because of no room for the continuity announcer (again, it’s possible they could’ve used it before Calendar at 6pm and that’s it, like TTTV/C3NE did with their image promo and North East Tonight). They did cut it down to leave just the chevron spinning - but they did leave the tiny hints of “3” in the background.
[edit: apparently that was a voiceover-less version… there was a version that had a pre-baked voiceover of “Come home to Channel 3… Yorkshire Television” or along those lines. But again, a tad long to wait for a clean version before the continuity announcer could pop in after the crescendo.]
Credit to whoever originally managed the ITV and/or Yorkshire pages on TV Ark; I’d link there but they’re still not exactly fully up yet so there’s not a place to link to:
And this endcap showing both logos kinda shows which of the stations was seen as the “lesser” in the whole Yorkshire-TTTV shebang… (source, though dunno where they got it from), would have no clue what show this was for but the lack of “ITV” suggests this was for a regional show, just played across both parts of Yorkshire-TTTV territory.
Well, historically, Multimedios/XHAW has been regarded as a superstation targeted at the Northeast of the country; for many years, their only station outside Monterrey was a rebroadcaster in nearby Saltillo. However, with the liberalization of the TV industry in Mexico triggered by the privatisation of state-run commercial network Imevisión into TV Azteca, and the increased roll-out of cable TV led to Multimedios getting additional transmitters, first in the nearby states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas.
For many years, Multimedios was known as “Imagen Familiar”, and had a schedule similar to those of pre-Fox era independent stations, mixing lots of local content with syndicated off-network reruns picked up from Televisa’s archive, mainly dubbed American series and Mexican old films. However, as its coverage increased, the channel began increasing the number of local content, alongside the roll-out of local news opt-outs. By the 90s, the channel had a large number of original content, although it was much less downmarket than it is now.
The radical switch to downmarket content came after three stages: Las Noches del Fútbol, which was originally a summary of the weekend matches played by local soccer teams, quickly became a adult-oriented entertainment variety show and made its host, Ernesto Chavana, a local star almost immediately; the second dubious move was the hiring of Mario “Mayito” Bezares, whose daily show, Acábatelo, quickly tested the limits of decency allowed in mid-afternoon TV; finally, Multimedios transformed a secondary channel, XHSAW 64, into a younger-oriented channel, Altavisión, which quickly skyrocketed in the ratings thanks to its trashy output, including a show hosted by influencer Poncho de Nigris, which was basically nonsense. These moves led to Multimedios’ schedule being dramatically changed, with most of its programming being live, but all sharing this dubious variety of content policy.
Even the newscasts, named Telediario (not related to TVE’s newscasts, but rather to a co-owned newspaper, which was originally known as Diario de Monterrey, but was renamed Milenio in 2000, after expanding to Mexico City), suffered the consequences of this dramatic transformation. The content became much more tabloid and American in style, in a sense similar to WSVN’s (in)famous 7NEWS “if it bleeds, it leads” format. Newsreaders such as Maria Julia Lafuente and Arq. Héctor Benavides began heavily editorialising during the broadcasts, at a level similar to any Sky News or Fox pundit. In the case of Lafuente, she is now more regarded by her clash with co-anchor Luis Carlos Ugalde on Monterrey’s soccer teams. Additionally, many of Multimedios’ presenters have ran into hot water over controversial or inappropriate comments uttered on-air.
When the channel expanded to Mexico City and other states of the country, the announcement was made with enormous backlash from media insiders. Monterrey audiences, feeling the channel only transmits a stereotyped image of the Monterrey population, asked Mexico City viewers to not watch the channel. When they arrived into Mexico City, the Monterrey-style concept of content didn’t cater to the large city’s tastes, more accustomed to watch national TV networks. After some months, the channel quickly took steps to increase decentralisation of its schedules and cater local tastes, with the northern fringe (broadcast from Monterrey) receiving a schedule with more original content, and the southern fringe (based in Mexico City) with an increased number of branded content shows and acquired non-fiction programming from Warner Bros. Discovery and Lucha Libre AAA.
The channel, up until the 2000s, had a quite unpolished brand identity, however, the channel adopted in 2005 a new look for its entertainment and news programming, designed by now-defunct agency Giant Octopus; as part of the changes, Multimedios signed a deal with Stephen Arnold Music for its music provision, composing new musical cues for the channel’s presentation and licensing Overture for its Telediario shows. Since 2015, Multimedios’ theme music is composed internally.
The gradual expansion of Multimedios into other cities led to the channel launching a satellite edition of the network in 2008, which is catered exclusively to airing the channel’s original content. This is also distributed to Costa Rica, where Multimedios has a local channel in the San José metropolitan area, although with local content cut-ins.
Additionally, Multimedios launched a news channel, branded under its Milenio newspaper. The news channel initially focused on a format similar to that of BBC World News, with half-hour news bulletins produced from Monterrey or Mexico City (in an alternate basis) mixed with back half-hours of topical content leveraging the paper’s verticals; since 2016, the channel has strictly focused on rolling news, although some topical shows and long-form content remain, specially in prime time. The channel’s original branding was designed by RenderOn, with music provided by Stephen Arnold Music for its daytime fringe content (News Matrix).
In 2017, Milenio received a large scale rebrand with new graphics from RenderOn, and a new music package produced internally. This package was heavily modified in 2019, after the channel aligned visually with the newspaper.
A full edition of French news channel LCI’s midnight newscast, aired by corporate sibling TF1 in the early hours of 17 September 1998. The bulletin is presented by Damien Givelet. The graphics were very minimalistic.
An excerpt of Chilevision’s defunct news service MundoVision in November 1994, read by Carolina Jimenez.
Finally, some promos and continuity from the very first day of LWT’s refreshing new look in late August 1996. Trish Bertram voices the ident.
I recently got my hands on a 1980 Vermont edition TV Guide, so I thought I might share a few pages from the magazine here.
(Click on the images if they’re too small to read here.)
First, here’s a review of CNN, which had launched a few months earlier:
And here’s the channel lineup for the Vermont edition. There are no cable channels listed because cable was still rare in the largely rural state, but there because Vermont borders Canada (and the Montreal skyline can even be seen from some higher elevations of the state), there were no fewer than eight Canadian stations listed, both English and French:
Some random pages from the daily listings:
And finally, here’s ad ad for the news on WCAX, Burlington’s CBS affiliate (serving virtually all of Vermont and parts of northeastern New York State):
A historical compilation of news opens from KBS in South Korea from the 1960s to the recently introduced look already discussed in the “International News” thread:
In 1981, WAGA in Atlanta changed its branding from News Scene to Eyewitness News and announced the change in a promotional video, which provides an interesting glimpse behind the scenes of early '80s TV news:
Rare to see ATV at this stage putting some effort in designing the visual branding, rather than putting some text like this:
(I may sound like an ATV fan here😂 but I think it’s more interesting to look at pres-wise, cos its near-constant management changes and minor position in TV market!)
