WBZ should not hang its head in shame (what an absurd idea)

[Martin Waters]

Chris Hall wrote:

>WYAY Atlanta has been on the air for two days and already sounds far better and up to date as a news station than frumpy old WBZ . . .

      Nonsense.

      I checked WYAY at 1330 today. The A pack, 1330-1335: two actualities credited to the Fox TV station and two phone actualities. B pack, 1335-1340: two phone actualities was all the sound they had. If they have any street reporters, they must have forgotten to send in their stories. WBZ, on average, would have had at least two reporters with extremely well-done wraps in that period of time -- one of them perhaps live with an actuality. Plus lots more. The WYAY anchor was somewhat hesitant sounding and stumbled too many times (any would have been too many) in just these few minutes for a big market station. 

      And there's nothing innovative about their concept. They have sports at 15 and 45, business at 10 and 50, traffic on the 6s', etc. The bumpers and promos were nothing special. Maybe they could hire Michael Coleman. They're running ABC network news on the hour and the 60-second ABC headlines at half past. The latter, at least, arguably, is not a good idea when you're trying to establish your local identity. Etc.

       Please turn on your radio and compare to WBZ -- for which I'm not particularly carrying water.

        The staff cutbacks at WBZ in 2008 -- culminating in the soon-reversed layoff of Steve Leveille -- have been gradually, one at a time, mostly reversed. Despite the best efforts of the idiotic quarterly-earnings junkies in suits in NY, CBS hasn 't wrecked WBZ yet.

      But they're still working on it. Don't even get me started about the creeping cancer of leased time/infommercials that the programming and news folks in Boston have no control over. It started when Sunday night's "Looking at the Law" gave way to a paid quack medicine "program" years ago. Now there's even a paid, self-serving financial show for an hour that interrupts the news at 10 a.m. on Sundays. Funny, CBS doesn't do that to WCBS or KYW, et al.