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"Fresh, New, Very LA:" The 2023 Sound of KNX News
- Thread starter Joey1986
- Start date
KNX is not named Radio Teletype
Honestly nothing really to write home about. Very generic. Very blah. Not distinctive at all as the old sounders were.
Should have gone back to the long time traffic horn tones that were used for decades before each report.
I agree, I can’t even tell that these new sounders are using the “KNX sound.” To me, it sounds very modern and generic, not distinctive at all. Could be heard on any station in the country. It actually seems to be the opposite of what they proclaim it is!
It is my belief that new sounders never embraced by regular listeners who always yearn for the old. They have to get familiar with them. In the last package, we did a mash-up of the old "traffic horn" sounder with a more modern theme. I'm hearing some of the anchors having trouble running the sounders. They run their own board and news anchors don't always have a DJ's ear for live mixing. With time and practice they should be able accentuate the features of the new package.
On the other hand, the old-fashioned horn sounds always reminded me of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang". While they did have the desired Pavlovian effect of calling attention to an update on traffic, they were entering the realm of antiquity.
The more recent update was an improvement, indicating that such sounders need to be refreshed in an evolutionary fashion and neither left "as is" nor abandoned.
And let's remember, boys and girls, that KNX needs 50-year-old listeners more than they need 55-year-old traffic sounders.
Sounders aside KNX has got to get its act together as regards to weather forecasts from their Ch 2 weather people, this afternoon (Thurs the 19th) it was raining significantly all over the SFV, Orange County and much of the LA Basin. The news anchor, and the traffic guy were both talking about how the rain was affecting the commute, and how miserable it was, and after the traffic (remember: Traffic and Weather Together!) they ran a Ch 2 weather person insert which must have been recorded several hours earlier as she said something to the affect: "mostly clear skies for your afternoon with a sight chance of showers mainly in the mountains" etc, etc. Not a quote but you get the idea. And to make it even worse the wx tag includes the words "the most accurate and dependable forecasts" or something like that. Please don't treat the listeners as if they are stupid. If the pre-recorded wx is obviously outdated then the anchor should have fresh copy available right then and there. Who cares at that moment Ch 2 didn't get promoted! The people tune in to KNX to find out what's actually going on, not to hear Ch 2 tooting it's own horn, which obviously is the purpose of pre-recorded wx inserts.
There are some similar issues and complaints related to the weather drops that KPIX ("CBS5" or "CBS News Bay Area") provides for KCBS radio. But it's important to remember that CBS Corp. divested itself of all O&O radio stations about 5 years ago. So like KPIX and KCBS, KNX and KCBS-TV are owned by different companies these days. Audacy and CBS probably have a deal to record those inserts by the TV weather people for the radio station to run every half hour, both in SoCal and NorCal. But you are absolutely right that when realtime weather events overtake the previously recorded drops, it's the stations' (plural) responsibility to either record updated weather reports in place of the now-outdated one, or if that can't be done, lose the old report and have the anchor read it live. That's just common sense.
As Mr. Dylan so famously sang, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." And the quickest way to irrelevancy is to tell your audience how sunny it is as they are getting soaked.
As Mr. Dylan so famously sang, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." And the quickest way to irrelevancy is to tell your audience how sunny it is as they are getting soaked.
And that is why in my decades in Puerto Rico, unless there was a hurricane, we never gave the weather. Just in the San Juan metro, there was almost always someplace that was raining and other places that it was not. Even with the radar at the TV stations, the squalls were so unpredictable that you could not pinpoint where it was clear and where it was not.
Microclimates are funny things. As are slow-moving storms. On Sunday, I had some errands and then needed to stop at the grocery store on the way home.
The store we shop at is 1.8 miles from our home---a four-minute drive. It's way less than that in a straight line, but there are twists and turns in the streets between.
When I walked out of the store to the car, it was bright sunshine. When I got home, it was a downpour with lightning and thunder. It was like someone drew a physical line midway through the drive---dry and sunny on one side of a street, a rainstorm on the other.
The L.A. metro is a HUGE geographical area, and it's easy to joke that there are only so many ways to say "partly cloudy and 72", but odds are if that's the downtown temperature, it's 64 and foggy in Santa Monica, and sunny and 85 in Burbank. Pre-taped strikes me as a bad idea in that place.
Echoing this by way of the underappreciated, and under referenced, excellent movie L.A. Story, where Steve Martin plays a TV weatherman who signs off with the tag line "and our next weather report will be in four days".
You got that right !
KNX also has a contract with the Weather Channel's radio operation for live weather reports as needed. They typically use them only when there is unusual weather in Southern California.
They sound good.
The KCBS/KCAL meteorologists don't.
With the separate ownership between KCBS and KNX, there isn't much need to 'cross-promote' by using KCBS (now KCAL) weather anchors. That department is a revolving door at that station, so it's not like anyone has some long time attachment to these meteorologists. Hopefully when the content agreement is up for renewal, KNX can dump the weather reports while keeping the news report audio.
I've long felt that putting TV "talent" on the radio was a mistake. If they have personalities, a great deal of their appeal is based on appearance, gestures and the video aspect surrounding them. They are also pretty good at reading stuff on the prompter that someone else wrote. Often they are between dreadful and disastrous in ad-libbing and doing spontaneous comments... to the point of embarrassment.
Anyone trained and specialized in doing scripted programs will fail almost immediately in any radio format other than all-news.
And sometimes the audio quality of those phoned weather reports from KCAL / KCBS meteorologists is really bad with people talking in the background. The repetitive nature of them being played over and over again all day gets annoying. They are literally phoning it in when they are doing those weather reports. At least on KFI, they are reading the weather reports live, even if they are boring when the weather is nice all the time!
In L.A., this practice (at KNX) dates back to the CBS cluster, which included KNXT (since the 80s, KCBS-TV).
In general, this worked for a while---up until the mid-late 80s, a lot of TV news people got their start in radio and understood what they needed to do for an audio forecast. But that's not the case anymore, and there's very little "celebrity" factor left in local news. We used to fight for 30 and 40 shares. They wet themselves over a 1.0 instead of a 0-point-something these days.
Every once in a while you'll come across a TV weatherperson who does these radio hits that takes them seriously and makes an effort to sound good.
When Paul Deanno was the AM drive weatherman at KOMO-TV in Seattle, he voiced really high quality weather reports for KOMO-AM (the all news station). He then moved on to KPIX, I don't know if he gave the same effort there for KCBS. At KOMO, he replaced Jim Castillo (who's worked in nearly every big market in the country including LA) who was absolutely atrocious on the radio. Literally zero effort. Deanno was such a contrast.
KCBS/KCAL has no recognizable weather talent on staff. Not sure they even have someone filling the 'chief' position since they let Garth Kemp go. If you're not cross promoting a co-owned station and you're leveraging "name talent" from TV on the radio, you might as well use the Weather Channel, who will brand their reports for your station ("I'm meteorologist Mark Thibedeaux for KNX News Ninety Seven One FM").
Bingo...KCBS/KCAL has no recognizable weather talent on staff.
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