Background: Originally published May 4, 2005. This was written when KOBI-TV changed its news brand. Decades ago, the station's newscast was called "Eye Five News." Perhaps it was just a coincidence that the station's logo looked like an Interstate-Five milepost sign..??.. KOBI-TV signed on the air in 1953, about ten years before the freeway was built through southern Oregon.
Paul Machu taught Fundamentals of Studio Production on Monday and Wednesday nights, 6:00-10:00p.m., at Lane Community College. Machu was production manager at KVAL-TV in Eugene, and later married reporter Susan Castillo, who is now (2005) the Oregon state superintendent of public instruction.
It was from him that I learned "what's in a name" for television newscasts. Back in television's infancy 45 years ago, a person could go to a major city and know the type of newscast to watch based on the newscast's name.
For example, "Eyewitness News" in the early days followed a sensational-type format. "If it bleeds, it leads" could be one way to gauge the content of such a newscast. Meanwhile, newscasts in smaller markets were often more homogenous in nature; the content in smaller markets more closely resembled each other, than newscasts in larger cities.
Television newscast changes have been common in the Eugene and Medford markets in recent years. KVAL and KPIC still use the decades-old "Northwest News," although since Fisher Broadcasting took over in 2000, more individual names have been used to establish separate branding identities: "KVAL News" and "KPIC News."
KEZI-TV abandoned its decades-old "Eyewitness News" identity several years ago. To provide a less abrupt change for the viewer, KEZI gradually shifted from Eyewitness News to "KEZI Eyewitness News" to "KEZI Nine News" to the present-day "Nine News."
KMTR-TV sets the record for name changes among southern Oregon television newscasts. They launched in 1983 with "KMTR 16 News," changed in the late 1980s to "KMTR News Oregon," then switched back to simply "KMTR News," before settling in on their present-day "NewsSource" for their branding identity.
KOBI-TV in Medford will now refer to itself as "NBC5" instead of "The News Channel." In case anyone is wondering if such charges are made in a vacuum, they set a pattern that stations are following across the country. Back when KOBI adopted The News Channel in the late 1990s, other stations across the country were doing the same. KGW-TV in Portland changed from "News 8" to "NewsChannel 8."
The logic behind the News Channel identity for stations across the country, presumably, is that viewers will associate news with that station, regardless of the program that may be on at any given time during the day. So, if there's a breaking story that everyone is talking about, viewers will naturally tune to The News Channel for the latest information, since news is presumably what the station does best.
With more television choices these days, some stations are finding it's best to brand a name that's short and simple to remember. KTVL-TV in Medford in the early days was "Newscenter 10," followed by "Channel 10 News," to their present-day simple name "News 10." Network programming obviously plays a major role in determining what station a person is tuned to...so one could figure it can't hurt to include the network name in a local station's identity, such as "NBC5 News."
I don't know if many Eyewitness News newscasts are still in existence, with the possible exception of KABC-TV, channel 7 in Los Angeles. But regardless of what's in a name, Paul Machu would have plenty more to talk about today, than he did when I took his class 18 years ago in Eugene.
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