Friday, July 17, 2009

Anklepants

One of the joys of working in a newsroom is you have the most interesting conversations.

A co-worker and I were discussing one of our favorite news sources the other morning, KYW AM 1060 in Philadelphia. Even though the station has lost a bit off its fastball, it's still a great news operation with a solid presentation, and really good coverage of the state capitol. I manage to catch an early morning hour, via internet, just about every day. Harry Donahue and Ed Abrams are the best, and the third member of the morning team more than holds her own. She's Carol MacKenzie. The name may be familiar to a lot of you. She worked at WBRE for a while in the 90's.

The KYW admiration society then launched into a discussion of the Westinghouse television and radio stations, also known as "Group W." Westinghouse became a part of CBS several years ago. Under Westinghouse ownership, these stations were among the best in the country. I'm expecting e-mails from two of my former bosses who are also former Westinghouse employees.

Anyway, you could always tell a Westinghouse station by the logo. It was the same font for every station. That font was instant credibility because you automatically knew the owner.

I won the "geek of the day" award because I actually know the name of the font. Don't ask me why, but it's called "anklepants." An old KYW-TV 3 logo is at the right. I recently re-did my blog header to show you a bit more of the anklepants font.


While all news radio stations KYW and WINS 1010 in New York kept anklepants, most of the television stations, sadly, have ditched it. A couple, like WJZ in Baltimore and KPIX in San Francisco have one font for the call letters, but they kept anklepants for the number.

It was especially sad when KDKA TV in Pittsburgh said good-bye to anklepants. This is the old logo. KDKA radio still used anklepants, and that's a good thing. The station is a legend, and even though it's just a font, it's a nice link to a lot of history.

I realize this is more than you really wanted to know.