When someone first suggested writing about how we go about the process of changing our “look”, I didn’t think anyone would be interested. But we have had such an incredible amount of visitors to our online studio camera (click here to view the camera), ,which we installed just before construction began, that it sold me that many of you are interested.

First of all...why remodel in the first place? Well, I've been with WCNC for a little over three years and the old news set was built and installed in 1998 I think. The look was a little dated...there were areas that didn't seem to make as much sense as they might have seven or eight years ago and, you know how it is, sometimes you need a change. When you give a room a new coat of paint and buy a couple of pieces of new furniture it energizes you. So change we did.

Over the past six or eight weeks we worked with an expert set designer to put together all the elements we needed. The news director had her wish list...Terri and the weather team certainly wanted to make sure the weather work space made sense...the producers had ideas...the directors had an agenda...the engineers all quietly processed the infrastructural changes that had to be made...a whole lot of ideas that had to be focused and realized. It's amazing that something that might seem so simple is really complex. We finally arrived on a design and crafted a plan to execute that plan, so, about three weeks ago we moved the news set to a temporary location and got to work.

We built a brand new desk for the anchor team, we updated the weather center and we created a much more flexible environment to more effectively communicate to you, our viewers. We installed cutting-edge technology and replaced a lot of our old standard definition monitors with wide-screen plasmas. If any of you out there have taken the leap and bought one of those fancy "16 by 9" flat screen tvs you understand. Its just cool. We changed a lot of the lighting design and, hopefully brightened things up a bit and we, a little more than subtly, moved to a more blue color palate for the scenery. In my opinion, people just look good in front of blue-hued scenery. Hopefully you think so too. Also, if you remember the old set, we had a window with a skyline view of uptown Charlotte. A VERY outdated view of uptown. That's gone. And while you might feel let down knowing this little bit of inside TV magic, the area beind the photo of the skyline is really our newsroom. We decided to open that up so for some of the time you're watching you can see into our busy newsroom as the news team is working.

All in all we are pleased with the results. The tricky bit in all of this, for those of us who think about these things, is...we want people to notice that things look fresh and new but we don't want you to notice. At least not notice to the degree that you miss the information that is being communicated. The important thing is you hear and see the important news of the day...the news that is relevant and impactful on your life. A new studio set is great. The current news and weather information is why you watch. Over the next little while we'll be tweaking. The production folks can always find something to tweak.

So...tune in...pay attention to the new colors, the lighting, the cool new monitors, the forecast center and the window into the newsroom. Pay attention to all that for just a second, then let all that fade into the background then listen to and watch what Sonja, Chris, Terri, Bobby, Colleen and (I'm not going to name everyone...you know who they are)...have to say about the important news today...right now and every day. Thanks for watching.

What do you think of the new set? Leave us your comments below.