So I was watching CNN’s news while eating lunch today when they toss to some chick in another studio showing off their new weather center set. You know, just in case there might be a hurricane this year to interrupt the constant updates about shark attacks or missing white women or Christiane Amanpour interviewing angry Muslim Arab after angry Muslim Arab (with the occasional self-hating liberal Jew born in Israel who’s too ashamed to call himself Israeli).
Anyway, she’s sitting at a desk holding a large tethered remote, grinning like a madwoman and showing off about half a dozen large flat-panel monitors suspended with dual aluminum pole struts.
Oh, and a robotic pedestal camera roaming around the set like some big-eyed Dalek. Not that this robotic camera is used for the main desk shot, since that appears to be a fixed location she sits in.
Oh, and an overhead shot to show the whole set with all the monitors at a resultion where you’re guaranteed not to be able to see anything.
So she shows off the remote… nothing new.
Feeds from around the world… nothing new.
A telestrator with various icons she can dot over the landscape… nothing new.
A few temperature maps… nothing new.
A monitor feeding back to the CNN anhcor set… nothing new.
NOAA projections overlaid on a Google Earth map… okay, slightly new, but they’ve shown this stuff before.
All in all, nothing new. And on top of that, she has to get up and walk around to show most of it off.
But then, she saves the most impressive part for last: a freestanding curved display monitor. She’s got the standard temperature map up there for all to see highs for AN FRANCISCO and OS ANGELES (apparently, it would cost a few thousand more bucks for a monitor wider enough to show all of the Left Coast).
But she is pointing right at the freestanding display, and mentions that there’s no chroma-key there. It’s a real monitor, she can look right at the map along with us, no need to use “guide” monitors on their side of a chroma-key display. No, you can watch the back of her head and she looks for various highlights to point out to us.
(THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE: The weatherpeople I knew would not only lay out their single-display slideshow, preferring to use the on-set displays as office equipment and not presentation platforms on-air, but they’d have the teleprompter display changed to a live feed to they could see a mirror-image of themselves as a guide if they didn’t want to use the guide-monitors on either side.)
So, for all this junk in a studio in CNN’s Atlanta Headquarters, the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on equipment and design and wiring and manpower, the array of monitors she has to get up and walk around to dramatically… there’s only one thing CNN achieves by doing all of this…

Now that there’s no chroma-key, the weathergirl can wear any damn color clothes she wants to.