The seventh floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza has been transformed from WNBC-TV’s newsroom to a construction site. It’s not clear what the new area will look like, but the area is being turned into an “Information Center” that will support WNBC-TV over-the-air news production as well as the channel’s new local 24-hour cable news channel that is expected to launch by the end of theyear.

30 Rock has been seeing its share of construction lately. The third floor side of the building, including Studios 3A and 3C, was renovated earlier this year to make room for the new combined NBC News and MSNBC newsroom that occurred in conjunction with MSNBC’s move to New York City from its original New Jersey headquarters.

It will be interesting to see if WNBC-TV’s new look as the network’s O&O will take the modern, European style design that has been seen in the NBC newsroom, “Nightly News” set and the “Today” windowed studio downstairs.

WEAR-TV in Pensacola/Mobile, Ala. is preparing for its launch in high definition.

The set, designed by Devlin Design Group for Sinclair Broadcasting Group, features many high tech elements and one very unique element.

“A new set featuring 30 HD monitors, state-of-the-art weather equipment and an anchor desk that can rotate 180 degrees will debut with the conversion. Comparatively speaking, the old studio is a walk-in closet, and the new environs are the Taj Mahal,” writes Julio Diaz.

The sets most unique element is a fish tank built into a desk. Looking back on many different sets, this has to be the only one we have ever seen with a fish tank other than WEAR-TV’s previous set.

MSNBC.com has been experimenting with what it calls “interactive HD views” of news stories. These are essentially super-high quality panoramic photographs presented using Microsoft’s HD View Beta 2 plugin. As with the similar QuickTime interactive view technology, the user can zoom, pan and tilt around the photograph.

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