Spectrum News channels get new logos

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Charter’s collection of Spectrum News regional cable channels are transitioning to updated logo designs.

“Spectrum News has unveiled a rebranded and refreshed logo design for its local news networks. The rebranded logo … reinforces Spectrum Networks’ continued focus on news, and aligns more closely with Charter Communications’ logo and font design,” said a Spectrum News spokesperson to NewscastStudio.

The updated logo debuted on March 1, 2023, and is built using the bespoke font Spectrum Sans, a humanist-style typeface developed for the company.

In most cases, each local offering continues to be referred to as “Spectrum News (Channel Number),” with the numeral placed in the lower right of a square with rounded corners to the right of the stacked “Spectrum” and “News” lettering, with “News” in bold.

There are two distinct exceptions to this basic layout.

NY1, the original offering that launched back when Time Warner Cable controlled the operation, has “NY” added to the upper left corner of the square to allow both the Spectrum name and “NY1” moniker that many New Yorkers became accustomed to appear prominently. 

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In the Tampa market, Bay News 9 has the initialism “BN” added in a similar location.

Officially, the network is now known as “Spectrum Bay News 9,” making it the only one of the channels to move the location of the word “news” in its official name and when spoken on air.

The Spectrum Tampa and Central Florida channels are on cable Channel 9 and Channel 13, respectively, a holdover from the days when the cable systems and channels in those markets were owned by Bright House Networks, which eventually became part of Charter and was absorbed into the Spectrum offerings.

The logo lockups notably continue to avoid including any reference to the market outside of the “BN” and “NY” seen in the box of those two logos. 

Previously, most of the Spectrum channels used an italic sans serif with distinct rounded corners along with an angled box for the channel number, which was not set in italics.

In some ways, this purposeful inconsistency does make the logo grab the eye.

The old logos also typically set “Spectrum” in much smaller type, creating a slightly awkward space between the “M” and the polygon.

The new design brings both words more in line, though “Spectrum” is still slightly de-emphasized thanks to its slightly smaller height and lighter weight. 

Spectrum News continues to use the same graphics package, but with the logos swapped out.

In addition, updates were made to the channels’ weather opens, including updating radar logos, such as for Klystron 13 and 9 that the Bay Area and Central Florida outlets brand as “the world’s most powerful weather radar.”

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Sources tell NewscastStudio that a broader weather graphics update is in the works.

Meanwhile, baynews9.com and ny1.com continue to host their websites on their existing domains, though entering those URLs redirects to baynews9.com/fl/tampa and ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs, respectively.

The directory paths with references to Florida, New York City and “all boroughs” matches how the other network sites are set up on the domain spectrumlocalnews.com, though the company also owns spectrumnews1.com. Visiting either domain redirects to a splash page asking the visitor to select a market.

The user is then redirected to the appropriate page, such as spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/triangle-sandhills for the Central North Carolina region. Visiting spectrumlocalnews.com or spectrumnews1.com in the future then redirects the user to the directory path previously selected unless the visitor opts to switch markets by clicking in the site header.

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