Several groups have undertaken large-scale digitization efforts to tackle the problem, with some exploring new AI and ML (machine learning) tools to more efficiently tag and index video. Regardless of the method, generating accurate metadata is key to any archive efforts, both for old content and fresh material being created today, said broadcasters last week at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum in New York City.

Metadata’s Critical Role

“Before we can actually monetize the archives in a reasonable way, we have to have metadata on it,” said Mike Palmer, AVP, advanced technology/media management for Sinclair. “And in many cases, most cases, we have not been putting good metadata on it.”

Palmer, speaking on the panel “Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities” moderated by this reporter, said archive metadata must not only include enough information to find content using a media asset management (MAM) system. It also needs to have information about the rights attached to the content, since most call-letter stations have a mix of content they shot themselves, and fully own the rights to, and derivative content originally sourced from a network news service.

There isn’t any technical means today to tell whether a station owns a piece of content or not, Palmer said. That question can usually be answered only by calling and (hopefully) finding an employee who was there when it first aired.

“How long have we been talking about archives and metadata, but we’re not bringing back basic information about ownership, what camera it was shot on, the date, the geolocation, all this metadata that is in the cameras that we should be carrying forward,” Palmer said. “And we’re recreating the same problem that we’re trying to solve today with AI and ML because we’re simply not putting the right metadata on that content as it moves into the archive.”

Palmer said the culprit for lost camera metadata is often nonlinear editing systems that strip it out during the production process. To combat the problem going forward he sees a solution in the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard, as promoted by the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). C2PA specifies provenance metadata that survives all the way from camera to distribution. C2PA not only addresses content ownership, but also content authenticity, an issue of growing importance in the age of AI-generated fake images.

‘A Wildly Human Process’

To improve accessibility of content for its journalists and producers, Hearst Television began digitizing the archives across its stations in 2021. To date it has digitized about 20%-25% of its archive material, representing roughly 45,000 hours of video.

“We parachute into a couple of stations at a time and help them digitize their archives in a systematic way,” said Devon Armijo, director, digital news integration for Hearst Television. “We bring in archival staff that handles not only the physical media but also the paper data that associates with it. Not only do we focus on digitization, but they also are not only tagging. They are looking at it in a discovery way. making sure they’re telling about the editorial opportunities, the promotional opportunities and sometimes the sales opportunities that are there in the archives — things that are sealed in the tapes that folks may know or not know that they have.”

While Hearst makes some use of automation, Armijo said that digitization remains “a wildly human process,” particularly when dealing with physical media that is beyond its end of life, such as 40-50 year-old tapes. That is where Hearst’s archivists serve as “the first line of defense.”

“They’re putting tapes through on a daily basis and making so many human decisions, up front at the beginning of digitization, that helps you with any sort of automation that rolls through afterwards,” Armijo said. “We had some automation processes throughout, like black [frame] detection. But that stuff is all secondary to the human decisions, the conversations, and understanding the history of not only the station but the content that’s there in your archive.”

Hearst licenses archive content to third parties, Armijo said, but the group itself remains “our first customer.” So far this year, Hearst has used its archive to produce over 370 pieces of digital original content along with a handful of linear specials and some local streaming content, including the popular true crime series Hometown Tragedy.

Fox is digitizing the archives across its station group as well as Fox News and Fox Business and bringing them into cloud storage. It has taken a different approach than Hearst by outsourcing the work, which encompasses tens of thousands of U-matic, one-inch and two-inch tapes, 16mm and 35mm film and various digital tape formats.

“We have tractor trailers come and pick up the entire library and it goes off to one of our five digitizing vendors, and then it works through their process,” said Ben Ramos, VP, Fox Archive, field and emerging tech, Fox News. “They have around 35 metadata enhancers who watch every frame of it, and kind of tag it as they’re going through it. It’s very manual, we haven’t gotten to too many AI/ML tools yet.”

Fox’s first goal was to preserve “at-risk” content like one-inch, two-inch and U-matic libraries, with the second objective being to generate ROI by licensing content to third-party documentary filmmakers. The initial effort was aimed at 5,000 U-matic tapes.

“What do we have in there, what’s the failure rate, and can we find ROI?” Ramos said. “We found ROI within six months, so that kind of supercharged the process, and then we got to do the rest of the 70,000 U-matic, two-inch and one-inch, and then we started dipping into the more expensive 16mm.”

Fox has experienced a failure rate of 3%-5% on that older content, and those impaired assets are now sitting on two pallets “awaiting further remediation,” Ramos said. That could involve baking them for several weeks to remove moisture, or even cracking tapes open to clean them and rehouse them.

Overall, it is a slow process, and so far, Fox has only digitized about 8% or 9% of its total physical media assets. One of the surprising findings is that newer formats like Beta, DV and DVCPRO tapes are also experiencing similar 3%-5% failure rates during the digitization process, and some of the older one-inch and U-matic tapes are actually playing better depending on how and where they were stored.

“Now everything feels a little bit at risk,” Ramos said.

Finding Answers With AI, ML

Sinclair was early in archiving some of its content in the public cloud, and last year struck a deal with producer Anthony Zuiker to mine its news archives to create original content that can be licensed to third parties. The group has around 23 million assets that were “born digital,” Palmer said, which means they been archived from a newsroom computer system with a script attached to it. Those assets have accurate metadata, allowing one to search that content across the entire enterprise and access it. Sinclair also has another roughly 10 million assets sitting on shelves on varied physical media.

“The question at this point is what do we want to invest in to bring this back?” Palmer said. “We look at news content, and it’s a fact that most news content has no value in the archive. It is the rare jewel that justifies the expense of all the rest of the work that you put into that. So, we’re focused right now in trying to determine, to the best of our knowledge, which portions of the archive have the highest probability for containing those jewels, and then go mining in that direction. And we may not — I say may, because there are no hard decisions at this point — but we may not want to go back to those 10 million assets and actually digitize them all. It depends on what we find.”

Sinclair has worked with archiving vendor Memnon to digitize cutsheets and tape labels on stored media at a few stations. It plans to use AI tools like optical character recognition (OCR) to analyze them and hopefully generate good descriptions that it can then use to determine what is worth digitizing.

Fox Sports has spent several years on its own complex archive project with Google to create a system that allows producers to quickly call up old footage, such as to enhance a halftime package. Ramos said he has been given access to it and “playing with it for about six months.” The system uses two kinds of metadata: metadata created by human loggers, as well as metadata created by the same ML algorithms that form the basis of YouTube search. A user has a choice of searching by either type.

“It’s definitely working,” Ramos said. “It’s a massive, massive archive, it’s huge. They’ve got a lot of content in there, so it would be really hard to search otherwise.”

Ramos’ own budget for AI/ML tools is more modest, so his team has focused on the least expensive AI tools, speech-to-text and OCR, and runs content through the AI tools themselves.

“Usually when there’s an anchor or a reporter talking about something, it relates to the video that’s covering that,” Ramos said. “So that’s been a really good way for us to inexpensively find most of what we need. But it’s not 100% of the way there.”

Finding Affordability

French company Newsbridge wants to make indexing archive content and searching through it more affordable. The company has developed a cloud-based AI engine called MXT-1 that can quickly sift through archive video and generate human-like descriptions, and do it more affordably than conventional AI systems, said Newsbridge CEO Phillippe Petitpont. Its indexing technology can also be applied to ingesting live content.

“With 1,000 hours of archive, there might be three hours that are hidden gems that have a lot of value,” Petitpont said. “So, you need to analyze 1,000 hours but there are maybe only three or four that are relevant. The problem is that current AI, monomodal indexing technology is very expensive. You don’t want to spend $10 million to index something that might be valuable for just two or three hours. So, we took this problem and have been working on it for a few years. We need AI with video understanding that is able to be very efficient, so that it can meet business realities in terms of pricing.”

Petitpont said a key differentiator for Newsbridge’s AI that it is multimodal, which means that it doesn’t just analyze speech or recognize text but considers multiple types of data within video as a human would. And instead of analyzing each individual frame of video, MXT-1 employs “smart subsampling” and only looks at a few key relevant frames. This cuts down on the use of expensive graphics processing units (GPUs) on public cloud compute and avoids wasting money by “overindexing” content.

“We only process a frame that will really best illustrate the content,” Petitpont said. “So then we’ve reduced by an order of magnitude a lot of traditional sampling.”

Sinclair is not currently a customer of Newsbridge, but Palmer said when he spoke with them he was impressed by their smart subsampling approach. The company obviously had arrived earlier at the same conclusion that his team at Sinclair had reached.

“That was, that you don’t need to look at every frame of video,” Palmer said. “You don’t need to do some of these massive tagging things for every frame of video. Some of these AI models will create pages and pages of metadata for each frame of video, and that is not appropriate for news. Less in some cases, and probably this case, is better.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here. Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

The post Metadata Is Key To Archive Monetization appeared first on TV News Check.

Here are the videos:

Adapting to a Climate of Continuous Crisis, the conference’s titular, opening panel, featured Barb Maushard, SVP of news, Hearst Television; Ellen Crooke, SVP of news, Tegna; Nora Zimmett, president, news and original series, The Weather Group; Sam Singal, group vice president of editorial and content, Spectrum Networks; and Joe DiGiovanni, head of North American Sales, The Weather Company. They discussed how they’re dealing with the recruitment and retention crisis, climate change coverage, navigating a growing trust crisis with viewers and how they’re readying to deal with generative AI.

Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election, the keynote panel, featured E.W. Scripps CEO and President Adam Symson and Connell McShane, an anchor at NewsNation. They discussed how their respective networks are looking to avoid the pitfalls faced by their major cable competition to chart a middle course and how to build a more durable model for news that, in turn, shores up an imperiled democracy.

Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy featured Sahand Sepehrnia, SVP, streaming, CBS News & Stations; Mike Braun, SVP, digital media, Gray Television; Jeff Zellmer, SVP digital operations, Fox Television Stations; Greg Morrow, GM of ViewNexa, Bitcentral; and Rick Young, SVP, head of global products, LTN. They shared that the volume and immediacy of viewer data on their streaming and FAST channels is allowing them to make programming decisions and iterations on the fly and the live content still winds with audiences over everything else.

Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities featured Ben Ramos, VP, Fox Archive, field and emerging tech, Fox News; Mike Palmer, AVP, advanced technology/media management, Sinclair Broadcast Group; Devon Armijo, director of digital news integration, Hearst Television; and Philippe Petitpont, CEO, Newsbridge. The panel looked at how AI is impacting the content retrieval and rights management elements of archives, and the steep challenges news organizations still face in getting a handle on what’s in their vaults.

Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation featured Lee Zurik, VP of investigations, Gray Television; Kate O’Brian, president, Scripps News, The E.W. Scripps Co.; Meredith McGinn, EVP, diginets & original production, NBCUniversal Local; Kengo Tsutsumi, partnerships editor, ProPublica; and Stephane Guez, co-founder & principal, Dalet. Panelists discussed the collaborative structures they’ve built both within their groups and with partner organizations, the technology that’s helping to realize the complex projects they’re undertaking and how such collaborative ways of working will be essential to newsgroup’s survival in a rapidly changing age for journalism.

Agility in News Production featured Ernie Ensign, AVP, news technology and operations, Sinclair; Steve Fastook, SVP of technical and commercial operations, CNBC; Clint Moore, director of broadcast operations, Gray Television; and Erik Smith, VP of news operations and technology, Fox Television Stations. The group looked at how broadcasters are striving for more efficiency in all aspects of news production including studio presentation, newsroom workflows and field operations. Flexibility and speed, they stressed, are key drivers for any implementation of new technology.

Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News? featured Laura Ellis, head of technology forecasting, BBC; Aimee Rinehart, senior product manager, AI strategy, the Associated Press; Santiago Lyon, head of advocacy & education, Content Authenticity Initiative, Adobe; Claire Leibowicz, head of AI and media integrity, Partnership on AI; and Ray Thompson, senior director, partners and alliances, Avid. The group laid out the most pressing issues around generative AI that news organizations will need to triage, including its weaponization for disinformation, how it will complicate already thorny trust issues and the ethical considerations that come with its adoption and labeling of its usage for viewers.

Fireside Chat Sponsored Sessions

AI and the Future of Broadcast Workflows

There’s lots of talk about AI in media, but what is likely to be the actual impact on TV production workflows? Ray Thompson, senior director partners and alliances, Avid Technology, talks about how AI is increasing workflow efficiency and will soon expedite content delivery.

News: The Last Frontier for AR and Virtual Sets

Widely used in sports programming, augmented reality and virtual sets are making their way into news programming, thanks to photo realism and other technologies that have ramped up quality. David Rodriguez  Moldes, director of product at Brainstorm, talks about how AR and virtual sets are affecting news storytelling and expanding companies’ ability to go beyond the news into magazines and other formats.

The post NewsTECHForum: The Complete Videos appeared first on TV News Check.

There’s good reason for TV stations to be focused on free ad-supported television (FAST) channels and other digital platforms — they have become a rapidly growing business.

“In the aggregate, FAST channels have generated $7.3 billion this year and that’s projected to grow to $34 billion in 2027 amidst a rising tide of consumer usage and a rising tide of monetization that’s complementary to local,” said Greg Morrow, GM of ViewNexa by BitCentral.

“The numbers for FAST for news content are off the charts,” said Rick Young, SVP, head of global products, LTN. “The numbers show that half the FAST channels out there are news and half of the viewing time [on those channels] is news. That’s massive. And the more real-time, the more live the content is on those channels, the more demographics that you want will find them, whether they are male or younger.”

While CBS started implementing FAST and digital streaming in 2014, it’s only been within the last three-to-five years that most local station groups have gotten their live-streaming operations off the ground with services such as Fox’s LiveNow, Gray’s Local News Live and CBS’ local news apps. The relative newness of these services means that they are still in experimental and iterative phases.

“We look at the minute-by-minute concurrence when we’re evaluating the success of the streams,” said Sahand Sepehrina, SVP, streaming, CBS News & Stations. “We see that the local audience comes in about one to one half hours earlier than the national audience. Because of that, we have invested heavily in mornings. Now we have nearly 100 hours of live newscasts that are streaming exclusively in the mornings. We’ve seen that drive new audiences so as we’re starting to look at other day parts, we’re getting a lot smarter about what content we invest in.”

Viewers tend to turn to live streaming news when big events are happening. The longer the events go on, the more viewers tune in and stick around, stations are finding.

“We have found that live events really start to pick up an audience after the first hour. When we invested in live events that ran an hour to two hours, the ROI wasn’t nearly as strong as live events that were much longer,” Sepehrina said.

Gray launched its Local News Live product out of Omaha, Neb., in 2020 and then moved it to Washington, D.C. The group quickly realized that it needed to be live and streaming as much as possible and that there’s an appetite for local news coverage, even for people who don’t live in that market.

“We always want to be live. Our research and traffic have shown that engagement was so high when we were live that we really never want to go dark,” said Mike Braun, SVP, digital media, Gray Television.

In addition, viewers are more interested in watching stories from other markets than Gray expected: “It’s not only where you are, it’s where you’ve been and where you are going,” Braun said.

Three live-streaming strategies that BitCentral’s Morrow has found to be successful for local stations are first, to put up weather and traffic cameras that viewers return to often.

Second, stations are seeing success programming “hyperlocal” sports, such as high school, junior college and local second-tier professional leagues.

“The most successful thing we’ve seen on that front is working with the state associations on state championships, which are concentrated tournaments that take place over a period of days in sports like hockey and football,” Morrow said. “These get huge amounts of traffic and there are sponsorship opportunities. We are talking live content with huge tune-in times. People tune in all day long to watch, and it draws audiences outside of the local community.”

Third is programming a host-driven, vlogging style of content, like viewers find on TikTok or YouTube Shorts, which is something the Fox Television Stations have done both on their local-news streams and on their streaming news service, LiveNow. LiveNow has digital journalists, or DJs, who create their own content on the fly, although they are supported by producers.

“They choose the shots, they talk about the content as it’s happening, they are just constantly just managing everything,” said Jeff Zellmer, SVP, digital operations, Fox Television Stations. “They have to have that passion, they have to have that stamina, but they also feel really empowered.”

Allowing talent to stay in constant touch with the audience creates a relationship that keeps viewers coming back.

“This is about having a dialogue with the audience about local issues,” Morrow said. “We saw when a station added that component to their local broadcast, they saw lift, engagement and recurring tune-in.”

That tune-in extends past the typical local news audience of older adults to younger millennial and Gen-Z consumers.

“What we are finding in the digital or FAST world is that the audience is younger and more male-skewing than we might have imagined,” said LTN’s Young.

Another advantage of live streaming is that journalists can spend as much or as little time as they want on certain topics.

“There’s the freedom to talk for 10 minutes if there’s a reason to do that. Journalists are eager to talk about things they didn’t cover in a one-minute package,” Zellmer said. “We are watching the data constantly. We absolutely pay attention to the viewer. We wouldn’t be doing what we are doing if we didn’t see that it was growing over time.”

Fox is not only watching the data closely — it’s allowing viewers to watch closely as well. LiveNow includes a graphic in the left corner that tracks how many people are watching at any given time. “It gives the DJ immediate feedback of whether people are interested in what he or she is doing,” Zellmer said.

It’s all leading to a time in the not-too-distant future, where TV stations’ linear and digital offerings are all just one part of a larger content offering and aren’t considered to be distinct products, Young said.

“It’s no longer a world of traditional versus digital,” he added. “The audience is everywhere. The numbers are equal in terms of engagement and new opportunities on old and new platforms. It’s a ‘yes and’ strategy for everybody now going forward.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

The post Stations’ Streaming News Strategies Are Literally Evolving By The Minute appeared first on TV News Check.

“My job is to be the champion of our news directors, our news leaders across the country, and the stress that they are under is different than I’ve ever seen before,” said Ellen Crooke, Tegna’s SVP of news. “So many of the day-to-day conversations that I have with news leaders are about dealing with the stress of the journalists due to the type of stories they face.”

Frequent mass shootings and other dangers have forced TV-station newsrooms to carefully consider every decision to send a news team out to cover an event and even to reduce exposure by choosing not to report from the field when it’s not deemed necessary.

“That’s one of the things I think that’s changed the most,” Crooke said. “When I started, news leaders were in charge of safety and security. It’s too much now.”

Newsrooms today are employing security consultants and teams and holding careful conversations to determine the best course of action before sending teams out in a knee-jerk reaction to breaking news.

“Good leaders will evaluate every story, every assignment, every situation to ensure that when we need more than what we have, we’re providing that,” said Barb Maushard, SVP of news, Hearst Television.

And those conversations aren’t only around news teams, but around all teams going out to cover any event, including the weather.

“A few years ago, we hired a head of security, but we also mandate that security teams go with every single crew that’s out in the field,” said Nora Zimmett, president, news and original series, Allen Media’s The Weather Group.

Weather is another area that’s changed dramatically in recent years, as reporters and producers increasingly face dramatic weather situations.

“I was raised in the business when it was like ‘suck it up,’ but we don’t do that anymore,” Zimmett said. “There is no mandate to go out and cover anything. We have people who are like ‘OK, I’ll do snow and hurricanes, but I no longer do tornadoes,’ or ‘I’ll do tornadoes and snow. I don’t do hurricanes,’ and that’s OK. Because there is nothing worth that level of stress, that level of PTSD.

“It was a shift for myself, my direct reports and our executive leadership team that just because we were taught that you just deal with it, that doesn’t mean it’s right,” she added. “And that also certainly doesn’t mean you’re going to get the best out of your employees. If you have a reputation in your shop for throwing caution to the wind, you’re not going to retain the best talent. That is not a way to lead your team. I think the news industry has to evolve out of this sort of militaristic attitude of ‘it’s our way or the highway.’”

Newsroom leaders also have had to take steps to support employees’ mental health, which can become fragile while performing difficult jobs in stressful situations.

“Back in the day, it was ‘go do this and write this and send it in,’” said Sam Singal, group VP, Charter Communications’ Spectrum News. “Now I find that we spend a lot of time walking through the newsrooms, pulling up a chair and talking to people and understanding what they’re going through.”

Companies also have made mental health services available to employees.

“We’ve made sure that our employees have places to go to seek support for those who want to stay in and want to be able to manage the challenges of the job,” Maushard said.

Of course, part and parcel of these conversations is the issue of pay — journalism has always been a notably low-paying field except for perhaps the biggest names. But companies have recently been forced to increase salaries as it’s become harder to retain employees.

“We are actively and constantly looking at equity and analyzing what are our competitors paying what our colleagues paying just to make sure that we’re up to par with everybody else,” Singal said.

“We have to pay the right amount of money for the jobs, whatever that amount is supposed to be,” Maushard said. “But I think it’s more than that. It’s about the benefits. It’s about the environments we create. It’s about the purpose. It’s about people wanting to do this and then us having to make these into the kind of environments where they’re going to want to be because our communities depend on it. Democracy depends on it.”

Adding to the stress is the cadence of the 24-hour news cycle — including at TV stations where streaming apps and FAST channels have increased the content burden — as well as the pressure to stay connected with audiences through social media. Technology that automates some of those tasks can help, said Joe DiGiovanni, head of North American sales at The Weather Company.

For example, if a station group like Tegna, which owns 64 stations in 51 markets, is covering one weather crisis in one market and a completely different one in another, technology can help stations communicate with and assist one other.

“There may be somebody out West who is an expert in wildfires, while there may be somebody down South who’s an expert in hurricanes. That’s still a news story in other markets, but they may not have that content. So, through our cloud technologies, they can grab that content from those markets and use it in other places,” DiGiovanni said.

In addition, storing content on the cloud in searchable databases means it’s easy to find in crisis situations.

The Weather Company also provides weather forecasting technology that helps meteorologists tell weather stories to viewers in a way that’s comprehensive but also easy to understand. That type of technology has become increasingly essential as climate change has become a central focus of newsrooms’ ongoing coverage.

“Our job at the Weather Channel is to predict the future, and this uncertain future is scary,” Zimmett said. “We view our job now as not just to predict what’s going to happen in terms of extreme weather, but what’s going to happen to your mortgage, what’s going to happen to your insurance? That is something that is now a fabric of our coverage.”

“It’s not about climate change from where we sit. It’s about climate and weather impact,” Maushard said.

When covering anything from climate change to financial markets, political campaigns or even local traffic, technology remains both a useful tool and a potential threat, especially as newsrooms experiment more and more with artificial intelligence (AI).

“We look at AI in three different ways,” Crooke said. “The first is ethics: How will we as journalists use AI appropriately and transparently? Second: how can we innovate using AI? And third, which is what worries me most: How will we be duped by AI, especially in the 2024 presidential election?”

To avoid the third scenario, Tegna is training all of its journalists in the first quarter of 2024 on how to detect and deflect disinformation propagated with the use of AI.

Because journalism is more stressful and challenging than ever, it’s even more driven by the passion and purpose of those who pursue it, panelists said. That’s the secret sauce that keeps people in the business.

“News really is a calling. You have to have a passion and want to do it because you’re gonna make sacrifices,” Maushard said.

“One of the things that makes people stay in their jobs is feeling that they are part of a purpose, that they are doing work that matters,” Crooke said. “I think we’ve seen so much loss in journalism because there’s not always strong work happening that’s making a difference in our communities. The more we focus on purpose, the better our retention will be.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

The post News Leaders Focus On Journalist Protection, Stress In Fraught ’24 appeared first on TV News Check.

Content sharing works the other way at Scripps, too, with Scripps News also airing local stories with the potential for national interest. Local political reporters are working with journalists on the national beat, and Scripps is facilitating similar relationships between investigative reporters across the station group as well.

“What we have to do … is to work with the internal partners and external partners to create the best product for our viewer,” said Kate O’Brian, president of Scripps News, at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTechForum. “The most important glue that makes it stick is to have dedicated teams who are responsible for sharing the information with each other, sitting over the whole and communicating.”

In times of slim margins and expanding channels, efficiency is the primary key to content production, with collaboration like that on display at Scripps — so widespread and integrated into the culture — optimizing it.

Scripps is not the only station group adopting a hyper-collaborative approach between personnel across its entire network.

During the panel “Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation,” moderator and TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp highlighted similar efforts in other station groups. At NBCUniversal Local, multiple Telemundo newsrooms help build regional FAST channel programming in the Northeast, Florida and Texas, while Gray’s investigative reporters across the country work together to build programming for InvestigateTV, a national reporting initiative and show.

“Knowing that we wanted to produce more live original newscasts on a daily basis without completely taxing the teams, we came up with the idea of leveraging the multiple markets,” said Meredith McGinn, EVP of diginets and original production at NBCUniversal Local. “One market will run the control room and anchor the show; another market will build the second block, and other markets the third block, and other markets the fourth block. And what we’re seeing now on these Telemundo, regional FAST channels: those newscasts are the most engaged shows of the day.”

Lee Zurik, VP of investigations at Gray, said his company’s mission of getting ambitious, enterprising reportage to viewers by any means necessary was hatched in response to consumer demand.

“We know by the research that there is an appetite for this, and we need to do this to be good watchdogs in our community,” Zurik said. “We really looked at a way to leverage what we have as a company, so we added this national investigative unit that does investigations across the country, and we share them with all of our stations.”

Cross-station collaboration of this magnitude would not be possible without recent advancements in technology. McGinn cited the now ubiquity of Slack and Microsoft Teams, two platforms that newsrooms have become more familiar with since the pandemic made in-person collaboration dangerous, cutting down the “email clutter” as well as the need for daily all-hands meetings, without compromising communication flow. “It’s enabled us to go from teams of three or five people in the market to hundreds across the division,” McGinn added.

There are other reliable tools boosting newsroom collaboration that are much more sophisticated than that pair, too. Companies like Dalet have developed a series of tools in this space, utilizing cloud and AI tech to make collaboration more seamless, across virtual newsrooms.

“It used to be in the newsroom, there was a sort of very rigid division of labor: you’re editing content, you do just that; on the editorial side, you work with scripts,” said Stephane Guez, co-founder and principal of Dalet. “Today, it makes no sense. If you’re going to produce for all sorts of different digital platforms, everybody is going to want to be much more involved in all aspects of the news making. What we as a company are trying to do — in terms of what type of news production systems we are building — it’s really to make it possible, to make this collaboration more effective between people in different roles, between stations, between different groups in different teams.”

Even collaboration across entities that could be considered competitors is happening. Decision makers at the digital news outfit ProPublica are taking a high-tide-raises-all-boats approach, working with Gray and Scripps on investigative stories for their TV stations this past year.

“We write 10,000-word stories for…what I like to call what I like to call ‘the tote bag audience,’ the New Yorker audience, and we hit them quite well,” said Kengo Tsutsumi, partnerships editor at ProPublica. But partnering with the likes of Gray and Scripps gives ProPublica a chance to reach an even broader audience, particularly those in Middle America, he said.

In his remarks on the panel, Tsutsumi provided behind-the-scenes details on the collaboration between ProPublica and Gray that generated a special report about blocked train crossings in Indiana. It includes footage of young children who are forced to climb over, under and between stopped train cars that could move again at any time while on their way to school.

ProPublica reporters discovered the problem, but it was the production of video footage exhibiting the danger the kids were encountering daily that made a TV-publisher partnership obvious and necessary for the story to be served best. It also led to an interview with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, and Zurik said legislators are reportedly taking action to create safer passage for children in affected communities because of the story’s reach.

“ProPublica, we would have never done something like that, something so punk rock,” Tsutsumi said, referring to the guerilla filmmaking executed by Gray. “But of course, it ends up back in our 10,000-word print story [and] it changed it into something that was a better print, digital product. We use their footage and so everyone in the newsroom could see this is what happens if you expand and collaborate.”

In closing, Depp asked the panel, “Do we have to be more collaborative now in order to survive and be relevant to news consumers in this upcoming year?”

“Absolutely,” O’Brian said. “If we’re not collaborating with each other, if we’re not utilizing the IP, utilizing all the know-how across all the different parts of our organization, then we’re wasting it.”

“It’s not necessary, it’s essential,” Zurik said. “With technology, it is easier now to collaborate than ever before. It’s essential to our mission as journalists and quite frankly, it’s essential for us, for survival in the industry.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

The post Collaborations Now Essential For Survival, News Leaders Say appeared first on TV News Check.

Ray Thompson, senior director of partners and alliances at Avid, said AI’s assistance with transcript creation has already proven valuable. Not only does it construct word-for-word transcripts, but it also produces summaries of interviews, allowing TV news producers to make quicker decisions about which portions of the footage to use in stories. Thompson added that the tech can then churn out a new transcript for a finished package, locate where key phrases were said within it and drop permanent markers onto it to aid in searches. He also said that Avid recently added a “mix searches” feature to its MediaCentral platform, allowing users to combine metadata and phonetic searches into one. 

“It’s driving efficiencies,” said Thompson about gen AI. “It’s basically making things go faster, and hopefully allowing you to … deliver more content and deliver at scale and do so much faster.”

From the publisher’s perspective, Aimee Rinehart, senior project manager for AI strategy at the Associated Press, said that her organization has leveraged AI for nearly a decade. Starting in 2014, the AP used the tech to build earnings reports, growing the number of reports that year tenfold, from 300 (written by humans) to 3,000. 

“There was actually a white paper that indicated that there was an uptick in the stock market around the time those were released because there were 2,700 companies that had never been written about and suddenly they had some visibility,” Rinehart recalled. “So those continue to run today and we’ll keep experimenting around workflow efficiencies.”

Over at the BBC, Laura Ellis, the company’s head of technology forecasting, said the company is using generative AI for “lots of language work translation, transcription and personalization.” She said the tech is helping dyslexic workers at the company write more quickly, and it’s also being used to generate story headlines — with human oversight.

Ellis went so far as to say that the BBC is “a technology organization as well as a content organization,” one that is not “cutting humans out of the loop.” However, she also noted that the company is not blind to the potential pitfalls of AI. 

“We’re now trying to work out how all these new capabilities [help us] can create new things, new products for our audience, and how we can do that ethically and safely, because if we lose trust with our audiences, we lose everything,” Ellis said. “Generative AI has its moments and has its foibles, so [we’re] just trying to create a cross organization conversation about where we want to go with it, what we want to do with it, and how we do that safely.”

Adobe is one organization trying to figure out ways to help newsgroups navigate this minefield. Also sitting on the panel was Santiago Lyon, head of advocacy and education content for the Authenticity Initiative at Adobe, who said the effort he oversees involves a “community of over 2,000 media and technology companies and others, working to set and implement an open standard around provenance,” referring to the origin of digital files and the tracking of potential manipulation. Such information, Lyon said, can be shared with viewers, boosting transparency about the content in front of them.

“You can think about it sort of like a digital nutrition label, in the same way that you might look at a food product in the supermarket and understand what’s in it,” Lyon said. “We’re also doing this work with hardware manufacturers, so it’s already in production cameras out there, working with smartphone manufacturers working with editing tools, working with publishers and CMS manufacturers, and the whole initiative [is] underwritten by Adobe and [the tech] is incorporated into Adobe products.”

Claire Leibowicz, head of AI and media integrity at the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit coalition committed to the responsible use of artificial intelligence, said that there will certainly be “unintended consequences” with greater deployment of gen AI in journalism. However, her group is working on guidelines for AI use in newsrooms to help address related issues. It includes suggestions for newsroom leaders about how to approach AI integration, what problems to look out for and how to talk to production teams about its use. 

“Journalistic standards are the helpful conduit to making a decision about what you disclose,” Leibowicz said. “What do you have as a starting place in terms of journalistic ethics about what requires a correction or what requires explanation of methods? … There’s certain precedent that we do have on our side to help us in the AI moment, in the sense of what we do in terms of disclosure.”

Another ongoing effort is in place to generate guidelines for generative AI tech use and transparency associated with it. Lyon said that literature from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) has emerged as a “best-in-class” standard for such guidance. He advocated for its use in newsrooms, saying it is even consulted by legislators charged with building policy on the matter. 

But in-house discourse among publishers and other decision makers will only be impactful if consumers understand gen AI and what role it plays in content production. “We’ve done a fair amount of research and consumers get confused quite quickly, depending on the demographic, as to what they are looking at, what is being conveyed,” Lyon said. “So you’re trying to find that balance to simplify it and make it effective.”

Consumers are also going to have to learn to trust gen AI. Leibowicz cited an Axios poll that said half of Americans believe AI will be used to create content that will impact the upcoming presidential election. 

“If you’re implementing AI in your newsroom, that’s amidst an ecosystem of public literacy that AI is kind of going to be infused in all types of content,” she said. “So this question of, what responsibility do you have to both meet people where they are in terms of thinking that most content is AI generated to date, but also not to induce a degree of skepticism, that’s going to make an already distrusting population more distrusting of the news media — and there’s no perfect answer.”

According to research, Leibowicz said that consumers don’t just want a label that says news producers use AI, they want to understand where it is being used and what it is being used for. “There’s even a question of how noticeable they are” in broadcasts, she added. “That’s a design consideration more so than it is a linguistic one, but you want to make sure people can see these things.”

On top of all that, news stakeholders and consumers have varying perspectives on the threshold for conveying disclosures of AI use, Leibowicz said. Some people might want to know whether or not a writer used Google to generate some ideas for headlines, while others might not think it crucial at all.

Education initiatives can’t arrive quickly enough. Not only is AI already used in newsrooms on a growing scale, it’s also relied upon in spaces covered by journalists, creating yet another impetus to stay in lockstep with the tech.

Reinhart said, “If you live in a town with a bank or school or a police bureau, chances are they’re using some type of algorithm to determine where they do arrests, or how many people are going to graduate,” as well as other data that informs policy. She said local reporters should ask community leaders what is being used and how, and noted the Tampa Bay Times recently won a Pulitzer Prize for a story about a sheriff executing preemptive policing based on AI forecasting. 

“So, AI is happening at your level, no matter what happens in Silicon Valley,” Reinhart said.

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

The post Gen AI Will Transform News. Experts Say The Rulebook Must Be Written Now appeared first on TV News Check.

Big Changes At CNBC

Glen Dickson

CNBC unveiled its first graphics redesign in a decade this week, with a new logo and an updated ticker. But the new look builds on changes the financial news network has been gradually making to its studio presentation over the past three years, said Steve Fastook, SVP of technical and commercial operations for CNBC. Since 2020, the network has integrated high-pixel-density, movable LCD displays with scenery and AR graphics in studios at its Englewood Cliffs, N.J., headquarters and at both the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in Manhattan.

The LED displays can be easily configured to accommodate interviews with both studio and remote guests, allowing traders to speak from their trading floors while still appearing to be on-set. And AR graphics such a 3D representation of a stock chart give talent a more dynamic way to present information, said Fastook, speaking on the panel “Agility in News Production,” moderated by this reporter.

“It’s all about presenting data in an elegant and beautiful fashion,” Fastook said. “And this is where AR and high-quality LCD screens are everything; it’s revolutionized everything we do. I don’t think I’ll ever put a brand on a set again. Right now, I have one brand and one desk left, and it’s the CNBC Peacock. Everything else is completely electronic. Because the screens are affordable, they’re configurable, because the form factor is small. So, I can curve them, I can make strips, I can make them vertical or horizontal. It’s really amazing stuff.”

Fox Television Stations Create Options

WTTG Washington and WAGA Atlanta are taking the lead for Fox Television Stations in experimenting with AR and XR graphics, said Erik Smith, VP of news operations and technology, Fox Television Stations (FTS), as the group seeks new options for the abundant content its stations produce each day for both linear and digital distribution.

Erik Smith (LinkedIn)

“We are a live-based company; WTTG is doing over 15 hours of live linear content a day,” Smith said. “Clearly, we’re trying to support Fox Local and other initiatives for our company in the digital space, so we need flexibility in our studios. We want to create compelling storytelling opportunities across all of those platforms.”

FTS uses a hub-and-spoke approach for its graphics operations, with Chyron as the base technology. WTTG has invested in the Chyron VSAR virtual graphics product, which is based on the Unreal platform and already works with its existing Chyron infrastructure. WAGA has taken a different approach and is focused on augmented reality using The Weather Company’s MaxReality product. Neither station has those systems up and running yet and they are both currently in the setup phase.

Smith said that call-letter stations can be rightly viewed as “the last frontier” for AR and XR graphics, which have been widely adopted for sports coverage as well as by several national newscasts. The biggest challenge is in personnel. While Fox’s graphics hub has “phenomenal artists” and there is also a local artist at each station, that doesn’t mean they have specific expertise in 3D modeling and Unreal Engine rendering, which is what most AR/XR systems today run on. There are plenty of freelance artists with Unreal expertise, Smith noted. But most of them approach it from a gaming perspective and not a broadcast background, and they don’t have expertise with NRCS integration or MOS.

“It’s really about getting the right human resources to support the content,” Smith said. “Because you don’t want to farm it all out, you want to be able to build it in-house and keep it close. So, that’s a challenge that we continue to work through. It will continue to grow and there will be more opportunities and more people to support it, but it’s a challenge right now.”

Remote News Producers At Gray

On the other hand, new IP-based production tools are helping to solve personnel challenges for Gray Television, which like other groups has found it difficult to attract and retain quality employees, said Clint Moore, director of broadcast operations for Gray Television. After most employees shifted to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gray found that many wanted to continue to work from home after the pandemic eased and it was safe to return to stations.

While there was a “big debate” about whether Gray should allow that or not, Moore said, a couple of stations fully embraced the work-from-home model.

Clint Moore

“They’ve got producers that work for them that turn shows daily that don’t even live in the same city, in some situations they’re states or even time zones away,” he said. “We looked at that on a corporate level, too, and said how can we help these stations? A lot of stations are struggling, they’re always recruiting, and they need help on a corporate level.”

So, Gray formed a new group of a dozen corporate employees called “Remote News Producers” that fully work from home in different time zones and provide an additional resource that stations can tap to produce daily newscasts. Each remote news producer has a group of stations in the time zone in which they live, and they pitch in to help stations by filling in for employees who are sick, on maternity leave or on vacation. Some days they might produce an entire newscast, while on other days they simply help out as an associate producer.

Each remote news producer is responsible for having a “certain footprint of equipment” at their home, Moore said, with a station providing the rest so they can efficiently connect to do their work. The move has been a big success for Gray, with one remote news producer even winning an Emmy for her work.

“It’s been really helpful for us, and the stations have really appreciated it,” Moore said. “And it allows us to attract a higher caliber of employee, because you can get someone who’s highly qualified who can live where they want to live and still produce news.”

Gray has also extended at-home work to directing through the use of production automation systems like Ross OverDrive. That is a workflow that also started during the pandemic and persisted at a few stations, sometimes in combination with a remote news producer.

“In a situation where in an automated control room we [would] have anywhere from two to four people in there for a newscast, now you can just have one person at the station watching everything, making sure everything is doing everything it’s supposed to,” Moore said. “And everybody else is working remotely to direct and produce from home.”

Sinclair’s Camera-To-Cloud Workflows

For its part, Sinclair is looking to take its news production into the public cloud. The group has been working over the past year with Sony and other vendors on a “camera-to-cloud workflow” where video captured by a field camera is ingested directly into the cloud and then immediately available for editing through a cloud-based editor.

Ernie Ensign

“The idea there is having access to content as quickly as possible, and moving us into this mindset of gather, report, gather, report,” said Ernie Ensign, AVP, news technology and operations for Sinclair. “With all of the content consumption that happens every day, we can’t wait for a story to be produced, to have a photographer edit in the field and send it back in. So, the mindset is to get content in as fast as possible, with metadata.”

Sinclair has an “assignment queue” within its newsroom computer system that’s linked to the camera, so a producer can attach a label to a story that will stay with the video captured in the field. Ensign said that stations have embraced the new workflow and that Sinclair plans to expand it further next year.

There still are some challenges with the camera-to-cloud system, including workflow overlaps with existing bonded cellular devices, which send some content quickly to the cloud, but not everything. But the bigger issue is the overall reliability of cellular coverage.

“You can’t build a workflow and it only works some of the time,” Ensign said. “It’s got to be fairly resilient. And I think each of the cellular providers have a different strategy, in whether they’re trying to target bandwidth or a more blanketed coverage across the country.”

Sinclair has had numerous conversations with cellular providers about making their coverage more robust and is also experimenting with a new compact Live U bonded device that promises to transmit content more quickly.

“It’s a work in progress, but I think as the codecs in the cameras get better, we can increase the quality and reduce the bitrate,” Ensign said. “I think that’s going to further improve those workflows.”

The other area Sinclair is exploring is using cloud-based switchers to support a full production control room (PCR) in the cloud. That effort is not aimed at live daily newscasts at this point, but instead for remote productions of events like political debates, parades and town halls.

“I’m not sure that [the] cloud is completely ready for 16 hours of live news a day, and that the business models completely work,” Ensign said. “But certainly, all these other types of productions where we roll a production truck, the set up and tear down take a lot of time and effort and energy and engineering resources. And we think there’s some better ways and better tools out there to turn those into more cloud-related productions. Those so far have been very successful, and we’ve gotten good engagement and good endorsement from our newsrooms.”

Wider Cloud Adoption

Smith said Fox is also working with LiveU on a cloud-based ingest system where metadata flows from the NRCS at a station, through the LiveU ecosystem, and then back into the Bitcentral MAM. Fox is also evaluating cloud-based production switchers as control room replacements but is currently focused on productions for digital properties or linear coverage of “pop up events” where it doesn’t want to use an entire control room.

“Some of those cloud production tools you can spin up and use on an as-needed basis really fit that model for us,” Smith said. “We’ve looked at multiple vendors on that.”

In that vein, Fox’s digital team is currently using TVU Networks’ Channel playout system and Producer production system, and FTS has also tested LiveU Studio and Grabyo.

CNBC is also using cloud production tools today, not for its primary broadcast but for coverage of special events, which the network organizes and offers as a subscription service. Remote coverage is typically accomplished by sending a producer equipped with a PC and a few cameras.

“Our events business is almost completely through cloud control,” Fastook said.

Gray is looking at cloud-based production but definitely in more of a hybrid approach, Moore said, particularly given the vulnerability of some stations to severe weather events.

“We’re not going to jump all-in on the cloud right away, it’s too risky,” Moore said. “We have a lot of stations in the footprint of along the Gulf and along the coast, and for those stations it’s not if you lose connectivity, it’s when.”

When it comes to improved connectivity, both Fox and Sinclair are interested in using 5G network slicing with dedicated bandwidth if and when that becomes available from carriers. And both groups have recently been making use of low-earth-orbit [LEO] satellites like Starlink as a new connectivity option, with Fox gradually adding Starlink gear to its news trucks to go along with existing bonded equipment.

While both Smith and Ensign view Starlink as another “tool in the toolbox,” Ensign said it has already proved invaluable for Sinclair for remote coverage.

“Starlink did save us at an Ohio State football game a couple of months ago,” Ensign said. “We had very limited bandwidth from where we were, and Starlink was the difference in still getting on the air.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

The post From Remote News Producers To Camera-To-Cloud Workflows, Broadcasters Chase Agility In Studio And Field appeared first on TV News Check.

To do that, Symson is putting more reporters back into the communities Scripps’ stations serve, even the smallest ones like Helena, Mont., or Lafayette, La. Earlier this year, Scripps started hiring more reporters in those communities and paying them more. At the same time, Scripps has scaled back on positions like anchors and capturing live shots just for the sake of being on the scene. The result is more resources going to reporting and less into production, especially in those smaller markets.

Adam Symson

“When you decide that you need to change things in order to create a more durable model, particularly in our smaller markets, you make a decision that you’re going to essentially try to change the entirety of what it is we are known for,” Symson said. “What that’s led us to do in our smaller markets is reprioritize reporting and deprioritize what I would consider the performative aspects of our business.”

One of the main reasons Symson has made the decision to do that is to increase viewer trust.

“If you go out and speak to those consumers, those audiences that are on the edges of our markets, and you listen to what they say, they don’t trust us because we’re not there for them,” Symson said. “I think our obligation to rebuild trust is to get back into the communities where those people live and to cover their lives, not just when there’s a quadruple homicide, but when there’s a real issue at stake. We have to have some humble pie about where we are today and recognize that we are responsible for creating this dynamic and that we can get ourselves out of it.”

Besides its local news operations, Scripps also operates nationally distributed Scripps News (formerly Newsy), so some of the content produced on the local level can trickle up to the national news network.

The issue of trust also is an issue for national news services, such as Nexstar’s upstart NewsNation, which launched in March 2021. NewsNation’s mission is to provide unbiased news to consumers in all parts of the country, not just in the major media centers.

For NewsNation anchor Connell McShane, who spent years as a financial reporter with Bloomberg and then Fox Business Network, building trust with viewers is still about the basic journalistic principle of putting in the time and the work.

Connell McShane

“There’s not much credibility or trust if you don’t have a lot of knowledge of the subject matter,” he said. “You have to put the work in so over time you build up that credibility, that trust with the audience.”

In both cases, the emphasis is on building long-term relationships with viewers and with communities. That’s something that’s long been a hallmark of local TV stations.

While the panelists largely agreed that the polarized nature of cable news contributes to a media environment of mistrust, they said having more time on air can allow for more conversation and discovery around issues – depending on how that time is used. That can ultimately help build trust.

“There is this advantage that you do have time to talk literally about everything or anything that you want to do,” McShane said. “If you have 10 hours a week just on our show, you should be able to have a lot of different discussions, a lot of variety. Are we perfect? Of course not. Do we fall into some of the traps that other people do? I’m sure, sometimes, but I think there is also that advantage.”

As Scripps is working to beef up reporting across all of its 61 stations in 41 markets, it has its eye on artificial intelligence (AI). While AI offers technology that can be helpful in the newsgathering process, it also potentially creates many more ways to confuse and disillusion news consumers.

“Anything that could in any way call into question the validity of our reporting and create a scenario where consumers aren’t quite sure whether it’s real or not, is problematic,” Symson said.

To avoid that problem, Scripps is developing an online trust center ahead of the 2024 election where consumers can go to verify what has and has not been originally produced by Scripps.

“I’m very concerned about the prospect of the use of AI to damage our brands and inadvertently exacerbate that trust problem,” Symson said.

McShane sees the potential danger in AI as well, but he also sees the potential benefit. “I’m generally very excited when new technology comes into our industry and want to be one of the first ones to use it,” he said. “What I’m concerned about obviously is technology that can do our job for us.”

That said, both men also see the upside of AI. “There will be significant opportunities to leverage AI that brings efficiency to news operations and maybe alleviates some of the pressure on the newsroom from an economic perspective,” Symson said. “So, this is not an all bad story, we just have to be thoughtful about how we use it.”

Finally, news consumers – and particularly students and young adults – need to be educated on how to consume news and information, Symson and McShane agreed.

Scripps partners with the non-profit, non-partisan News Literacy Project, which started News Literacy week, to bring more transparency and education to the news process. NLP has developed a curriculum that goes into middle and junior high schools to teach media literacy.

“We are graduating kids into the most complex content ecosystem ever to exist, with none of the skills necessary to be able to understand what is propaganda, what is journalism, what is a press release,” Symson said.

Part of it remains just doing journalism the old-fashioned way, McShane said. “If you’re in a position where you can do a good job every day, as simple as it sounds, over time people start to trust that guy with the news. And when you have a whole organization of men and women that people trust with the news, you build up media literacy that way.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

The post For TV News, Rebuilding Trust Is Core Imperative For Election Year appeared first on TV News Check.

The conference is free to attend in-person or virtually for qualified news leaders, journalists and technologists at news organizations and media companies.

“This year’s NewsTECHForum engages head on the most pressing crises facing the news industry right now, and we want these essential discussions to be as accessible as possible,” said Michael Depp, chief content officer of NewsCheckMedia and editor of TVNewsCheck. “This event offers a rare occasion for introspection and constructive thinking for how best to engage an extremely difficult news year ahead. Offering a livestreaming option is a great way to allow more professionals to join us, particularly in a year of tightened travel budgets.”

NewsTECHForum, now in its 10^th year, is co-located with the Sports Video Group Summit. The conference’s theme for 2023 is Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis.

Featured sessions are:

• Keynote: Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election
• Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy
• Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News?
• Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis
• Agility in News Production
• Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities
• Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation

Register here.

The post NewsTECHForum: In-Person Or Live Streaming Options For Attendees appeared first on TV News Check.

Adam Symson, president and CEO, E.W. Scripps, and Connell McShane, anchor, NewsNation, will join moderator Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsCheckMedia and editor, TVNewsCheck, for the keynote discussion at the New York Hilton at 10 a.m. on Dec. 12.

The session will look at how the industry must meet a critical moment to determine TV news’ lasting future, where emerging technologies will come to bear and what’s at stake in the work the industry does over the next year.

“Television news is hurtling toward an inflection point that may very well be the next U.S. presidential election,” Depp said. “On that trajectory, it will need to validate its legitimacy with skeptical viewers and prove its relevance. Along the way, the industry’s resilience will be tested like never before.

“Adam and Connell will speak to the unprecedented stress test the industry — and U.S. democracy — faces and how they see their respective roles in that,” Depp added. “I expect a frank and revealing conversation that lays bare the stakes and offers a hopeful picture of perseverance.”

NewsTECHForum, now in its 10^th year, is co-located with the Sports Video Group Summit. The conference’s theme for 2023 is Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis.

Featured sessions are:

• Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy
• Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News?
• Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis
• Agility in News Production
• Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities
• Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation

Register here.

The post NewsTECHForum Keynote: Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism And The ’24 Election appeared first on TV News Check.

Speakers are Devon Armijo, director of digital news integration, Hearst Television; Mike Palmer, AVP advanced technology/media management, Sinclair; Philippe Petitpont, CEO, Newsbridge; Ben Ramos, VP, Fox archive, field and emerging tech, Fox News. TVNewsCheck Contributing Editor Glen Dickson will moderate the discussion.

“AI has fundamentally changed the process of metatagging archives and making them more thoroughly searchable, which in turn has offered pathways to new content creation and licensing opportunities drawing from those archives,” said Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsCheckMedia and editor, TVNewsCheck. “This session will look closely at how a well-organized, easy-to-retrieve-from archive can have numerous benefits for newsrooms under pressure.

“The panel will also look at the emerging challenge of how media companies can authenticate their deep trove of archival content and determine rights ownership,” he added.

NewsTECHForum, now in its 10^th year, is co-located with the Sports Video Group Summit. The conference’s theme for 2023 is Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis.

Featured sessions are:

• Keynote: Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election
• Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy
• Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News?
• Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis
• Agility in News Production
• Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation

Register here.

The post NewsTECHForum: Harvesting Archives For New Content And Opportunities appeared first on TV News Check.

Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News?, a panel at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum conference on Dec. 12 at the New York Hilton, will take a candid look at how news organizations are continuously reassessing their guidelines around AI usage and grappling with the step change it presents to the industry.

Speakers are Laura Ellis, head of technology forecasting, BBC; Claire Leibowicz, head of AI and media integrity, Partnership on AI; Santiago Lyon, head of advocacy and education, Content Authenticity Initiative, Adobe; Aimee Rinehart, senior project manager for AI strategy, Associated Press; and Ray Thompson, senior director, partners and alliances, Avid. Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsCheckMedia, and editor, TVNewsCheck, will moderate the panel.

“It’s impossible to understate how profound an impact generative AI can and will have on newsrooms,” Depp said. “The question is how well prepared they will be to assimilate the benefits it will bring to content production and the considerable pitfalls it presents. Laura, Claire, Aimee, Santiago and Ray are among those grappling with the most serious implications the industry must now confront regarding ethics, trust, transparency and how everyone’s roles will be fundamentally changed.”

NewsTECHForum, now in its 10^th year, is co-located with the Sports Video Group Summit. The conference’s theme for 2023 is Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis.

Featured sessions are:

• Keynote: Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election
• Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy
• Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities
• Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis
• Agility in News Production
• Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation

Register here.

The post NewsTECHForum: Will AI Enhance Or Threaten The News? appeared first on TV News Check.

These leaders will also share the technologies that are surfacing to best enable these projects, facilitate cross-group communication and make promising local content visible to all.

Speakers are Meredith McGinn, EVP, diginets & original production, NBCUniversal Local; Kate O’Brian, president, Scripps News, E.W. Scripps Co.; Kengo Tsutsumi, partnerships editor, ProPublica; Lee Zurik, VP of investigations, Gray Television; and Stephane Guez, co-founder & principal, Dalet. Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsCheckMedia and editor, TVNewsCheck, will moderate the discussion.

“Collaborations — both across and between news organizations — have been a major focus of the industry this year, and the groups leaning into them have learned a lot about how to build the best possible architecture to see them thrive,” Depp said. “This panel will draw from an enormous amount of accumulated knowledge from organizations who’ve realized that this may be the only way to stay viable with news consumers looking forward.”

NewsTECHForum, now in its 10^th year, is co-located with the Sports Video Group Summit. The conference’s theme for 2023 is Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis.

Featured sessions are:

• Keynote: Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election
• Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy
• Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities
• Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis
• Agility in News Production
• Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News?

Register here.

The post NewsTECHForum: Building The Architecture Of More Collaborative Content Creation appeared first on TV News Check.

A panel of top streaming executives at major station groups will address these and other crucial questions in a session, Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy, at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum conference on Dec. 12 at the New York Hilton. They’ll discuss how data and technology are facilitating decision making and how deep audiences’ appetites for experimentation run when watching news content on streaming.

Speakers are Mike Braun, SVP, digital media, Gray Television; Greg Morrow, GM of ViewNexa, Bitcentral; Sahand Sepehrnia, SVP, streaming, CBS News & Stations; Rick Young, SVP, head of global products, LTN; and Jeff Zellmer, SVP digital operations, Fox Television Stations. Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsCheckMedia and editor, TVNewsCheck, will moderate the discussion.

“The sands of news content on streaming are shifting extremely quickly, and what’s behind that is years of data now available since news organizations first launched their streaming channels,” Depp said. “This panel will dive into the data and the insights it has illuminated on consumer behavior when watching streaming news content, including on emerging FAST channels.

“We couldn’t have a deeper bench of experts to crack open this subject,” he said, “and the stakes couldn’t be higher in terms of acquiring the next generation of viewers to keep local news operations alive and thriving.”

NewsTECHForum, now in its 10^th year, is co-located with the Sports Video Group Summit. The conference’s theme for 2023 is Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis.

Featured sessions are:

• Keynote: Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election
• Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation
• Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities
• Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis
• Agility in News Production
• Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News?

Register here.

The post NewsTECHForum: Reassessing The Streaming News Content Strategy appeared first on TV News Check.

Panelists are Ernie Ensign, AVP, news technology and operations, Sinclair; Steve Fastook, SVP of technical and commercial operations, CNBC; Clint Moore, director of broadcast operations, Gray Television; and Erik Smith, VP of news operations and technology, Fox Television Stations. Glen Dickson, contributing editor, TVNewsCheck, will moderate the session.

“There’s no doubt that news production has become extraordinarily more agile, and this panel will tackle that fact holistically by looking at how that’s happening both inside the studio and out in the field,” said Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsCheckMedia, and editor, TVNewsCheck. “Steve, Ernie, Clint and Erik are right on the edge of this, pioneering the innovations that the rest of the industry will follow.”

NewsTECHForum, now in its 10^th year, is co-located with the Sports Video Group Summit. The conference’s theme for 2023 is Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis.

Featured sessions are:

• Keynote: Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election
• Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation
• Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities
• Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy
• Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis
• Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News?

Register here.

The post NewsTECHForum: Building Agility In News Production appeared first on TV News Check.

A panel of top-level news executives will discuss how the industry can evolve fast enough to sustain the incessant red line of pressure on which it now operates daily in the title panel of TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum conference at the New York Hilton on Dec. 12.

Speakers are Ellen Crooke, SVP of news, Tegna; Barb Maushard, SVP of news, Hearst Television; Nora Zimmett, president, news and original series, The Weather Group; Sam Singal, Group VP of editorial and content, Spectrum Networks; and Joe DiGiovanni, head of North American sales, The Weather Company, an IBM Business. Michael Depp, chief content officer of NewsCheckMedia and TVNewsCheck’s editor, will moderate the discussion.

“Every day I speak with news organizations that have seen their capacities tested to the limit by the sheer velocity of major events, the unremitting stresses on their personnel and infrastructure and the widening damage done by consumers’ erosion of trust,” Depp said. “This panel opens NewsTECHForum by engaging all the industry’s most pressing crises head on and laying out the key issues we’ll spend the rest of the day tackling.

“Ellen, Barb, Nora, Sam and Joe are confronting these crises every day and can share insights and nascent solutions that their unique vantage points offer,” he added.

NewsTECHForum, now in its 10^th year, is co-located with the Sports Video Group Summit.

Featured sessions are:

• Keynote: Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election
• Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy
• Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities
• Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation
• Agility in News Production
• Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News?

Register here.

The post NewsTECHForum: News Leaders On How They’re Adapting To A Culture Of Continuous Crisis appeared first on TV News Check.

The event, co-located with Sports Video Group’s Summit at the New York Hilton, features industry leaders from the BBC, AP, E.W. Scripps, CNBC, Tegna, ABC Owned Stations, NBCUniversal Local, Sinclair, Gray Television, CBS News & Stations, Adobe and more.

Featured sessions are:

• Keynote: Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election
• Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis
• Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy
• Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities
• Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation
• Agility in News Production
• Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News?

“This year’s NewsTECHForum gets right to the most urgent issue facing news organizations today—how to handle bigger stories coming at far greater velocity than ever with thinner, more stressed resources to do so,” said Michael Depp, chief content officer at NewsCheckMedia and TVNewsCheck’s editor.

“Each session this year takes the measure of the current news climate and how leading organizations have taken successful, incremental steps to adapt to it,” Depp said. “Those solutions come from a combination of emerging technology — including the controversial adoption of generative AI — and evolving management of people and workflows.”

Register here.

The post NewsTECHForum 2023: Adapting To A Culture Of Continuous Crisis appeared first on TV News Check.