Dawn Sterling

Sinclair ABC affiliates WICS-WICD Springfield, Ill. has hired Dawn Sterling. She will join Stacey Skrysak on the evening news desk. With a background and extensive experience in Central Illinois, “Sterling is bringing a fresh perspective and a wealth of knowledge to our viewers.”

Sterling is a graduate of Central Michigan University. She began her news career in Binghamton, N.Y., then worked at WTHI Terre Haute, In. She also worked for Sinclair-owned WSMH Flint, Mich., before moving to Central Illinois in 2004

“Our goal is to take our local newscasts to the next level. What better way to do that than to bring in an anchor with years of experience in the local market. I see this as a win, not only for us, but for Central Illinois viewers,” says WICS-WRSP News Director Heather Nodine.

“It’s rare that you get to hire someone with Dawn’s skills and abilities with two decades of experience in the market” says WICS-WRSP General Manager Robert Richardson.

Sterling begins on-air Jan. 15 and will co-anchor the news at 5, 6, and 10 p.m. with Skrysak. Sterling will also make appearances on the Fox Illinois newscasts at 5:30 and 9 p.m.

The post WICS-WICD Springfield, Ill. Add Anchor Dawn Sterling appeared first on TV News Check.

“We’re meeting our audience’s needs by adding an extra hour of news every morning to help prepare them for the day ahead,” said Michael Valentine, WUSA VP-station manager. Get Up DC will now be on from 4:30 to 7 a.m., followed by CBS Mornings from 7 to 9, then back at 9 to 10. The now five-and-a-half-hour morning time block will give our viewers a mix of coverage focusing on what’s local to the DMV and national news.”

The Get Up DC anchor team of Wisdom Martin, Allison Seymour and Annie Yu will continue as the hosts for this expanded hour.

WUSA’s Great Day Washington, a live, daily talk show, will move to 3 p.m. weekdays. Valentine added: “Great Day Washington explores the region’s entertainment, food, travel and so much more, and serves up helpful information for our audience, including relevant sponsored segments.”

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WDIV says Canine, a seasoned professional, “has consistently demonstrated an unwavering commitment to journalistic integrity and storytelling. Her leadership has been characterized by a profound impact on newsroom culture, fostering an environment that encourages collaboration, creativity, and a dedication to delivering news of the highest caliber on all platforms.”

Bob Ellis, WDIV vice president and general manager, says: “Jennifer’s impact on this newsroom has been profound. She’s an enormous reason why we are who we are today. What makes her special is her intense desire to foster the culture of a newsroom that doesn’t try to be like anyone or anything else.

“With the changes we’ve made to our product just getting started, Jenn is also the right person to lead us in our evolving storytelling approach and help every news employee find ways to serve our viewers on all platforms every day. I have the utmost faith that she will lead, communicate with transparency, and move us forward.”

The post Jennifer Wallace Canine Upped To WDIV News Director appeared first on TV News Check.

Cameron Hopman

Allen Media’s ABC affiliate WKOW Madison, Wis., has hired Cameron Hopman as 27 Storm Track chief meteorologist, appearing on its weeknight newscasts at 4, 5, 6 and 10 p.m. beginning, Jan. 8.

Hopman will join 27 News Anchors Amber Noggle and Caroline Dade at 4 p.m., Brandon Taylor and Sara Maslar-Donar at 5 and Amber Noggle and Brandon Taylor at 6 and 10.

Hopman comes to WKOW with 15-plus years of forecasting experience. He was the chief meteorologist at WEVV Evansville, Ind., for the past five years. Prior to that, Hopman forecasted the weather for WLFI West Lafayette, Ind., including as chief meteorologist for three years.

Hopman holds a degree from Eastern Illinois University and has his National Weather Association Broadcaster’s Seal of Approval.

“It was an intense process to find the right person to fit our evening news team,” said WKOW News Director Dani Maxwell, “It was important for us to not only find someone who would meet the high expectations we have for our 27 Storm Track weather team but would also find ways to connect with our audience. We’re confident that Cam’s warmth and expertise will quickly make his forecasts a part of our viewers’ nightly routines.”

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Caleb Michael

Nexstar Media Group-owned NBC affiliate WDTN Dayton, Ohio, has added Caleb Michael to its 2 NEWS Today team. He joins from Columbus, Ohio, where he’s been a reporter for WCMH, also owned by Nexstar.

Michael was born and raised in California but is no stranger to Ohio, with family throughout Columbus. He received his bachelor’s degree in communications from Oregon State University, where he was a Division 1 student-athlete on the men’s soccer team.

“We’re so excited to have Caleb join our 2 NEWS family,” said Melissa Jones, WDTN-TV Vice President & General Manager.  “We love Caleb’s enthusiasm and energy and believe he’s a great addition to the 2 NEWS Today team.”

Michael will be joined by Lauren Wood, meteorologist Jamie Jarosik and traffic anchor Kelley King beginning Tuesday, Jan. 2, to co-anchor 2 NEWS Today beginning at 4:30 a.m. and 2 NEWS Today on CW affil WBDT from 7 to 9 a.m.

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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.

Press Forward was launched by a coalition of donors earlier this year and is centered on four funding priorities:

• Strengthening local newsrooms that have the trust of local communities.
• Improving infrastructure for local news production and dissemination.
• Closing longstanding inequities in journalism coverage and practice.
• Advancing policies that expand access to local news and information.

“Journalism, particularly local journalism, is the fabric of our democracy, the medium through which we strengthen communities, tell stories that build shared understanding, and hold power to account,” said MacArthur President John Palfrey. “Twenty percent of Americans live in ‘news deserts,’ areas without reliable coverage of local issues. Press Forward aims to reverse that trend and confront this lack of credible information that contributes to a growing divide in America, declining civic engagement, and distrust in its institutions.”

The largest of MacArthur’s initial grants, $32.5 million, will go to a national pooled fund for local news, housed at The Miami Foundation to provide a way for donors of all sizes and types to partner in this shared effort.

MacArthur has also launched a new grantmaking strategy to support local news in alignment with Press Forward to provide direct grants to news organizations and outlets, each of which are also being supported by at least one other Press Forward funding partner. The first of those grants, which will provide infrastructure support and shared services, along with direct support for eight local newsrooms, are:

• 100 Days in Appalachiawill receive $1 million through the Rural Digital Youth Resiliency Project to support its news reporting on issues of significance to residents of Appalachia, with an emphasis on reaching young people and leading a community of practice, providing security and safety training, and other support services for reporters covering extremism.
• Buffalo’s Firewill receive $350,000 through the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance to support its North Dakota news reporting on the Fort Berthold and Twin Buttes communities, home to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations.
• Catchlightwill receive $1 million for its support of visual storytellers working for local news outlets across the United States, supplementing vital reporting with images intended to deepen understanding of local issues.
• Charlottesville Tomorrowwill receive $350,000 to support its reporting that serves residents underserved or misrepresented by media.
• Conecta Arizonawill receive $350,000 for its reporting and engagement activities serving the Spanish-speaking residents of Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora.
• Documentedwill receive $500,000 for its accountability, investigative and engagement reporting on issues affecting the immigrant communities of New York City.
• El Tímpanowill receive $500,000 for its reporting on, with, and for the Latinx and Indigenous Mayan immigrants in the San Francisco Bay area.
• Enlace Latino NCwill receive $350,000 for its accountability, investigative, and engagement reporting serving the Spanish speaking communities of North Carolina.
• Free Presswill receive $1 million to build and strengthen the capacity of local and state civic actors to inform the creation of policy environments that prioritize local information needs of underserved communities.
• Lawyers for Reporterswill receive $450,000 to provide essential legal services on a pro-bono basis to news outlets.
• Mississippi Free Presswill receive $350,000 for its reporting on the state capitol and rural areas of the state focusing on systemic and structural challenges, and race, gender, and LGBTQ+ issues.
• National Trust for Local Newswill receive $500,000 for its work to acquire and help transform local newspapers to create more sustainable and responsive news entities.
• NewsMatch, a program of the Institute for Nonprofit Newswill receive $3.5 million to provide matching grants for individual donations made to news outlets, and training and tools to bolster the fundraising capacity of newsrooms.
• Outlier Mediawill receive $1 million for its reporting addressing the information needs of Detroit residents, particularly low-income people and communities of color.
• Racial Equity in Journalism Fundat Borealis Philanthropy will receive $3.5 million to support Black, Indigenous, and People of Color-led newsrooms with grants and technical assistance.
• Rebuild Local Newswill receive $500,000 to support its national coalition that works to provide education on the need and opportunities for federal and local public policy in support of journalism sustainability.
• URL Mediawill receive $500,000 to support its network of Black and Brown publishers working to share content, distribution, and build shared revenue streams.

This first set of grants includes funding for infrastructure support and shared services, along with direct support for eight local newsrooms that engage in sustained, deep listening to serve their communities with news and information. These newsrooms also explore how to deliver information in innovative ways, including through text messaging. Through its own grantmaking and grantmaking with Press Forward partners in the pooled fund, MacArthur is building the case for, and highlighting the possibility of, a local news renaissance around the country.

Learn more about MacArthur’s Local News grantmaking as it continues to be developed.

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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.

In this Talking TV conversation, TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp and Editor at Large Harry Jessell take a wide-ranging look at the year just wrapping up and the one ahead, and what’s on the line for broadcasters as it comes.

Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.

Michael Depp: We’ve come to the end of a pretty volatile year for broadcasters, and it might fairly be said, an annus horribilis for us all. So, it’s probably a good time to take stock of some of the major events that have faced broadcasters in 2023 and look ahead to what is most likely to impact the industry in 2024.

I’m Michael Depp, editor of TVNewsCheck, and this is Talking TV, our weekly video podcast. This week, I’m joined by Harry Jessell, our beloved editor at large, and we’re going to talk about the health of the industry generally as it goes into the next year, the hope for regulatory relief, the prospects being ushered in by generative AI, 2024 election coverage and much, much more. We will be right back with that year-end conversation.

Harry Jessell: Good to see you, Michael. How are you?

It’s good to see you. I’m well, thanks. And it’s good to see you. You are the only person I’d want to wrap the year up with and look ahead to…

I think I’m the only person qualified to do that.

The only man standing on this planet who can do it. Exactly. Exactly. So, let’s play a little ghosts of Christmas past, and then ghost of Christmas future. And let’s start with the past, the year behind us. A lot of things going on. One of those things that might tell us something to sum up the year’s health of the industry, are stock prices.

Well, yeah, I thought, you know, there’s a lot of ways to measure an industry and we have some big public companies, so I thought I’d take a look at the stock prices and see how we did this year. First of all, the Dow is up 10%. The S&P was up 20%. So, it must have been a good year for the TV stocks. No, they were all down: 3%, 7%, 5%, 3%. Nexstar took a big hit, 32 points [Ed. note: Since this was recorded, Nexstar’s stock rebounded to 155 on Thursday]. But it was a high-flier. It started the year 174 and is down to 142, which is sort of a shame because Nexstar, the group, I think is really trying to do some things. And maybe we can talk about that a little bit later on with the CW and the NewsNation.

So, not a great year if you believe Wall Street. But I will say they’re doing better than radio. There’s a couple radio groups now that are selling for under a dollar.

Yeah, I don’t know, I mean, radio is a pretty low bar relatively speaking, but we have had a lot of headwinds this year. I mean, you know, just generally, advertising, the spot ad market was really challenged for a lot of this year. It wasn’t a political year. Of course, they’re looking at one next year and have a lot of hope with regards to a rebound there.

Well yeah, you know, that’s the nature of this business. And I think the number was that we got from Steve Passwaiter was $10 billion, of which broadcasters will get the lion’s share. So, that’s going to be a big hit for broadcasters and positive hit. They have that to look forward to as well as the challenge of covering those elections.

Yes, which we will come to. Let’s talk a little bit about the M&A year that wasn’t, in many ways, starting with Tegna.

Well, yeah. Well, this business is so heavily consolidated now that there’s not much room for mergers and acquisitions anymore. And the one big deal was cratered by the FCC and Jessica Rosenworcel, she torpedoed that deal crushing Soo Kim’s opportunity to make another big score in broadcasting and I think may have chased off some private equity money and hedge funds that might have been looking at broadcasting and their big cash flows that come, and she sort of sent a signal that you’re not wanted here in broadcasting. She’s a traditional Democrat, isn’t looking for more consolidation in this industry. So, that was sort of a negative for the industry, I think, overall.

Yeah, absolutely. But then we also have perhaps ABC on the sales block.

Well, yes, that was the story that never happened. In July, Bob Iger decides… I think the comment was like, his linear channels may not be core to the business, which a lot of people took as a sign that he was ready to divest ABC and ESPN maybe and his minor or smaller cable networks. And everybody got excited for a while. I saw numbers for ABC at $5 billion up. But you know, just a couple of weeks ago he sort of walks it back and says, you know, really, I was just really gassing, never mind, we believe in the future of linear TV. Maybe that means he does believe in linear TV. Maybe he just stirred up no interest in those networks.

Well, Byron Allen shot his hand up and Nexstar seemed to be sniffing around.

Nextstar, I think is definitely, and Byron is always sticking his hand up in the air. He’s an ambitious man. One of these days he’s going to make a big score, I think.

This would be a big one for him.

So, that never materialized. Maybe let’s put a positive spin on that. Let’s say this is Disney recognizing once again that linear TV is core, is important for maybe creating shows that they can sell downstream. So, let’s take it as a positive.

And of course, people at ABC are pretty nervous, though. I don’t think anybody feels like they’re standing on terra firma right now.

Well, probably not a good idea if you’re in the broadcasting business.

Harry, there was another big story this year with Disney and Charter.

Well, I was just going to say, the other sort of endorsement of the linear TV idea was that Disney and Charter, after coming to loggerheads in September or late August over a new carriage deal. It looked like that would go bad. It looked like Charter might walk away, but they didn’t. They were able to cut a deal for the ABC stations and more, and ESPN, and they got Monday Night Football up there.

And so, all was well, that was sort of a short-lived crisis. And had they not done that deal, that may have had repercussions for other broadcasters trying to cut new retrans deals. And so, I think for the time being, it’s secure, the idea the retrans will continue to come in. We have another year or two anyway of business as normal.

Sigh of relief.

Sigh of relief.

Another issue this year that was substantial, still unfolding really, is around the FCC and the virtual MVPDs, and that kind of fostered a bit of a schism inside of the broadcast world.

Well, yeah. Network versus affiliate the old, they’ve always been at odds, more prominently at some times than at others. But the real story there is, again, Rosenworcel has decided that she will not save broadcasters and allow them to deal directly with the virtual MVPDs, which are becoming a big part of the ecosystem now. That they will have to work through the networks, and when the networks make those deals with the virtual MVPDs, the affiliates always end up on the short end. So, that was a blow.

And it’s like Rosenworcel, like a lot of people, they say they love localism, but she doesn’t do a whole lot to help localism by supporting TV stations. I think she thinks she’s doing good by disallowing duopolies. I saw that was in the news again this week. NAB is making another run to persuade the FCC to allow network affiliates in the same market to own each other, you know, common ownership of two network affiliates. She’s not a fan of that. She’s turned down deals like that or rejected deals like that. That’s something she could do. You know, giving affiliates the right to negotiate directly with the MVPDs would have been nice…

Doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it, Harry?

Now we need another term. Can we come up with another term for that?

Yeah, I’ll work on that.

But what is clear, what is crystal clear, is she wants to help, maybe. But she doesn’t quite know how to. We’ll put it like that.

Well, one of the things I suppose you could say that that she did do to help, at least nominally, was a task force that was announced on ATSC 3.0, back in April, I believe it was, at the NAB Show, to kind of kick start that along, get that moving a little bit further. Doesn’t seem to have been a great year for NextGen TV, though, has it?

Well, it continues to bump along. Every so often you’ll see that they have announced another market, but I have yet to see a real plan for generating some revenue, creating a business either through enhanced television or through datacasting. I think the fact that LG, one of the big TV manufacturers, decided to take a pause in the marketing of NextGen sets was not good news.

Under litigation. So, it wasn’t maybe a voluntary pause, but nevertheless.

Yeah.

Just to say they were the biggest boosters in the OEM world for this technology. They were the ones kind of sticking their neck out the furthest. There was a lot of ambivalence with a lot of other set manufacturers.

Well, we’ll see what happens at the Consumer Electronics Show. But, you know, frankly, I don’t think that’s… I think it’s more of a datacasting business. I think that’s the way it’s going to go. And in even in that space, there’s another competitive transmission system out there. Got 5G, you know, uses the same transmission system they’re using for the phones, there’s a faction of the LPTV industry that’s sort of pushing this idea. So, then the ATSC proponents have to deal with that now, that somebody else is after that spectrum.

They’ve definitely thrown some cold water on that. But I do know that that some of the other the non-Sinclair broadcasters are trying some experiments with datacasting that they’ve kind of been keeping a lid on. I think some companies are just trying to manage expectations around this that it’s not going to be a panacea.

But you know, what’s interesting, when I talk to general managers, these are some of the people who are the most John the Baptist about the potential. They really do believe something is coming that will be transformative, mainly in terms of like addressable advertising in many ways. And it’s odd because that sort of dropped out of the national conversation. Certainly, it’s not leading the salient characteristics of ATSC 3.0 when we’re talking about it in a broader sense. So, they still believe, even if the faith has perhaps been challenged.

Well, as Mark Aitken is always telling me, keep the faith.

OK, well, there it is. So Nexstar, we touched on that before and they’ve had an interesting year with their national network endeavors. One of them being the CW, which underwent a pretty significant reboot this year.

Well, my Nexstar or my CW story is: I was at a New Jersey beach in September wondering how I was going to watch the West Virginia/Pitt football game, and I was surprised to find it on the CW. I guess they have an ACC package. I should have known that, but they do, and so I was able to watch that game sitting in a beach resort in New Jersey. I guess out of Philadelphia, it was. But I think that’s the right strategy, I mean they’re really heavy into sports. They did a wrestling thing also.

So, yeah, I think that’s a wise way to go. I hope they can make it. I know they’re investing heavily in it. At least Nexstar has sort of a growth strategy and maybe that’s why their stock is trading so much higher than their peers. Also, I listed this the year that Scripps came out and started talking about scooping up some local sports, and we’ve seen some of that.

Yeah, not only Scripps, Gray is on their heels, other groups are getting in there and definitely a lot of sports deals were announced. It wasn’t a plethora, but there was so much flux in that space, and it continues to be really, a lot of the teams in various leagues wanted to develop direct to consumer products for streaming so they can be sure to reach their fans. But they were convinced in many cases that broadcast is a value to them.

You know, it was years ago when I was growing up, you could watch baseball, hockey, basketball on broadcast TV or fairly frequently, boxing. All of that went away, by and large. And so, you know, those were fan recruitment devices. Those are tools for that, and I think they’re seeing the wisdom of that. And so, you get these 30-game packages that are popping up around the country with different teams and they seem to be good deals, or at least the teams are willing to try it out and see how it works.

Well, I hope we see more of them. You seem to have tracked it more closely than I. I’ve seen a few, but I’d like to see, you know, what do I know about sports marketing? But here in Pittsburgh, to do 25 or 30 games on broadcast TV and remind the people that have abandoned, the cord cutters, that we still have baseball here in Pittsburgh seems to me like a no brainer. I’d like to see it. I think it certainly would be a great thing for broadcasters if they could make that not as a loss leader, but as a real source of profit.

Yeah, well, Scripps is certainly the most bullish in that area, but Gray isn’t far behind them. And I think every group is taking this. Sinclair is trying to get back into that game a little bit and do some deals, and I think most groups are at least considering the possibility.

I think if Sinclair never saw another sports program again, they’d be happy.

Well, perhaps.

Their venture into sports has not been a good one so far.

No, but that story isn’t done being written yet.

OK, keep the faith, keep the faith.

That’s right. That’ll be the mantra.

That’s our theme.

Absolutely. And then just lastly, with Nexstar, NewsNation has another year behind it. Now they’ve got a presidential Republican debate that they have hosted. Are they, do you think, moving closer to viability, acceptability, with viewers?

I haven’t looked at the numbers, but I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant, and they could have had any TV station going on. Any TV station, there’s 10,000 of them and they had NewsNation. They must be doing something right. I think having that Republican debate on, which for some odd reason, I’ve been enjoying those debates. You know why? Because they’re talking policy. If they’re talking real policy, they’re talking about fixing things. There’s something normal about them. But I thought, I thought that was sort of a feather in their cap. It gave them a little status. If they were one of the big boys. I think it’s a very polished network.

It is.

No nonsense, very polished. They’ve done a nice job.

That’s Christmas past Let’s look to Christmas future 2024. There are a few things I want to bring up. Just the things that I’m watching and dynamics that will be kind of obviously important for the next year. One of them is the FAST channel phenomenon, which has become wildly, explosively popular with broadcasters. All of them, I think, at this point realize or already have FAST channels that they’re putting in various places, on the MVPDs, on the apps that are sponsored by the OEMs. Most of them have a strategy of ubiquity and putting them in as many places as possible. It’s a sort of easy-to-understand, intuitive business. It’s linear TV streaming, simply no VOD menu.

But it is an area that also, interestingly, where there’s a lot of change already happening. It used to be, you buy a smart television, you open up the app with all the FAST channels inside and you’d see a lot of library content stuff that was just kind of thrown at the wall to see what works. We are past that phase now.

We’re in the culling phase and the reorganization, redistribution of where FAST channels sit in those ecosystems. And it’s definitely turning out to be the case that they have to really think about, anybody putting one of these channels out, has to think about programing. It can’t just be some afterthought or just wheels that are running in endless circles that the OEMs and other more prized real estate wants to see original programing. They want to see dynamism, they want to see live. And so, it would seem that every broadcast group right now, needs –  

When you say, OEM, what are we talking about?

The set manufacturers, so the LGs, the Samsungs, anybody’s who’s got… and every TV basically now is a smart TV and it’s starting to come with loads of, you know, hundreds of FAST channels. But if you want to have a good place in that channel lineup, then you’ve got to have good stuff there. So, there can’t be any passivity about the programing. I think we’re going to go into this interesting year of prioritizing that platform and what it can do and just being much more active.

I have to tell you, when I turn on my TV, I look at, you know, I use Roku, when I look at those, you know, I can go down search channels and it’s just the clutter of stuff. And, you know, sometimes you see something that you might think is interesting. You go in there, it’s second-rate stuff. It looks like a lot of clutter.

It’s got a diginet-y kind of quality to it, sometimes in the worst sense of the diginet. But again, that’s you know, that stuff is getting stale. And it was sort of placeholder material in the FAST ecosystem. And now we’re moving into this more, I hate to use the word, but curated kind of sensibility about those channels.

Well, here’s what I want to know is what am I going to do with all these pay streams that I’m paying for I can’t keep paying them for. I think I’ve you know, they’re sort of like barnacles. You go through, I just collect them. I don’t think there’s, I’ve got them all and I got to do something. Can we cut to the consolidation phase?

Bundling. Well, the consolidation phase is happening for sure. But before that we’re going to see the bundling phase. And that word has already been thrown out by a few executives just in the last couple of weeks. It is coming. I think Apple TV and Paramount are talking about bundling and there are others that are under consideration right now. Bundling is going to happen, as people predicted years ago, the a la carte nature of streaming and buying streaming services has become onerously expensive, just on par with what people were paying for their cable bills. And so, what’s the value proposition really there? We’re going to see some culling of the herd. We’re going to see some bundling. There’s just going to be endless volatility in that space. So, you know, keep watching.

I guess the story is that none of these things are particularly profitable right now.

No.

No, they are not.

Well, many of them are. You know, Netflix tends to, by and large, to be pretty successful, but you have to have a massive, massive library. And that bundling is right. Even when you have a big library with lots of good titles, it’s got to be super enormous to really sustain. Of course, having all that programing costs a lot of money. The technology itself costs a ton of money and people don’t realize, they think it all just wafts in the cloud. There are server farms and massive infrastructure costs to running these things. And so, these were not small businesses that were quick to get off the ground and inexpensive. They were enormously expensive.

And then you add in the programing cost, to make the best programing that we’ve ever seen in some ways in the history of television. High cinematic production values, this cost a fortune. And this is all weighing on everybody’s balance sheets right now as we’re going into 2024.

You know, back in the day, it always irritated me that you had to get both HBO and Showtime. And I’m feeling the same way. If I want to get all the stuff that I want to get, I really have to do all those channels and they all have something on them.

You have to work three jobs to pay for it all too.

There’s a couple other things. Well, the major thing to watch, I think, for next year and maybe the most important thing since the advent of the internet — and I’m not even being hyperbolic here — is generative AI and its potential not only to change every part of our life, every industry, it’s going to affect broadcasters and it’s going to affect them imminently.

When I was at the IBC show in Amsterdam back in September, the word every single booth there was repeating like a mantra was the word
“efficiency,” because everyone realized they needed to get more efficiency out of their technologies than they have been getting. They need to lighten the load on people who are working in news, who are overworked. They need to get rid of redundant activities that go on routinely in newsrooms.

And AI, generative AI, has the opportunity to wend into so many facets of news production and lighten the workload, do incredible good potentially toward reducing the kind of redundancies that are out there helping, for instance, with versioning content from multiple platforms, which is a very onerous part of people’s jobs at TV stations as one example. It has so many appeals, and it’s becoming so much more precise, so sharp and so intelligent, it’s machine learning, so it’s always learning from what it’s doing. And its appeal to news producing companies is enormous on many levels. They are also extremely wary of the knock-on effects that it brings with it.

I’m sorry, what kind of effects?

The knock-on effects of, you know, just various things that will happen that as a result of adoption that you have to consider. You know, one of the things, for instance, being the major trust issues that consumers have with all sorts of televison, both local and national television, at this point.

When you’re employing AI at any level of the news process — and it can be applied at every level from news gathering to writing material, editing — all of this stuff can be automated. It can intermediate itself in very minute and very substantive ways that you might consider to be authorial in some ways.

The industry now has to reckon with how do you tell viewers about how you’re using it? If you are, what sort of disclosures do you offer there? And if you do disclose — I just read something today that the viewers want to know when it’s being employed, but they trust you less when you tell them. So, you know, you’ve got a real conundrum, there.

Yeah, really. Are you hip to what happened to Sports Illustrated?

Sports Illustrated, Gannett. I mean, those who have used it compositionally to write stories and yet, mind you, AP has been using it for years in that regard. They have these sort of templatized stories that they use to report earnings for a lot of small companies that allowed them to produce a lot more earnings coverage than they had been doing because they create a written template, and they plug in data points that are sort of scraped with the AI.

They did the same thing for minor league sports and baseball. And we’re talking like five or so years ago. It’s been out there, and they were fully transparent about its use there. Other groups are murkier in the way that they have used it.

Well, SI, which I consider a great journalistic brand. I don’t know what it is lately, I don’t read it. They were making up reporters. I mean, they were using stock photos and putting little blurbs at the end of the story. I mean…

And I still don’t think, as of this moment they have not come completely clean with what happened there. But it does enormous damage to the credibility of the brand. Of course, SI had some damage done, you know, going into this. And I think it’s often groups that are in dire straits, like Gannett, who are using it very liberally. But some TV station groups, look, many of the SVPs of news that I talked to in local station groups have a high, very elevated level of concern about it. They know they have to deal with it. They know it’s kind of fashioning into an arms race where someone is going to start using it and they’re going to get a competitive edge by doing so. So, they can’t just stick their head in the sand about it.

The stage that they are mostly at right now as groups is to form a sort of steering committee or some sort of internal apparatus that can start to assimilate all the information, the developments that are going on around this world — and they are coming daily, fast and thick — to try to get a handle on simply what is the narrative around this technology, how can it be used and what are the pitfalls we need to be aware of?

And there are also industry-wide consortia that are beginning to consolidate around this, around subsets of the AI issue, for instance, content authenticity, and we’ve had some podcasts and other material just this year about this subject.

How do you authenticate stuff because it’s so easy… AI can be weaponized as sort of tool of manipulation of content, and what do you do? How do you discern that? How do you prevent your own content from being in some way altered and misused once it’s out in the wild? And so, there are technologies being developed to watermark things once they’re disseminated, and there’s a sort of manifest that follows it. It’s extremely complicated, and it’s an arms race between the sort of bad actors using AI and the news organizations who want to use it to good effect.

Well, look, let me interrupt you. What would you advise the broadcasters? You say there’s sort of a downside to transparency, Right?

There is.

You can’t be too honest.

Well, so it seems. I mean, there was one report that found that viewers then have a wary eye that they raise around that. But there’s already a handful of news organizations who are wholly creating content with AI, that you can just get rid of reporters altogether.

This is one of the facets that’s going to have to be dealt with, and it does present, it should be really clear, that if companies broadly adopt generative AI into their newsrooms, it doesn’t seem possible that positions won’t be eliminated in the process. And those are positions that require a lot of critical intelligence.

And so, you know, I don’t want to say that producers all need to be worried about their job security per se. But the notion of a gen AI filling the many facets of the producer role is imminent and many other roles. You can have an AI-generated synthetic anchor or an avatar of one of your existing real human anchors, right now.

Well, TVNewsCheck has been sort of on the cutting edge of reporting that they can’t find producers. So, it sounds to me nobody’s going to lose their jobs, they’re just…

Probably not.

This may save stations.

Harry, I have a disclosure for you: You’ve been talking to an AI this whole time. I’m not actually, not actually me. It’s just my avatar. Just kidding. But it’s close. We’re close to that, and so the point is, broadcasters need to lean into this. They need to pay close attention, read everything they can. They should have a point person or group if they don’t have that now already. And these groups, these people are going to have to make some very consequential choices over the next months and year with regards to this technology.

Well, that’s great editorial fodder.

We’re all over it.

You should be.

I just want to bring up one last thing I think that we’re all going to obviously be looking at for next year and deeply concerned about, which is coverage of the 2024 election, because you have a very, very difficult needle to thread, even just looking through the lens of local television stations here where everything is politicized at every single level. You can’t just say, well, we’re local, we’re not national, we don’t have to worry about the same trust issues. They do. Mistrust has widened and it’s deeply impacted local news, and they cannot put their heads in the sand with regards to engaging the deeply polemicized viewerships that they have right now.

Trump is almost certain to be the Republican nominee and Biden the Democratic nominee. And with more and more utterances coming from Trump that are deeply, concerningly anti-democratic in nature, as in threatening the core tenants of the republic, stations have to wrestle with how they present that, that language, its consequences. What we know, in this particular candidacy, is issues that are raised that are very, very serious to the future of U.S. democracy as we have long known it.

They risk in engaging that to any degree utter alienation of Republican voters, for instance, and to abdicate in any way they risk alienating Democratic voters or just generally left-leaning voters who feel that that abdication is a failure of responsibility. And so, on that front, again, they’re going to have to make daily decisions about coverage. And they’ve struggled with this, and they continue to struggle with it about how to contextualize all of this. And how to get out of the horse race to talk about the larger issues that affect the state of the republic right now.

So, those are those are some serious, serious things that they’re going to have to grapple with, as well as the safety of their reporters. I mean, reporters are assaulted in small ways and large ways, much more than people realize in this country. It is a dangerous job. They’re in the crosshairs. People have been whipped up into a kind of frenzy and they feel very, very free about attacking verbally or otherwise or making threats on social media or in person reporters at every level.

And so, every single newsroom is going to have to develop protocols and keep iterating those protocols and have security with their reporters when they’re in situations that could become dangerous and so many more situations can become dangerous now.

OK, here’s a question for you, you want to pontificate, sir. Do broadcasters have a responsibility or are they liable? Because of the nature, I mean they’re going to take all this political advertising in next year, right? A lot of it is provocative, a lot of it is pretty nasty. It can get pretty nasty. Doesn’t that sort of fuel this conflict out there in the real world?

So, you’re sort of warning broadcasters that they’re going to have a tough time covering this election next year. At the same time, they’re sort of whipping up the electorate with just broadcasting those ads. I didn’t use the word responsible because they’re not, because of the way the law is written. They are not liable for a lot of what goes into those ads. Their obligation is they air them pretty much as they receive them. What do you think?

Well, like you said, their responsibilities are somewhat limited. They’re certainly not going to turn down that money. They need it badly. But, you know, it kind of also circles around to a broader media literacy problem that we have in this country where, you know, a lot of viewers conflate everything they see into one big kind of organism.

They don’t make these delineations. We’ve done a terrible job as a country, given how saturated we are with media. We have an electorate which is ill informed in many, many, many cases and conflates a lot of material. Of course, those problems are conflated by some news organizations themselves, particularly on cable, particularly in primetime, where this conflation of opinion and news is just wholly realized at this point.

So, we have that problem to untangle and no immediate solution presenting itself. If I could dictate something to the industry, I would advise trying to weave in media literacy efforts more often into their programing in small and large ways, if they could, to help viewers understand and unpack critically the things with which they are being presented.

And you can do that in all sorts of ways. But right now, this problem does face us immediately. And these are the dynamics that are already well in motion. And so, we’ve got to play the hand that we’ve been dealt.

I think that’s a good answer. Media literacy and broadcasters, I think, should do that. Again, this gets back to transparency. What they’re doing, what’s really happening out there, when the politicians say this, what do they really mean and not?

I don’t think they should stand in judgment just to know that, at the very least, know what the incentives that are driving media understand the economics of the business so viewers can sort of understand why they do some of the things that they do. I think that having a good industry-wide campaign for the industry, for broadcasters to undertake…

At the same moment, it should be clear that a lot of groups have made great leaps forward in just the last couple of years in the way that they’re covering stories, in realizing that they need to build transparency more into the process, what they’re showing viewers and showing them behind the curtain of news production a little bit more than they ever have, trying various creative ways to be more transparent.

And the product is everywhere that you can see of that nature, and there has been great improvement. They are meeting, trying to meet the moment in that sense. So, I’m optimistic that an effect of all of this has been that that most of the major groups have been introspective about their news product, iterating it much more dramatically than they have for decades.

Well, they are still considered the most trusted source of news, so they’ve got to be careful not to lose that.

Yes, exactly. And they know it. Well, I think a good note to leave it on is the prospect of trust and hope springs eternal. Harry, it’s been great talking with you once again and looking back and ahead to 2024. We’ll see you next year.

OK, yes, sir. See you then.

Thank you. And you can watch past episodes of Talking TV, at TVNewsCheck.com, as well as on our YouTube channel. We will be back in the new year with a whole slate of new Talking TV podcasts every Friday and look forward to seeing you then. Have a good new year.

The post Talking TV: Ghosts Of TV’s Christmas Past And Future In 2024 appeared first on TV News Check.

Mary Collins

A few weeks ago, a 2024 presidential candidate complained on social media that MSNBC was using “FREE government approved airwaves” to criticize that candidate. Of course, those working in the media industry understand that MSNBC is not a broadcast network and does not use the airwaves to deliver its content. Further, since the Fairness Doctrine was repealed during the late 1980s, broadcasters are not obligated to provide more than one viewpoint on contestable issues. In ways both good and bad, the business of broadcasting is just not what it used to be.

The competitive environment for video news was already changing before the FCC discarded the Fairness Doctrine. National cable news channels, such as MSNBC, gave viewers in-depth national reporting that broadcasters simply didn’t have the time to cover. Then came access to the World Wide Web, which could offer information (and misinformation) on-demand and from around the globe.

Broadcasters have always had the responsibility of providing local content to their communities. This is part of the commitment they make to receive an FCC license to use the broadcast airwaves. It’s also what makes them valued in the community. People want community and regional news, weather, sports and traffic information from sources they can trust. Local on-air talent become familiar faces and earn viewers’ confidence. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons the Chicago Tribune, for example, features weather reports from the local ABC station’s meteorologists instead of picking up the information from a national weather service. They want to reinforce the perception of being a local newspaper.

This confidence in local broadcasting is not just my observation. Pew Research’s Local TV News Fact Sheet, published in September 2023, states: “Television remains a common place for Americans to get their news, and one of the most preferred sources for local news specifically.”

Despite this, the research company’s News Platform Fact Sheet, published in November, says that 86% of U.S. adults often or sometimes get news on their phone, on a tablet or by using a computer. Further, as of 2023, 58% of those surveyed preferred to get their news on a digital device, while those favoring viewing on a television were only 27% of the respondents.

The picture becomes murkier still when one factors in the various offerings that now make up the television ecosystem. The choice is no longer simply broadcast or cable/MVPD. With connected televisions (CTVs), consumers have the choice of AVOD (Advertising-supported Video On Demand); SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand); TVOD (Transactional Video On Demand), which includes, among other extensions, both the option of streaming pay-per-view and in-stream purchases; HVOD (Hybrid Video On Demand); and other options that I’ve either skipped or are in development. CTVs also supports FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television) channels, which are programmed linearly and internet-delivered.

When looking at FAST channels, it’s interesting to note that news offerings significantly outperform other options, despite being underrepresented. In October, media commentator Evan Shapiro posted a graphic, using data from OMDIA, showing that news, which accounts for only 18.3% of total FAST channels, commands 53.8% of hours viewed and 47.7% of served advertising impressions. Further, according to the accompanying blog, the average length of time a consumer spends with a FAST news channel is longer than that spent on all “comparable channels.” Shapiro further comments, “News appears to be generating whatever appointment viewing looks like in FAST.”

But remember, Pew found that 86% of U.S. adults often or sometimes consume news on a non-television digital device. More concerning is that 58% prefer to get their news using such a device. Advertisers are aware of these trends and are adjusting their spending accordingly

At the beginning of this month, in a post called Tick Tock, Shapiro shared Dentsu’s 2023 projected year-over-year ad trends. There is revenue growth, but it’s not in traditional media or linear television. Specifically, Dentsu projects that traditional media will be down 2.0% from 2022, dollars spent on linear TV advertising will shrink by 1.9%, but digital will be up 7.2%, search dollars will grow 7.2%, CTV’s increase will be 20.2% and retail ad spend will rise by a total of 22% between 2022 and 2023.

What I take from all of this is that there are great opportunities for content-producing local media groups, if they choose to embrace them. Look at those projected increases for ad spending in digital and CTV. It is local video groups, television stations, that own the news programming consumers find most valuable — local weather, traffic and crime are in the top three. The challenge is in figuring out how to repackage and monetize this content while offering it in the various ways consumers now prefer. The market is there. We’ve already seen the successful  example of Capitol Broadcasting’s launch of WRAL+, which includes FAST channel distribution, podcasting and an over-the-air offering.

If you are a local broadcaster making New Year’s resolutions, I recommend including one about leveraging the value of your local news content.

Former president and CEO of the Media Financial Management Association and its BCCA subsidiary, Mary M. Collins is a change agent, entrepreneur and senior management executive. She can be reached at MaryMCollins1@comcast.net.

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