“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.

Katie Wilcox

Katie Wilcox, executive producer of investigations for the Tegna-owned NBC affiliate KPNX Phoenix, says those stories are among the ones newsgroups today “get a bad rep for.” But while attending the annual conference organized by the nonprofit group Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) in 2022, gun violence emerged as the single most important topic reporters need to cover in conversations between Wilcox and her Tegna colleagues.

“It is so consuming of our local news,” Wilcox says. “There are too many shootings, too many families that are coming to the news, too many people that are suffering.”

However, the question of how to cover gun violence in a fresh, compelling way remained.

Choosing A Timeframe

After some deliberation, Wilcox says she and her fellow reporters set out to “give a voice to people who often feel forgotten” once the next area shooting occurs. Their significant programming initiative about the topic would focus on a single week that would be relevant to viewers.

They chose the unofficial first week of summer, beginning with Memorial Day Weekend, for their focus because, according to data published by the Gun Violence Archive, it was the first seven-day period of 2022 in which 1,000 shootings were reported in the U.S.

“It’s kind of cyclical,” Wilcox says. “Shootings tend to increase over the summer, but definitely we’ve been seeing an unsettling trend of increasing gun violence since the pandemic.”

The 7 Days, 1,000 Shootings initiative, encouraging local Tegna markets to revisit stories of shootings from the week around Memorial Day of 2022, was launched. Ultimately, reporters in eight markets — KPNX Phoenix, KUSA-KTVD Denver, WTHR Indianapolis, WCNC Charlotte, KHOU Houston, WWL New Orleans, WTSP Tampa and WBNS Columbus — chronicled how shooting victims, their loved ones and communities have fared in the year since their respective violent events occurred, among other related issues.

The new segments aired between May 29 and June 4 of this year. Some markets produced multiple stories, and they looked at reasons why many shootings go unsolved (in places like Tampa), the fact that people of color represent the majority of shooting suspects and victims (as is the case in Charlotte) and whether gun violence could be treated as a country-wide public health crisis.

Diving Deeper

Cierra Putman

Susan Batt

Cierra Putman, investigative reporter for WTHR Indianapolis, worked on three pieces alongside special projects producer Susan Batt, primarily focused on the plight of survivors.

“The majority of people who are shooting victims, they survive,” Putman points out. “I wanted to show people how [shootings are] impacting individual families, individual communities, because I wanted people to start thinking about it that way as opposed to, ‘Oh well, that’s one person who’s no longer with us.’ No, these shootings have long-term effects on people and sometimes we don’t talk about that.”

“It is imperative for our community, when we’re talking about this particular topic, to go beyond the who, what, where, when, why,” says Katie Moore, an investigative reporter and anchor at WWL New Orleans. “The how has to be part of that conversation and I think that the why needs to be explored more than just: ‘Police have identified x, y and z as a motive.’”

Moore’s contribution to the 7 Days, 1,000 Shootings project disclosed disheartening statistics about the high rate of gun violence in New Orleans, as well as Louisiana writ large, which significantly outpaces states like Texas (by fourfold) and California (eightfold). She also covered the concern over increasing gun thefts across the U.S. Predictably, many of those guns end up playing a role in violent acts.

Katie Moore

But Moore’s piece started with a particularly sad story about an 80-year-old woman who was shot and killed while attending her grandson’s high school graduation ceremony. The octogenarian was struck down by a stray bullet that was fired after members of two families, including a 15-year-old, turned to firearms to end a verbal argument. Instead, they took the life of Augustine Greenwood and devastated her surviving relatives.

“If people can’t hear the stories of the people who were affected by [gun violence], what is ever going to stop it?” Moore says. “We’ve had policing experts over and over say, ‘You can’t arrest your way out of this problem.’ So, the solution has to lie somewhere else, and by telling these stories in our communities, that’s one of the ways where we can make a big difference.”

Some of the Tegna packages shed light on possible solutions to the gun violence problem — the type of coverage consumers positively respond to. For example, Nate Morabito, investigative reporter at WCNC Charlotte, reported about one local hospital that already has a program that treats gun violence as a public health issue. There, doctors connect patients to services for secure housing and other benefits. It’s a model already happening in Morabito’s community and could be scalable elsewhere.

Back in Phoenix, at KPNX, one of Wilcox’s 7 Days, 1,000 Shootings pieces analyzed cases with teen victims. The mother of a friend to one of the teens killed in the Phoenix area last year was the source of one proposed solution. “I want to see stricter laws regarding the parents,” she told Wilcox. “When a child has a gun, either on social media, or walking the street or being caught in a car, the parents need to be held accountable for their children. I want to see — in high schools, in junior high and elementary schools — a hotline where you can call about a child who has access to a gun or who is talking about firearms.”

Wilcox says the audience response to KPNX’s 7 Days, 1,000 Shootings was “overwhelming.” The station fielded many messages from local teens telling stories of other friends of theirs who were shot, she says. The teens also revealed that they are nervous about going to school, believing gun violence could erupt there at any time.

A New Context

Tegna is now piecing together a 7 Days, 1,000 Shootings production geared toward a national audience. Composed of parts from local packages, it will air in the coming weeks on the group’s streaming channels. The range of stories — from a single week in just a handful of markets — all stacked together will provide deeper context and exhibit the upsettingly wide scope of the problem much more effectively than those nightly quick-hit pieces in A-blocks.

Ellen Crooke, SVP of news at Tegna, is proud of the investigative reporters, as well as their producers, who generated this critical collection of content. She volunteers that all she had to do as a Tegna leader was get out of their way.

Ellen Crooke

“It’s not mandating something or telling our journalists or our stations what to do but allowing our journalists to take the stories they’re passionate about and go with it,” she says. “There was very little oversight. It was about clearing the path for our journalists to do powerful work, and to be led by fellow journalists, like Katie, that’s when magic can happen.”

That trust from the top wasn’t forged by accident. Susan Batt, the special projects producer out of Indianapolis who worked with Cierra Putman on the WTHR packages, says Tegna is fortunate to “have an incredible team of investigative reporters” across its markets. With that freedom, Batt says they were allowed to “find the stories that spoke to their needs in their communities.”

“Because they allowed us to have so much power in the way we told these stories, we were able to take on this issue in a different way,” Putman says. “I was very thankful for that.”

The post Tegna Snaps Gun Violence Reporting Out Of Its Fog appeared first on TV News Check.

His remarks about the historic Capitol insurrection emanated from a small studio the network had been using throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The space had given Pergram and his colleagues a chance to cover the Hill during a most consequential campaign season when circumstances made such work perhaps more challenging than ever.

But on that day, the studio — located in the basement of the very building that was under siege by Trump supporters, its doors barricaded, its windows covered by coats — could have turned into a death trap. Such harrowing scenarios have apparently become something of an uncomfortable norm for journalists, with reports of physical attacks against them skyrocketing over the course of this past year, compelling industry leaders to become extra-vigilant when it comes to safety.

Fox News reporter Chad Pergram on covering the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6: “There were a couple plans that I had in my head, a couple places you could go to hide, and also a tunnel that goes to the Library of Congress, underground, that if I had to I could probably get out that way.”

“You have riots and demonstrations that periodically get out of control,” Pergram, Fox News’ Congressional correspondent, says. “But the idea that you have the Vice President in the building, presiding over the Senate, the Speaker in the building, and they’re certifying the Electoral College [during a joint session of Congress], I’m not sure that everybody understands the import of that and therefore the severity of what happened.”

Officials were evacuated. A Capitol policeman and a rioter were killed amid the violence. Pipe bombs were recovered from the area and dozens of arrests were made as local police and National Guard soldiers restored order.

However, Pergram was able to broadcast measured reports throughout the day and deep into the night from inside of the Capitol Building because, all along, he was confident he could ultimately keep himself and his crew safe.

“There were a couple plans that I had in my head, a couple places you could go to hide,” Pergram says, “and also a tunnel that goes to the Library of Congress, underground, that if I had to I could probably get out that way.”

Knowledge of such escape routes comes with Pergram’s nearly 30 years of experience covering Capitol Hill. But such keen awareness is something that every TV news reporter must bring with them into the field today.

‘Staggering’ Attacks on Journalists

“Never has it been a more dangerous time to be a journalist in the modern history of the United States than it is right now,” says Dan Shelley, executive director of the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA).

In addition to sponsoring the Edward R. Murrow awards, the RTDNA also conducts safety training as well as research. In a recent RTDNA survey of nationwide newsrooms, more than one-fifth of TV newsrooms disclosed that at least one attack was made on an employee in 2020.

Shelley calls that number “staggering,” and evidence of field reporter peril doesn’t end there.

Dan Shelley

The Reporters Committee For Freedom of the Press, another advocacy group that also provides legal services, released a reporter safety study of its own, which indicated that 438 journalists had been physically attacked last year — more than three times the number of assaults on journalists recorded the previous three years combined.

“What we’re hearing from journalists is that they feel like being visibly identified as press, which has always been a best practice [for safety], makes them feel like they have a bullseye, that they’ve got a target on their backs,” says Sarah Matthews, senior staff attorney at the Reporters Committee. “It’s just a more hostile environment.”

Though distrust in the media was already on the rise before Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president and began his rhetorical war against journalists, Shelley says the RTDNA has since seen “a dramatic uptick in the number of threats, cases of harassment, assault and arrests of journalists.”

“And it persists to this day,” he adds.

The Anti-Media Toll

Matthews also partially attributes the “shocking” number of attacks on journalists, be they physical, verbal or of the social media variety, to the now “years of public officials” — not limited to former President Trump — “verbally attacking members of the news media, and trying to undermine credible, legitimate reporting by calling it ‘fake news,’ by calling members of the media ‘enemies of the people.’ ”

“It just takes a toll,” Matthews continues, “and there’s a trickle-down effect where you start seeing people on the ground repeating this anti-media language.”

All this tension served as a backdrop to the coverage of 2020’s generational news events, including the election, the pandemic and, of course, the social justice protests.

Matthews says, in a way, it “makes sense that with the increase in protests” there would be some surge in violations of reporter safety. “All the same, we didn’t previously see police targeting journalists at this level,” she adds. “That feels new.”

And it is.

According to the Reporters Committee study, in 2018, 11 journalists were arrested; two years ago, the figure was nine, but in 2020, 139 journalists were arrested. All but 10 of the arrests last year took place at social justice protests.

How such outcomes are even possible in a free society — with journalists often sporting press credentials, holding microphones and existing as part of a team that includes members who man bulky, expensive camera equipment — is beyond the RTDNA’s Shelley.

Sarah Matthews

“It has happened unwittingly,” Shelley says of reporter arrests. “But unfortunately, it’s far-too-often happened when the officers know, or have a reasonable degree of certainty, that the person they’re arresting is a journalist; they’re not a participant in any march or protest that may be going on.”

Journalists Victims Of ‘Kettling’?

One explanation for some of these arrests is the police tactic of “kettling,” when a team of officers surround a group of demonstrators and execute a mass detainment before making individual arrests of everyone in the crowd.

Last June, at the height of the social justice protest movement, and when kettling was being used by police departments across the country, USA Today called the tactic “controversial.” Article sources also said there’s evidence to suggest that kettling, in fact, escalates conflict.

Both Shelley and Matthews said some journalists who were arrested last year found themselves caught in a kettle while reporting on the protests.

Having A Plan In Place

Ruschell Boone, a field reporter for 17 years, currently with Spectrum News’ New York City cable news channel, NY1, avoided arrest and any bodily harm in 2020. But like Pergram at the Capitol, even though she says she was embedded in the social justice protests last year out of a desire to have viewers feel like they, too, were “inside” of them, both she and her crew were prepared for such work.

“Each night when we went to the protests, we had a discussion about what happens if we get separated, what happens if we start to see unfamiliar faces as the evening went on, what happens if we start to feel unsafe,” Boone says. “‘Do we pull out as a team?’ ‘Do we pull out individually?’ Those are all questions you have to have [answered] because you have to have a plan just in case.”

A rule of thumb for Boone and her crew, should chaos erupt into a stampede, for example, is to “hug the nearest tree.

Ruschell Boone

“Nobody’s gonna run into the tree,” Boone explains. “Or if we were in an area where they didn’t have a lot of trees: the nearest bodega, the nearest corner yard or corner store, or if we were on the street and we could see what was happening, we’d pick a color car where we’d meet up.”

Familiarity between a reporter and their crew can prove valuable as well. Boone says sometimes she can communicate with her photographer with a look, signaling to them when it’s time to leave an area where security feels uncertain.

Working In Teams

“Field crews need to immediately leave any scene where they don’t feel safe,” says Sandy Breland, SVP of local media at Gray Television. She says her company encourages its general managers to send employees out into the field in pairs or teams of three, to help better protect their safety.

“Stressing situational awareness” is another approach Gray takes, Breland says. “Knowing where you are at all times, potential exit routes, thinking strategically about where you park.”

Gray field reporters may be asked to stay in constant contact with their news directors; they might even pool resources with rival stations. Other “counterintuitive” safety measures — as Breland calls them, for they may go against reporter inclinations to “run where the action is” — include alternative approaches to coverage, such as drone shots or using smaller GoPro cameras.

“Live shots are not a given,” Breland says. Such decisions “should be made on a case-by-case basis,” by local news directors, she observes.

Sandy Breland

Gray also adheres to a safety policy that says if security is hired to help protect reporters and other employees, they must be unarmed. Security is on the scene to serve as an extra set of eyes and to de-escalate potential conflicts, Breland says, and “if there’s a sense that armed security is needed to send a crew in, then it’s not worth the risk, and we need to look for alternative ways to cover it,” with drones or a camera positioned atop a building, for example.

Such mindfulness is indicative of Gray’s belief that, according to Breland, employee safety is a “top priority.”

“It’s always been safety first,” Breland says. “Given the unprecedented attacks we’ve seen on journalists the past year, we approach those conversations more strategically now.”

Journalist Safety First

Ellen Crooke, SVP of news at Tegna, echoes this safety-first sentiment.

“We have this phrase at Tegna,” she says. “There is no story, there is no shot, there is no video, no picture, no interview that is more important than the health and safety of our journalists.”

Though she would not disclose specifics about field reporter safety protocols at Tegna, because, as she said, “sharing those details could keep them from being as safe as they need to be,” Crooke stresses that it is an area where the company has made robust investment, including the issuance of safety guidelines to employees and the coordination of safety training.

“We work tirelessly to keep from putting our journalists in harm’s way,” she says.

That’s a relief to an advocate like the RTDNA’s Shelley, who says many newsgroup leaders are proactive in this area of reporter safety and, “thank God,” don’t need to hear him evangelize about it.

“What I do say,” he continues, “is that ‘You serve your community, and you have a responsibility to seek and report the truth on behalf of your viewers, your listeners and your readers. But you must do so safely, and you must do so responsibly.’

Ellen Crooke

“If you get attacked, if you get arrested, if you get assaulted … you’re the victim in that situation, but even more important than that, so are your viewers, listeners and readers,” Shelley continues. “They are denied access to information about what public officials, police officers and others are doing in their name. And that’s the critical role of journalists.”

An Omnipresent Threat

For reporters like Boone and Pergram, though, concerns over safety in the field are nothing new.

“We’re covering a lot of stories that are not very pleasant, and sometimes we’re going to places where people don’t want us to be, but the story has to be told,” Boone says. “There can be a threat. That threat can happen very quickly. It can happen spontaneously.”

When asked if reporter safety is of a higher concern today than it’s been at any other time in recent history, Pergram recalls the shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise, an incident Pergram covered in sweats because it occurred on a baseball field close to his home, and he’d been exercising at a nearby gym when he first heard about the violence.

“I was called away from a wedding some years ago, when I got word that Gabby Giffords had been shot,” Pergram adds.

He remembers July 1998, when two Capitol police officers were shot and killed, not terribly far from where he was holed up 22 years later as an attempted insurrection unfolded above him.

The ’98 shooting led to the installation of a fence around the building, which remains in place to this day. But when the security measure first went up, Pergram likened it in a piece to something out of a war zone and compared Congressional reporters to war correspondents.

Considering all these events in totality, Pergram offers: “I hate to say it, I’ve been at this for a while now, but these things, unfortunately, happen on a regular basis.”

The post Reporter Safety A Story That Won’t Go Away appeared first on TV News Check.

Ellen Crooke, VP of news, says the reckoning that protests across the U.S. compelled has hit close to home at Tegna. “Racial equality in our newsrooms and in news leadership is not going to happen organically,” she says, pledging to improve diversification efforts, starting with news leadership.

In an interview with TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp, Crooke also looks to some of the pandemic’s lasting impacts on local TV news, from virtual interviews becoming a permanent convention to shifting focus off the crime blotter and toward more pressing viewer concerns. She says Tegna’s Verify fact-checking enterprise has seen “exponential” growth in the months since COVID-19’s onset and that down ballot races will be a crucial focus for local newsroom during Election 2020.

An edited transcript.

In response to Black Lives Matter protests across the country, Tegna has facilitated a number of segments about race and racism along with what comes next at many of its stations. How has this moment overall led to any reexaminations of race and how it is framed within your news organization?

It has been an historic moment for news when you take COVID-19 and the protests in the Black Lives Matter movement for racial equality. I believe the latter is the story that will change our world and have the greatest impact. Our coverage of that is so important. There is the covering of the demonstrations, but we believe that was a moment in time. We’re focusing on getting beyond the protests to engage in deep work in our newsrooms to get to an understanding of why the protests happened.

Every station makes their own decision in how they are going to go about it. It is unbelievable what work is being done in the field such as at WWL in New Orleans with their special series of reports on “the talk,” which is about the talk that Black parents have to have with their children. It is one of the most profound pieces of local journalism I have seen. There are so many more.

The Black Lives Matter movement ignited clarity about racial inequality for the whole world, and it certainly did for Tegna, too. The most important thing that we realize internally is that racial equality in our newsrooms and in news leadership is not going to happen organically. Racial diversity and inclusion have always been one of our core values, but we haven’t been intentional enough. We have been discussing how we are going to move towards greater representation of the people that we serve in our communities and how we create a lasting education for our journalists about how race and people of color are covered and how we can do better at that. It starts with having more diversity in our news leadership.

With no end in sight to the pandemic, we are still in for the long haul on remote production. What elements of that way of working may Tegna hold on to even when the pandemic ends?

There are so many elements of it. We had two issues: employee safety and to continue to provide ongoing coverage on all platforms so that we didn’t miss a beat. Within days, we had anchors, weather people, producers and editors all working remotely. If someone had come to us before the pandemic and said we are going to turn 80%-95% of your operation remotely, that might have taken a year to plan out. That nimbleness is something that will stay with us. We are going to be stronger in breaking news and our ability to move to bring information to our community no matter what the situation or where our journalists stand.

We were one of the first to have a strict policy for our photojournalists and reporters of no in-person interviews. All of our interviews were done via Zoom, Skype or Facetime, and if there was a rare occasion that a news director approved an in-person interview, it was done outside and at least six feet away. That opened up our ability to talk to more people, to make sure we had more voices in all of our stories. We weren’t confined by who we could get to in 20 minutes or less. That will stick with us.

The other big thing that will stay with us content-wise is working on combating disinformation and misinformation. Our mission is to seek the truth, but we are also responsible for stopping the spread of false information. Several years ago, we launched Verify, a fact-checking initiative that originated at one of our innovation summits. Viewers are able to send in a story or something that they heard, and because local journalists are the most trusted source of news, they [help determine if] it is true or not. We have seen huge growth in Verify over the past few months. We have a national team Verify team made up of a reporter, editor and five fact checkers around the country, so along with the local Verify stories, this team will do those that can be shared across the whole company. Since the pandemic, it has grown exponentially.

Tegna was the first major station group to announce pay cuts and furloughs in early April because of the pandemic. Do you anticipate those continuing or expanding to include any layoffs in your news organization?

It is beyond my jurisdiction to discuss decisions regarding that, but our CEO said that furloughs were done early on to protect jobs in our company, equally, across the board. We heard from a lot of employees that were glad to do it this way [because] we were saving jobs in the long run. At this point, no one has lost their job at Tegna because of the pandemic. It is not my place to say what will happen in the future.

With the election now moving into high gear amid the pandemic, how are you adjusting your coverage strategies in light of the coronavirus?

Our local newsrooms in some ways cover the presidential race, but it really is about the 435 House seats, 22 Senate seats, the 11 governors that are up for grabs — those are the ones that our newsrooms are focusing on and have the most power to change or improve a voter’s life. That has really not been affected by COVID. We have stations holding debates. KVUE in Austin held runoff debates that were shared all across Texas. Those type of debates look a lot different when we have people remotely and they are not in the studio.  But with these debates and discussions with our candidates, we can get more input from our audience and voters as to what they are interested in.

Viewership in local news is up everywhere on all platforms, and so our political coverage in local elections is being viewed more than ever before. The Republican convention in Jacksonville was pretty much canceled. It was supposed to be in Charlotte and then Jacksonville, and those are our two stations, so that has changed. It allows them to focus more on local elections.

In addition to potentially hosting town halls and debates, local television has an important opportunity during this pandemic election to share with viewers some vital information about where and how to vote. We have more consolidated polling stations along with sharing mail-in voting information. What do you see as Tegna’s role there?

Every station makes their own decisions. We are working on get-out-to-vote messages that would go across all of our stations. It is not taking any political side, just the importance of each individual vote. Voter suppression or inability for everyone to cast their vote is something being covered by all stations across the board locally, where that is a huge issue.  Local journalists are the most important communicators of why it is important to vote, what races in their communities are important, who those candidates are and making sure that everyone has the ability and the right to vote. Communicating all of that is one of the most important things that our newsrooms are doing right now.

How do you see Tegna’s coverage of the pandemic evolving with its longevity in mind? 

In the beginning, our mission was facts, not fear. It was putting things in perspective so that people would trust us. As time went on, the disinformation around it was so important. Our visitors to Verify in March through June were 9.4 million, up 77% from the months before it. Video plays were up 335% from the four months before. We saw a huge change from the beginning of the pandemic to now of people wanting to have things fact checked. You could see that their trust in news reports was changing.

The other thing that really changed was something like 90% of Americans were closely watching the COVID-19 numbers in their market. People want to know the percentage up, percentage down. How does that compare to hospitalizations? Are deaths up or down? We tried to respond to that with the ability for each one of our stations to make graphs that can immediately go on television or on social media [with] the latest information from their county or state. Those numbers are [presented] in context. We have a hired a fulltime person during this pandemic just to analyze numbers in every single one of our markets to help give backup to our stations.

Our stations have had to create data champions to be able to really take a look at it. So that is a huge change that has happened from the beginning of this: our responsibility in making sure those numbers are accurate, that we are holding politicians accountable when they are talking about the numbers and that we are putting those numbers in context so that people can trust them.

So you are ramping up your data visualizations. It sounds like you are centralizing a bit of that, too?

We centralized working on a format that every station could use because one of the issues with these numbers is there is no uniform way to report them. Every county and state is releasing them in different ways. Our team in Denver does graphics and data visualizations for the whole company and created a system so that every individual station — 62 stations, 51 markets and 49 newsrooms at Tegna — could create their own graphics within minutes.

It has been such a profoundly stressful transformative period for local TV news. From your vantage point, where are you starting to see how it may be permanently reshaped by what is happening now?

Both the pandemic and the movement for racial equality across our country have had a profound and lasting impact on the content in Tegna.  First and foremost, our goal at Tegna will be to have more diversity in our news leadership and people who are making decisions that is more representative of the people in the communities that we serve. We are committed to making that lasting change.

We are listening and talking to our audience more, and there has been a shift from what has traditionally been what local news [is] about toward what our audience needs. We are more in tune with them. There are more tools now in place where our audience can speak to us directly and ask questions.

Journalists have been notorious for dealing with a lot of stress as a badge of honor. We don’t talk about it. We are tough. We push through. It is what we signed up for. Because of the unprecedented stress that our employees have been under, we as a company are more in tune to the mental health and well-being of our journalists than we ever have been before.

We have had sessions to help our news leaders deal with the stress. We have offered free sessions for our employees and their families, and I see this across the industry. We are acknowledging it and working with that, and it will make us all better journalists and better able to serve our communities.

The post TVN Executive Session | Tegna: BLM Will Have Lasting Newsroom Impact appeared first on TV News Check.

Ellen Crooke, Tegna’s VP of news, says the company convenes a group of its most ardent innovators every few months, brainstorming and then piloting ideas for content worthy of Netflix-like binge watching. Teams out of its Atlanta, Houston and Washington stations have been leading the way with work that has garnered awards and broken through to younger demographics.

In an interview with TVNewsCheck Special Projects Editor Michael Depp, Crooke said that an aggressive social media strategy is essential to boost ratings, old-school anchors are a thing of the past and transparency is essential in an age of media mistrust.

An edited transcript:

I understand Tegna has been having success reaching younger male demographics with its news content on YouTube. Where do social platforms fit into your news and audience strategies right now?

We can talk about the platforms, but we’re seeing success because we’re focusing on the content that’s going on those platforms. If we do not change the content that we’re creating to be more innovative, interesting and exciting, then it doesn’t matter what platform we’re on.

We have a simple mission: to create more exciting, shareable content. We’re seeing success on YouTube, but also on television, Facebook and over the top. And that is because we are putting our innovators — our next generation of journalists — in charge of the transformation.

We’re bringing in innovators from around the company — not department heads or leaders. They’re people who are passionate about changing what local news has become. They’re next-generation journalists, and we bring them [in] every few months. They come up with hundreds of ideas over a three-day period, we let them vote on the top 10 and then we support those pilots with funding and time.

You’re talking about iterating on multiple platforms?

Exactly — digital, episodic, investigative work out of the assembly line of local news. We put teams together and create in-depth content that is not your typical local news fare.

[They are] set aside so that they’re not in the daily mix, and their mission is to get people to binge watch local news. These teams have won national Murrows and Cronkite awards. It’s incredible the type of work they get to produce when you say do it digitally first.

Doing television first puts you into that local news format. They think of creating these episodes that people would want to watch like a Netflix series.

So, these are produced for digital first, but do they find a television iteration?

After it has been released and people start talking about it, then it turns into television. [Some examples are] The Triangle, which is about heroin in some of the wealthiest suburbs of Atlanta; Charlie Foxtrot, which changed laws and saved lives around our veterans losing benefits; and Selling Girls, which exposed child sex trafficking. They all had a television component, but not until after the digital component was realized.

Where are these teams based?

We created the first team in Atlanta, and it was just a group of people who were passionate and had gotten kind of sick of doing the old-fashioned, regular television news. They did some amazing work. Then we built a team in Houston. And then we’ve just created another team in Washington that’s working on their first piece.

This is all predicated on the idea that the traditional local newscast is antiquated or has problems. Drilling into those newscasts, where do they need a revamp?

The whole thing, top to bottom. One great example of that is Next with Kyle Clark at KUSA [Denver]. They decided to take their 6 p.m. show and blow it up and create content that is interesting, different and smart. It involves really great investigative work and commentary on the day’s news.

It lost audience first, that traditional older audience, but our goal was to bring in new audiences, and that’s exactly what happened. That newscast now is the No. 1 local television newscast in all of Denver. We’ve done the same thing with Breaking the News in Minneapolis. But we’re transforming newscasts all over the country.

Our morning newscast at WFAA [Dallas] has been transformed. There’s not a robotic formula that we’re having them go through. Each one is unique and different. But one of the common factors is, it’s social media first. It’s social conversation before, during and after these newscasts. It’s an ongoing conversation that happens before, during and after the show.

A large part of your role is hiring the right talent to lead your broadcasts. What are you looking for in an anchor today to connect with audiences?

I would say that word “anchor” is really becoming out of date. We like to think of them as influencers. They’re smart, quick on their feet, able to have a point of view. They’re not just people who sit behind a desk and read a prompter. That day is forever gone.

If you take a look at the success we’re having at WUSA [Washingon] in the morning, the host [Reese Waters] has a background in standup comedy. He is witty and smart and able to take the day’s news and give you a fresh perspective. We like to think of them as not just newscasts anymore, but as live events.

How are you tackling the general climate of hostility towards the mainstream media and audience mistrust?

Trust with our journalists is perhaps one of the biggest concerns that any news organization has right now. It’s really important for all of us to understand that this problem of trust with the media started well before the current administration took office. So Tegna is working on good quality, smart, transparent work.

One of the things that’s really taken off that came out of our innovation summit is a program called Verify. We asked people to send us content that they’re seeing where they wonder if it’s true or not and we work with them to verify it. We show our sources up front. It’s a regular segment that plays on social media, television and is something that people can interact with, and each station does its own version.

To pull everything off that you’re describing, it seems that you need to lay a lot of your local resources against social media platforms. There’s been skepticism for years about being too invested in those channels because they’re not owned and operated and the monetization isn’t there. How do you convince the brass to get behind this strategy when so much is contingent on working with outside channels?

Because that’s where our audience is. In order to have them relate to us, see our product, become fans and begin to interact with us, we need to speak to them where they are. And they are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.

Have you yet to see in any way a positive correlation between your volume of social activity in a given market and your local ratings?

Absolutely, yes. WFAA’s morning show would be one example. It has just in the past year had a complete reboot. We changed the graphics and the music and brought in different hosts, but one of the biggest changes is we really began to engage with the audience before, during and after the show. That’s shown a direct correlation to the increase in their ratings, and we’ve seen that at WXIA in Atlanta, at KARE in Minneapolis and KSDK in St. Louis.  In all of those our morning ratings have seen great growth over the past year.

At the executive level at other broadcasters, the position of news VP is sometimes now getting converged with marketing VP. What do you think of that shift and what it means about the industry at this moment?

We aren’t combining that. At Tegna, we have incredible marketers and we believe that having strong brands at our stations is perhaps one of the most important things you can do to have vital and relevant content for your market.

It’s important to have journalists understand marketing and how to get our message across. We have individual teams, but we are cross-training and understanding. In order to lead multiple newsrooms in these days, you have to have that sense of marketing.

The post Tegna Wants Local News Binge Watchers appeared first on TV News Check.

“Ellen is a passionate and innovative leader who is committed to reinventing local journalism in this digital age,” said Dave Lougee, president, Gannett Broadcasting.

Crooke has been with Gannett since 2002 when she joined WGRZ Buffalo, N.Y., as VP of news. She then joined WXIA in 2008. The station has received 21 regional Edward R. Murrow Awards and more than 150 Emmy nominations during her six years leading the newsroom.

“No group of broadcasters is more poised or more committed to shaping the future of local news than Gannett,” said Crooke, “I am honored to work alongside Michael and help lead our stations forward.”

Prior to her time with Gannett, Crooke was news director at WNDU South Bend, Ind. She’s also worked as assistant news director at WHAS Louisville, Ky., which is now owned by Gannett, and as a producer at WOKR Rochester, N.Y., and WTEN Albany, N.Y.

Crooke is a graduate of the State University of New York at Geneseo.

The post Ellen Crooke Named Gannett Bcstg. News VP appeared first on TV News Check.