“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.

“We are here to send a message to the country and, quite frankly, to the world: The free press is a pillar, maybe the pillar, of a free society, not the enemy,” Biden said in his speech.

The president and first lady Jill Biden, upon arriving at the Washington Hilton on Saturday, met privately with the parents of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been imprisoned in Russia since March. He was charged with spying, despite strong denials from his employer and the U.S. government. Some guests wore buttons with “Free Evan” printed on them.

Also among the 2,600 people attending the gala was Debra Tice, the mother of Austin Tice, who has not been heard from since disappearing at a checkpoint in Syria in 2012. U.S. officials say they operate under the assumption that he is alive and are working to try to bring him home.

“Journalism is not a crime,” Biden said. “Evan and Austin should be released immediately along with every other American detained abroad.” He said: “I promise you, I am working like hell to get them home.”

The Bidens also made a beeline for Brittney Griner, the WNBA star and Olympic gold medalist who was detained in Russia for nearly 10 months last year before her release in a prisoner swap. Griner attended with her wife, Cherelle, as guests of CBS News.

“This time last year we were praying for you, Brittney,” Biden said to the basketball star.

The annual black-tie dinner drew a wide array of celebrities and media moguls to Washington, with parties being held across the capital. Among those in attendance were actor Liev Schreiber, singer John Legend and his wife, Chrissy Teigen, the model and television personality.

Actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger opened the dinner with a pre-taped video about the importance of a free and independent press, calling reporters an “ally of the people.” Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were seated on the stage along with comedian Roy Wood Jr., a correspondent for “The Daily Show,” who was the featured entertainer.

While Biden spent the majority of his speech focused on the issue of press freedom, he also jabbed at some of his most vocal political critics. The occasion is a familiar and comfortable one for Biden, who attended several of the dinners as vice president to Barack Obama. The Washington event returned last year after being sidelined by the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Biden was the first president in six years to accept the invitation after Donald Trump shunned the event while in office.

But this year, he came not only as the commander in chief but as a presidential contender.

He started his punchlines with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, taking aim at a recent bill Republicans passed that would lift the debt ceiling in exchange for a series of budget cuts, including some of Biden’s key legislative achievements.

“The last time Republicans voted for something that hapless it took 15 tries,” Biden said, referring to the gruesome fight McCarthy endured to become speaker in January.

And he didn’t stop there, going after Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch about his age. “And you call me old?” he told the crowd. Murdoch is 92; Biden, 80.

Biden even made a couple of self-deprecating jokes, mostly surrounding criticism of his age as he mounts a second bid for reelection. “I believe in the First Amendment and not just because my good friend Jimmy Madison wrote it,” he said to a roaring crowd.

Wood, who took the stage after Biden, also zeroed in on the president’s age.

“We should be inspired by the events in France. They rioted when the retirement age went up two years to 64,” Wood said. “Meanwhile in America, we have an 80-year-old man, begging us for four more years.”

The post Known For Laughs, DC Dinner Spotlights Risks To Journalism appeared first on TV News Check.

Emily Barr

Full disclosure: I am no fan of guns. I have held and fired a gun only twice. Once was while visiting an old friend in rural Alaska, who suggested I should understand the basics before we headed out on a hike through bear country. A second time when I was participating in an FBI Citizen’s Academy program back in Chicago. The weight of the weapons and power of the kickback caught me off guard, but one thing I knew for certain: I did not enjoy the experience. Not surprisingly, I do not own a gun.

Last week, an Orlando television news crew became the latest victim of the gun violence epidemic we cover daily across our communities. In the coming days, we will ask ourselves, among other things, how to keep our crews safe while reporting on the very issues so many in our communities live with every second of their lives. The question is important, but it is so much bigger than that. And it is high time we in the media start asking for and demanding answers. We need to use our reach and frequency for a greater good.

How did we become a country with more guns than people? Why do we accept the notion that the Second Amendment categorically denies sensible gun legislation? Why is it so difficult for our elected officials to pass laws that might improve our collective safety? How do we keep covering murder and mayhem perpetrated by people with unfettered access to guns and not ask ourselves about the common denominator of the guns themselves. We cannot even agree that people with mental health issues that might make them a danger to themselves or others should not be allowed to purchase a gun. Really?

The news media has tried to apply a both-sideism approach to gun safety legislation coverage that has unintentionally built up a sense of inevitability when it comes to crime. It needs to change.

We often find ourselves buying into the idea that America is a gun-loving culture and we will never get rid of guns, so what’s the use in even talking about it? Every day, there are shootings on college campuses, elementary or high schools or simply on a playground or street or in big cities or small towns or in places of worship, grocery stores, workplaces or just anywhere, anytime, shattering families simply trying to live their lives. Our children are taught to hide, fight, run (or is it run, fight, hide?) when they are still learning how to read and write. The land of the free and the home of the brave? I think not.

Decades ago, television helped educate and inform Americans about the health risks of cigarette smoking. Despite a huge tobacco industry and fierce lobbying effort, today you are unlikely to be allowed to smoke indoors because of the health risks to yourself and others. Yes, people still smoke, but they cannot escape the dire warnings stamped on every pack of cigarettes and the endless “no smoking” signs posted seemingly everywhere. And in case you don’t remember this, it was a Justice Department lawsuit that led to a requirement that tobacco companies promote the dangers of using their products. First came the public service announcements, then came the mandated ads. And it was all done in the name of public health.

I would submit to you that television can and should play a similar role when it comes to gun safety. Please note, I am not talking about gun control. I am talking about safety. Gun violence is every bit the public health crisis that smoking was deemed to be. According to Pew Research, 2020 was the worst year on record for gun-related deaths. Nearly 8 in 10 murders (79%) involved a firearm. More gun-involved murders took place in 2020 than any year since 1968 and that was 34% higher than 2021. If this is not a public health crisis, I do not know what is.

I am devastated for the family and friends of the murdered Orlando journalist and his photographer currently fighting for his life. They were simply trying to cover one story — one murder, actually — when they became the story in yet another chapter of America’s growing gun violence epidemic. Local and network television, cable and streamers alike need to step up and shine a bright light on this very real, dangerous and growing public health crisis. The news media, especially local stations all across our country, reach a tremendous number of Americans across the political divide and have earned the credibility and respect to ask the tough questions and demand real answers.

A deluge of news coverage and reporting, public service announcements and the unflinching and uncomfortable focus we are collectively capable of delivering could help bring all of us to our senses. We have no more time or lives to waste. The time to do this is now.

Emily Barr is the former president and CEO of Graham Media Group.

The post Local TV, Let’s Really Talk About Guns appeared first on TV News Check.

Orange County Sheriff John Mina said during a news conference that they’ve detained Keith Melvin Moses, 19, who they believe is responsible for both shootings in the Orlando-area neighborhood.

Besides the Spectrum News 13 journalist and the 9-year-old girl, a TV crewmember and the girl’s mother were wounded during the second shooting. They were in critical condition at a local hospital.

“I want to acknowledge what a horrible day this has been for our community and our media partners,” Mina told a room full of reporters. “I work closely with all of you and know many of you and know the very difficult job that you do and also the very important job that you do for our community and for law enforcement. No one in our community — not a mother, not a 9-year-old and certainly not news professionals — should become the victim of gun violence in our community.”

Mina said they don’t immediately have a motive for any of the shootings.

“So, the suspect is not saying much right now,” Mina said. “It is unclear if he knew they were news media or not. We’re still trying to work all that out.”

Mina said the News 13 vehicle did not look like a typical news van with TV station markings.

Deputies had initially responded to the Pine Hills area, just northwest of Orlando, on Wednesday morning following reports of a woman in her 20s being shot.

Moses “was an acquaintance of the woman this morning, but as far as we know, had no connection to the reporters and no connection to the mother and the 9-year-old,” Mina said.

According to witnesses, a man approached the news vehicle later Wednesday and opened fire, hitting the two reporters. The man then walked to a nearby home and shot the mother and daughter.

WFTV crews, who were also reporting on the morning shooting, tried to give medical aid to the Spectrum 13 journalists.

Mina said Moses is already facing a murder charge for the initial victim, and charges are expected soon for the other four victims. Moses’ criminal history includes gun charges, as well as aggravated battery, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary and grand theft offenses, the sheriff said.

“Our hearts go out to the family of the journalist killed today and the crew member injured in Orange County, Florida, as well as the whole Spectrum News team,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Twitter.

Spectrum News 13 was not identifying the crew members who were involved in the shooting, according to a story on the TV station’s website.

“Please, please, say a prayer tonight for our co-worker who is in critical condition. And while you’re at it, please say a prayer for every victim of gun violence in this country,” Spectrum 13 journalist Celeste Springer said during her live on-air report.

Worldwide 40 journalists were reported killed last year, plus another two this year before Wednesday, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Only one of those was in the United States.

Jeff German, who covered politics and corruption for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was found dead outside of his home in September after being stabbed multiple times. Former Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles, who had been a frequent subject of German’s reporting, has pleaded not guilty to a murder charge.

In 2015, Virginia reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward were shot and killed during their live TV broadcast for CBS affiliate WDBJ7. The suspect, a former reporter for the TV station, died by suicide during the law enforcement search for him.

Associated Press writer Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

The post Spectrum News 13 Reporter In Orlando Killed Covering Story appeared first on TV News Check.