“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.

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While preserving all that old video sounds like an overwhelming project, only by doing so can broadcasters learn what assets they have access to, industry experts said during the Mining the Archives for New Shows panel at TVNewsCheck’s Programming Everywhere event on April 16 at the NAB Show.

Fox did a proof-of-concept preservation project of 5,000 tapes to convert the magnetic tapes and apply metadata to old video, Ben Ramos, VP, Fox Archive, field and emerging technology at Fox News, said.

Some of the content was damaged, and about 5% of the original conversions failed, but what made it through the process “was just pure gold, amazing content that hasn’t seen the light of day in 40 years,” he said.

The organization saw a return on the investment within nine months, he added, and expanded the project by an additional 45,000 tapes.

“It’s not until you make an effort, touch it, make an effort, that’s when you find how many assets you really have,” Ramos said.

A 60-minute tape costs Fox about $100 for the “Cadillac version” of conversion and tagging, Ramos said, while the “Kia version” with no bells and whistles runs around $20. But the higher-end version can yield “so many products” such as three seconds of New York City taxi cabs from 1977 and frame grabs of famous people, he said.

But Fox is also “reaching out to old news directors and photographers and assignment editors and people who were there that day” and asking them to provide detailed metadata on the old videos, Ramos said.

“It’s onerous and expensive,” he said, but added that the company “thinks it’s necessary with this specific subset of product,” although the return on investment for this undertaking remains to be seen. He called it a “curated white glove service that AI can’t replicate” that makes the quality of Fox’s archive “that much more special.”

Overall, he said, he needs “around $100 million” to digitize all the archives, but the steps to date have led to significant funding for more preservation efforts.

Nora Zimmett, The Weather Channel president, news and original series, said her organization has thousands of tapes in climate-controlled storage and is in the process of digitizing them.

“I didn’t appreciate how much of a process that is,” she said. “It’s not just the process, but the metadata, where to put it, and where to store it and how much to download.”

The metadata is critical, she said. “Your archive isn’t worth anything if you can’t find video by keywords,” Zimmett said. “It’s one thing to digitize and put it in the cloud, it’s another if there’s a user experience so producers and users can find the materials.”

The Weather Channel is bringing archived content into its current projects.

“You can slice and dice it so many different ways,” she said. “One piece of content can have so many lives now that we are well beyond a linear environment.”

And there’s no time like the present to focus on making the archives easier to use. “Every hour that goes by, we’re creating more video,” although that is being better tagged in the moment, she said. “It’s like the roadrunner — you’re never caught up.”

Zimmett said she wonders whether licensing an organization’s content to a big studio devalues the content. “After you answer the question of ‘can we,’ sometimes we wrestle with ‘should we?’” she said.

Jon Accarrino, VP of transformation and strategic initiatives for Capitol Broadcasting Co., said much of his company’s early content was destroyed due to improper storage, but in 2014 CBC digitized all of its tapes. It took truckloads, he said, to move the 36,000 tapes that needed to be converted.

“We sent off all these trucks, had all that content digitized and they mailed back this tiny little hard drive” full of SD video, he said.

In 2007, the company moved into fully digital operations with Bitcentral’s Oasis, and as such is working through archiving that content as well.

“A lot of it is older, MPE2 formats we need to recompress and move to new archive system we’re building,” he said.

And while a lot of companies are opting to store their archives in the cloud as a primary location, despite the egress costs, CBC relies on two physical locations with cloud as the backup. CBC is soft-launching its archives soon, he said.

Sam Peterson, Bitcentral COO, said many of the industry’s archives are not very organized. “The state of metadata and how interconnected it is, and the process they used to get it there, runs the gamut,” he said. “Some are thinking for the long-term, but some do not have the foresight.”

It is important to work with the end in mind. “What do we want to end up with, and how do we get there are thing you have to work through pretty quickly to not make it worse,” he said.

Peterson cautioned that archives maintenance can be simple but is not complete once a project is over.

“Know it will be iterative approach” because tools are rapidly evolving, he said. “The main thing is not to lose any more content. Let’s get it captured, at least.”

Read more from Programming Everywhere here.

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Ben Ramos, VP, Fox Archive, field and emerging technology, Fox News; Nora Zimmett, president, news and original series, The Weather Channel; Jon Accarrino, VP of transformation and strategic initiatives, Capitol Broadcasting; and Sam Peterson, CTO, Bitcentral, will join moderator Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsTECHMedia and editor of TVNewsCheck for the 3:15 p.m. panel.

“News organizations have realized what amazing material they’ve been sitting on for years, and the more progressive among them have been digitizing and metatagging that content for numerous applications,” Depp said. “This discussion will look at the processes they’ve employed to get a handle on their archives, the technology that has enabled them to do it and the original new shows and revenue opportunities they’ve developed from their efforts.”

Programming Everywhere gathers industry leaders to talk about the evolving business of content creation and distribution, with a focus on new development, reinventing local and national news and extending media brands on streaming.

TV station group senior executives will join programming, news and marketing leaders, syndicated programming executives and streaming media and technology leaders to take on issues such as the changing economics of syndicated programming, the relationship between FAST channels and the evolution of broadcasting, transforming television news and strategies for creating a programming everywhere business.

Participants will also consider their No. 1 challenge: creating more content for a multimedia audience, and how technologies like artificial intelligence, the cloud and IP production platforms can free up creative talent while streamlining costs.

Panels include FAST Channels and the Evolution of Broadcasting; Syndication’s Changing Business Model; Rethinking Genres: Games, Travel, Talk and More; Fresh Approaches to the News Franchise; Strategies for Building A Content Everywhere Business; and In Conversation: Anthony Zuiker on Creating New Shows That Break the Mold.

Register here for Programming Everywhere.

The post Finding Content Gold In Your Archives At Programming Everywhere appeared first on TV News Check.

Barry Nash, head of the Barry Nash & Co. talent coaching group, recently tested a series of weather forecast packages with viewers in a study sponsored by FX Design Group. It featured the same on-air talent presenting the same data, but in different positions on the screen.

“The more intimate settings won head-to-head every time,” Nash said during a panel discussion, Reinventing News Presentation and Presenters in a Multimedia Ecosystem, at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum in New York on Dec. 13. Digital 3X3 framing scored significantly higher than a weathercast presented in a 3×6 array, for example. One viewer Nash polled went so far as to say the broadcast was “easier to understand” when the weathercaster was positioned closer to the camera.

The lesson: Viewers warm to new presentation tech, but the presenter’s role remains crucial.

Meanwhile, inside The Weather Channel’s studios, wildfires rage, floodwaters rise above anchors’ heads, hurricane winds pick up cars and slam them down next to cringing forecasters. The destruction may be simulated — thanks to the power of immersive mixed reality technology — but its impact on viewers, Weather Channel producers believe, is as profound as it is important.

“We need[ed] to bring the weather, for a visual, visceral experience, inside the studio,” said Nora Zimmett, president of news and original series at The Weather Channel. “What we have found is that it’s really paid off in terms of the engagement from audiences.”

The “cinematic” graphics have a “wow factor” for viewers, Zimmett said, but they also generate “a-ha moments” for them. Providing an example, she said viewers responded to 3D exhibitions of climbing storm surge waters by saying it helped them better understand why authorities request evacuations during extreme rain events.

“That’s been huge,” Zimmett said. “We’ve also seen a ton of interest from advertisers and distributors, and that’s been a really interesting part of the industry that we didn’t expect, that people are coming to us because they want to be a part of these environments as well.”

It doesn’t hurt that the overall quality of the virtual reality graphic technology The Weather Channel integrates into broadcasts has grown by leaps and bounds. The speed at which it can be deployed has also increased dramatically.

“We now do this live,” Zimmett said. “You give us a scene and we’ll give you the real weather conditions … live on the fly without any editing, from fog to rain to snow, without cutting away.”

She said at one point such productions took up to five months of preparation. In terms of the station’s ability to present stories, Zimmett called this innovation a “game-changer.”

But Nash noted the technology’s full potential was undoubtedly not realized overnight — not before the on-air talent were appropriately trained to use it and engage with it.

“In research, viewers are quick to criticize [on-air talent] who look awkward and uncomfortable,” Nash said. “You’ve got to get into a mindset that ‘I’m not treating my talent as set dressing. If I’m going to have the tools, I’ve got to let my talent use them and they’ve got to be comfortable using them.’”

He observed that The Weather Channel’s on-air meteorologists all moved about the set with confidence while delivering their reports in tandem with the VR graphics. It certainly took time for them to “own it” on the air, Nash added.

The panel yielded other insights into evolving presentational best practices, and chief among them was to give talent permission to be authentically themselves.

An exemplar of that idea is Christian Bryant, anchor of Scripps News/Newsy’s In the Loop. Moderator and TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp observed that Bryant “does not come across like a traditional anchor in any way.” Viewers won’t see him in a suit and tie, and the sleeves of his collared shirt are typically rolled up. They will also hear him address them directly, with his sense of humor on display whenever appropriate. “Casual” is the best word to describe his general on-air persona.

“I get the chance to bring my whole self to the table,” Bryant said. “It seems to resonate with some people.”

He called In The Loop the “dive bar of news shows” because, like such an establishment, it’s “devoid of pretentiousness.”

Presenters also stressed TV news shouldn’t be afraid to provide behind-the-scenes access to the news producing process.

The curtain is continually pulled back on the set of Gray Television’s Hawaii News Now show This Is Now. Produced, directed and hosted by Jonathan Saupe, the show is a mix of short news items with later stretches of conversation between Saupe, a co-host and guests. It’s available to stream in audio-only as well as video formats, where viewers get to see Saupe work his relatively low-tech production controls in real time, much to their delight.

“It [is] so fascinating how literate our viewers are to how TV works,” Saupe said. “The magic is gone. They understand how video is edited; everyone does it on their phone every day. They understand what I’m doing when I’m pressing my buttons, so I think [we’re] just honest with them in our presentation.”

Saupe re-edits packages from other newscasts, often using footage left on the cutting room floor for This Is Now before they giving way to more lengthy discussion segments of the program. Behind just a couple of monitors and a microphone, Saupe delves deeper into the stories with his co-host and guests — stories he says are chosen for the most “viral possibilities.”

But the scant equipment requirements make for an agile production as well with breaking news capabilities that were recently on display when Saupe provided real-time updates on a volcano eruption.

“I hope that what comes across when we’re presenting news is that we care about our community,” Saupe said. “What we’re doing is really coming across conversationally; we’re talking to people in a real way.”

For more NewsTECHForum 2022 stories, click here.

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During her tenure at The Weather Channel, Zimmett led the team responsible for production of the network’s flagship morning show America’s Morning Headquarters, Weather Center Live and many original shows.

In addition to creating original series for The Weather Channel, Zimmett has developed broadcast syndication programming for Allen Media Group, such as Storm of Suspicion. Zimmett also led the network to two national News and Documentary Emmy awards in 2019 and 2021.

In addition to continuing to drive the editorial and creative direction of The Weather Channel, Zimmett spearheaded the content development and team building for The Weather Channel en Español, set to launch this spring. She also created and launched the Pattrn streaming network, a brand dedicated to climate and environmental reporting. Pattrn can be found on multiple AVOD, social media and digital platforms.

Prior to her seven years at The Weather Channel, Zimmett held positions at CNN, Bloomberg TV, HDNet and Fox News Channel. Zimmett graduated with honors from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in English.

The post Nora Zimmett Named President Of News And Original Series For Allen Media’s Weather Group appeared first on TV News Check.

She will continue to report to Tom O’Brien, president of Weather Group and EVP of Allen Media.

In addition to continuing to drive the editorial and creative direction of The Weather Channel, Zimmett is adding the content development and team building for The Weather Channel en Español  to her portfolio.

In her prior role as SVP of content and programming for the network, Zimmett led the team responsible for production of The Weather Channel’s flagship morning show AMHQ (America’s Morning Headquarters), Weather Center Live, its original shows, and its storm coverage.

Zimmett has also been instrumental in developing segments by taking data and turning it into tangible information for viewers through use of its immersive mixed reality (IMR) technology.

Last year, Zimmett was named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company and one of the most powerful women in television by Cablefax.

She is active in Women in Cable Telecommunications and is a fellow at the Betsy Magness Leadership Institute, the flagship leadership development program of the cable and telecommunications industry.

Zimmett graduated with honors from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in English.

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