Talking TV: Tectonic Changes Afoot In ‘Making The Media’

From the host’s chair at Avid-produced podcast Making the Media, Craig Wilson has intersected with many of the people shepherding media into its next era.

Wilson recently passed the milestone of his 50^th episode and has gleaned much about the industry’s major currents. Among the key issues he keeps bumping into: the deeply consequential power of AI in production and content creation; the boom in FAST channels; a near-crisis shortage of skilled labor in broadcast ranks; and novel approaches to video storytelling.

In this meta-leaning Talking TV conversation, Wilson shares many of the insights he’s picked up and the red flags he sees on broadcast’s horizon line.

Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.

Michael Depp: Making the Media, the podcast from Avid, recently celebrated its 50th episode, and Craig Wilson is its host. Just like this podcast, Craig has had conversations with some very interesting people across a wide cross-section of the media industry. He’s intersected some key issues along the way, including the expanding use of artificial intelligence, future proofing newsrooms, a skills shortage and emerging platforms.

I’m Michael Depp, editor of TVNewsCheck, and this is Talking TV. Coming up, a very meta episode of this podcast via my conversation with the host of another media podcast, Avid’s Craig Wilson. We’ll be right back.

Welcome Craig Wilson, to Talking TV.

Craig Wilson: Hi Michael, it’s great to be here and see you again.

Good to see you, Craig. Your own podcast intersects a number of tech issues, but the one that rises to the surface most urgently of late is AI. Now, of course, AI has been around in broadcast for many years, and it has largely been beneficial in areas like speech to text, translation and compliance monitoring. But talk has become more sinister around AI in terms of supplanting journalists and perpetuating disinformation and misinformation. Where are you seeing concerns about AI evolve?

Yeah, I think you’re right, Michael. It’s the one topic that I think bubbles up everywhere you go these days. And everyone you talk about has a view and an opinion on it. And it’s interesting, you know, as you mentioned, at the start, we’ve got 58 episodes of the podcast, we actually talked about AI in the first season of podcast a couple of years ago, and then we revisited again in this season and it’s interesting how the views of things have changed.

I think depending on who you speak to, some people are incredibly enthusiastic and positive about what we can potentially bring in terms of a tool which kind of assists journalists, for example, so they can take away some of the time-consuming tasks they perhaps would do, allowing them to focus on that creative element that perhaps AI itself can’t actually do. I think we’re studying with some emphasis now on what is it that the journalists themselves bring to the product?

It’s that analysis, it’s that ability for critical thinking and questioning. And so actually, you know, it can provoke a different kind of conversation about what AI means for journalists.

The other thing I would say about AI is I also think there’s a lot of caution within the industry about what AI actually means. And I think we’re beginning to see that people are concerned about the models the AI has been trained on. For example, the need for copyright. If it’s being framed on organizations or on articles from certain areas. So, I was recently at an event in Berlin where it was one of the topics among the leading broadcasters there.

And the main thing that came through for me, there really was a bit of caution. Yes, it’s an exciting area. Yes, it’s something that everybody wants to look in to, but let’s hang back and let’s take a look at what it actually means before we go and implement things. So, I think it’s one of these ones where are hugely exciting, lots of possibilities of what might come, but a degree of caution about actually implementing is going to mean.

It does seem like the generative side of AI is the real red zone, whereas the other parts of it, you know, the transcription services, for instance, that’s where you don’t really have a lot of controversy. But the generative side is where you can get all sorts of trouble, including kind of encroaching on the journalist’s role and the disinformation, misinformation perpetuation going on.

Yeah, I think it is on that generative side that there is this new degree of caution about what this actually means for the for the industry. And I think not just from the perspective of scriptwriting, for example, or a journalist writing stories, but also around imagery, you know, the use of images. I think we’ve all seen some examples in social media in recent months of images that turned out to be fake.

And I think another element of the broadcast has been talking to people about your content, authentication and trust in journalism. And I think that’s what, again, people are looking for. And if I am working in a journalistic environment, people have to have trust in the content that we are producing, whether it’s on broadcast or on social.

And I think that’s where brands that will probably be combined, that cautionary element of utilizing things like generative AI, because what will that actually mean? What does it mean for the future of journalism? What does it mean about trust the audiences have in in news outlets, in producing content as well? So definitely, to go back to the point you were making about the ways that AI can perhaps assist journalists, other things are there. If you take an example of something like the Panama Papers, you know, a lot of AI tools were used to be able to analyze enormous amounts of information to try to uncover common themes that come out from it.

So, it’s those kind of uses I think people are trying to explore now about how they can assist the journalists, in those ways they can be very beneficial. But you’re absolutely right. That’s the whole generative area. There is a huge amount of caution within the industry.

Among broadcasters, FAST channels have become another extremely hot topic. Why are they so fascinated by it? And what do you think is going to happen next in that sphere?

I think one of the things that’s really interesting about broadcast is I think the vast majority of broadcasters now, they have, of course, some kind of social presence. They have an online presence. But in the broadcast space, there’s only 24 hours in a day and they perhaps have their main broadcast channel, and the weather forecast is there, that is the forefront to their operations. But a lot of them build very, very large archives of content.

And I think people are trying to make sure is that any opportunity we have to monetize the archival content is taken up. And in the past, if you’re going down the route of a traditional broadcast channel, that was certainly something that was quite complex to do. It required a lot of work, a lot of radio interviews to actually get that in place and probably diluting the benefits that you potentially would have from printing and distributing the content.

So, I think why people are so interested in FAST channels is the ease with which they can be they can be set up, the fact that they are advertising-supported. So, there is an income stream coming in as part of that. And actually, the cost of the content that we’re actually delivering to the extent has already been covered because a lot of it is archival content.

But I do think there is a slightly separate element to this, which is I think people are looking at now, in addition to the archival content. What happens if I actually begin to put new content on these channels? Is this a way of furthering engagement with the audience by delivering that? And I think that’s where people are trying to get to now is what is that balance between new content that we perhaps create specifically balanced with all this archival [material] that there is an audience for.

What’s the feedback you’re getting on that front from those who are making forays into original content? I know we’ve both talked to folks at the CBC, for instance, where they were launching a CBC News Explore, which was all bespoke for that channel. Are they getting an ROI soon enough or are they seeing traction in viewership? Because it is a very fragmented landscape. When you’re on FAST, you have to iterate on all these different devices. It seems like it’s a little bit tougher work to aggregate an audience there.

Yeah, I agree that it’s a fragmented marketplace, no doubt about it. But I think we’re seeing huge growth so fast, not just in the American market. I think we’re also seeing here in Europe as well. And I recently spoke to a couple of people, you mentioned the CBC there who have gone down the route with their channel as well, but with others. And I don’t see any deceleration, if you like, in the interest in sending out FAST channels. I think they are seen as a convenient way of getting the content out. And I think they’re also seen as a wave. It’s ability to spread the brand perhaps into different audiences that wouldn’t traditionally come to a broadcast channel.

The bigger challenge that I think broadcasters are trying to address everywhere, particularly when it comes to younger audiences who traditionally, now, are watching less and less traditional television. I mean, I still think that broadcast television has a place. It is certainly still a significant income generator for a lot of broadcasters around the world. When we talk about monetization and other platforms, you know, it’s still very much core to their business. But I think they’re just looking for other outlets where we can take the core content that we already have and we could actually then repurpose it and through repurposing it, spread the brand and hopefully generate further from that.

Let’s move on. One of the things you’ve tackled in your show is TikTok and how news organizations seem to be drawn to it like a moth to a flame, increasingly, but they aren’t getting any revenue for their trouble there. So, let’s touch on that a bit. First, who is emerging as really getting TikTok, really nailing it and understanding it on the news front, and what are they doing that jibes well with what the platform is all about?

One of the really interesting things about TikTok is a number of years ago, if you spoke to people, what were they trying to do? They basically thought, well, we can create content once and we can just try it on whatever platform, and it will be it will be successful. It just doesn’t work at all.

And I think TikTok, if you like, is this alchemy because it takes all sorts to merge. If you said to people that, you know, in a couple of years’ time, this is going to be one of the battlegrounds for news, I think people would have thought you were off your head. But what’s happening is that because of the nature of the audience that was there and because of also, I think younger people coming into the media broadcast industry and utilizing that, they all have it on their phones, that it’s gained a bit of traction.

I talked in the last answer that we’re trying to find audiences wherever they are. But it was another aspect to this, which is that the way that people consume news has really changed to the extent that I think people at times, don’t recognize they’re actually consuming news. They’re just watching something that’s on whatever platform it is. So, it’s combined to take those consistently. I think what’s happened here, switching the game to corporate customers and reporters is it’s a resource for innovation.

People can experiment and they can find new things, and that then offers them an ability to read and perhaps talk about different issues, perhaps talk about different angles within a story, present a story in a different way, that actually attracts an audience.

Certainly, from TikTok, it’s a very specific type of audience that you’re looking at. I think we’ve seen huge innovation in this. I know, for example, with ABC News in Australia, they’ve got a whole range of incubator projects on this through that innovation lab. While it’s a big focus for the BBC here in the U.K., I think in the U.S. and I think a lot of the newspapers in the U.S., The Washington Post has built a very large TikTok following actually with very few staff members involved in that. It’s a very small team that they actually have that is able to actually drive a lot of people to it. And I think the reason that they’re doing it is—and you’re absolutely right, they’re not making money from it.

Most of us are commercial organizations that want to make money or if you’re a public service broadcaster, it is about reach, reaching the audience wherever they are. But ultimately, what they’re interested in is driving people to their own properties and using it all to an extent. But it’s like a loss leader in that sense of saying we are willing to talk, but if you want to find out more in that, you will come to our website, you come to our social pages, onto our broadcast properties to actually then find more information on that.

And I think that’s why there’s such an interest, along with because the nature of the audience means that traditional broadcasters are not reaching the audience in the normal way that we would have done in the past, and that’s why they’re so interested in them.

On that loss leader front, I mean, we’re over a decade into every social platform, one after another as a loss leader and every media company has to devote a certain amount of resources, labor hours to it. Do you find that any exhaustion fatigue is setting in among media companies around this dynamic, that social is always just a drain on their resources? It’s an audience builder, but only that, and it’s got next to no hope of real revenue ever coming in.

I don’t know if exhaustion is the right word, I think, there’s an acceptance that it’s just part of the beast. I think it’s just part of it. It’s just part of what we have to do.

I think what people are trying to do now is they’re trying to use the analysis and analytics. I mean, YouTube is a great example. You can see exactly when people drop off watching a particular program, and I can then use that to analyze and to do everything else, really.

Other examples I would give—someone told to me once about repurposing a story. They had a very exclusive story that we then went out and created something like 15 to 20 different versions of it for all of the various different platforms. And we said that you can fall out of love with a story if you’re having to do all those different versions of a story. And you can understand by the end of it that perhaps you don’t love it as much as you did when you first got the assignment or the exclusive that they were working on. So, thinking about what you’re saying, I do genuinely think I think it’s just part of the acceptance know that it’s part of the package of what we have to do.

One of the big themes that comes through within the media broadcast news business is about efficiency. It’s not that they’re getting loads more people to do all of these different things. They’re trying to find ways for their teams to work more effectively together. If you have this for content, we can then repurpose. Then let’s do that and perhaps focus on fewer stories and do them for more outlets and concentrate their resources rather than being spread and trying to avoid duplication of effort.

You know, a lot of news organizations still separate digital and broadcast or even print or radio parts of their organization, depending on the scale of the organization. I’m just trying to find ways that they can bring that more closely together. And I think that’s one of the challenges for vendors like ours, is to help them work more efficiently, more collectively together, make it easier to share content and distribute content. I don’t want to silo ways of working, but I think a lot of them have done traditionally in the past because that’s how we’ve evolved.

OK, another topic. You have been delving into the crisis of skills shortages in the media industry. Where are you seeing those shortages happening most acutely?

It’s really interesting. The pandemic has changed a lot of things. We all we all recognize that. For example, Michael, here we are, you and I doing this, you know, perhaps a few years ago with most of us would be in an office somewhere to do that. But I think the pandemic also prompted a lot of people to reevaluate what their working life was like and for a lot of people within the broadcast industry, we didn’t see more generally. I think it’s an industry that’s known for long hours. It’s an industry that’s known for potentially a lot of travel, depending on what it is that you’re that you’re working on. And if you’re working in something like sports, for example, there’s lots of weekend working that’s involved and things like that as well.

So, I think a lot of people reevaluated what we actually wanted to do. Some people took the opportunity to perhaps leave the industry and took a lot of experience away with them. Then at the other side, we then went through a period, of course, where we were all working from home. You couldn’t really get into an office to go and work. So, that opportunity for younger people to then gain the kind of skills that you get from working in an office environment, the connections that you make for people working in an office environment as well. We’ve gone through a period of growth where that has also happened as well.

What’s happening now is opportunity for people coming through education to go into adjacent markets. So, let’s say, I come through and I go in and I start over and I want to be a video editor, for example. I think it’ll work for two or three years at a college, university, come through and I have a degree. My degree is in video editing and perhaps I work in the industry and rather working and working in the broadcast industry.

Perhaps I want to go into corporate, perhaps I want to go into another form of content creation that isn’t traditional broadcast or isn’t traditional post-production, because the opportunities…. If you speak to any organization now, they will have some kind of content creation department or involvement somewhere along the way. You know, if you look at pharmaceutical companies, for example, they have massive departments. I think that for them what has happened is that progression some of those companies can also be quicker than going in … [to broadcast]. I’m going to join as a runner. I’m going to spend some time as a runner. Then perhaps I’ll be an assistant editor. And then I do that for a number of years. Maybe I can get an editing gig. And it took me 10 years to get to where I want to get to.

The other thing we also have to look at is people are investing a lot in their education and as a consequence of that, they want to get some payback and perhaps are looking for that quicker time than it’s on the speed than if you went into more traditional post-production, work your way through the system to actually get to that kind of level.

What does broadcast in particular need to do to kind of sexy itself up to people, potential candidates like that in those positions. We’re looking at all these adjacent industries and faster, quicker opportunities there. Do you have any advice for broadcasters?

There’s two separate aspects to that. One that is really interesting is there is a college or university here in the U.K., that had a course, I can’t remember the specific name of it, but still it was “Learn Broadcast Journalism,” for example. And they basically changed the name of the course to be “Become a YouTuber.” And that instantly changed the view that people had of what this course could actually deliver for them. They actually got a lot of applications for that.

Certain branding is perhaps a little bit of this. You know, for example, if you’re a post house, and you’re creating content, you’re creating content not just for broadcast channels here, but probably creating content for Netflix, for Amazon Prime and for all of the others, Apple TV as well. But younger people don’t necessarily associate post-production with that. They associate that with people who are doing stuff for broadcast, which is the TV my mum and dad watch as opposed to anything else.

This is a theme that we see more just about new people coming in, but also within the media industry. So, it’s about diversity and inclusion. It is about opening up the industry to perhaps people who have not traditionally thought that this was an industry for them, trying to make those opportunities available and encourage that throughout all ranks within the industry itself.

There is a lot more that the broadcasters can do to try to encourage people from different backgrounds, because the other thing about that is that then opens up different types of stories and you can tell different types of stories because, you know, if you have a more diverse workforce, a more diverse set of ideas to consider and to contemplate, you’re ultimately going to create different types of stories from the ones that have been there before.

I think within the industry there is a recognition that we need to do more about diversity and inclusion and encourage more people from more diverse backgrounds to come in and ultimately sort of benefit the industry overall.

Well, you just teed up my next question very nicely, Craig. So, thank you for that. Who’s making real improvement on the DEI front? You talk to a lot of different organizations. Who stands out to you as having been most effective in reaching toward those goals?

Yeah, I mean, I think there are a number of different groups in many different countries that are involved in that. So, I mean, one episode of a podcast that we did with a woman Carrie Wootten from an organization here in the U.K. called Rise, they have done an enormous amount of work in recent years of getting into primary schools, high schools as well as colleges, and bringing in lots of mentors from the industry. That’s one of the really interesting things that they have done, where they are peeling up younger people who are coming through perhaps a college or perhaps in school with people within the industry who are giving their claim and highlighting to them what the industry is about.

The other thing as well is there are so many jobs involved in the industry, a whole range of jobs. If you’re outside the industry, you probably didn’t even realize what could be involved. Organizations like Rise did a lot of great work in there. Also, and I’ll speak specifically over here in the U.K., your organizations like Channel Four, for example, they do a lot of work again with their suppliers to try to encourage this. And I saw some adverts just this week for paid internships. There’s some major organizations like CNN and others I know doing as well because, you know, the concept of an internship that’s unpaid, you’re almost instantly ruling people out by doing so.

The U.K. is particularly bad about that, I think everybody is. But in the U.K., I know that publishing, it’s always been unpaid and you kind of have to launch into that from a place of privilege. So, paid internships are absolutely key.

Absolutely.

Let me let me ask you finally about storytelling innovation. That’s an area where I’m always on the hunt to see where you find people pushing at the forms of video news storytelling. What have you seen in the course of doing this podcast that stands out to you as wow, that’s a really interesting new take on storytelling?

The way that storytelling has changed, and I think part of this is driven by social media and the expectations that people have around social media and also around developments in technology, where some work that’s done by mobile journalists or using mobile devices … what that does is it brings an intimacy to storytelling that you don’t get if you turn up with a big crew and lots of cameras and lights and set up. It’s a slightly false kind of atmosphere because of that, but I think we see people do stuff where a lot of it is shot on mobile devices.

What that I think brings us is intimacy into the kind of stories that you’re telling because it breaks that barrier with the person that you’re speaking to, who doesn’t necessarily think that I’m on television here because there’s a big camera and everything else. And they then become more relaxed. That’s one thing, you get people to open up a bit more.

But I also think you’re able to film in different ways. You know, a number of years ago I think there was a lot of speculation about 360 videos, what that was going to do was not really developed very much because that was seen as a way of immersive storytelling that can be done. But I do think that those kind of developments, the way that you can try to get underneath the skin of a story, you know….

The way that someone described to me recently was there’s a lean-back way of storytelling, and it’s not really what people want now. They want something that’s a bit more engaging. You know, I’ve written a piece today, Michael, because it’s 35 years this month that I started working in newspapers back then, and I’ve been involved in the industry, you know, through all this time. And I’ve seen huge changes through that period. And I think news in particular has become more personality driven. But I think to answer your question, people are looking for guides. They’re looking for trusted people that they think will tell them innovative things that are interesting for them to know.

BBC here has done some work with a reporter, David Ross Atkins, who does these quite intense 6-, 7- , 8-minute pieces. He encapsulates a really complex story and really boils it down. And I think people are looking for those kind of things. It comes back to perhaps something we talked about at the start. It’s about trust and trust in news organizations. I think that’s really important. So that’s a lean forward. Let me be the guide in the process and to take you through the story. I think that’s where the real kind of innovation is going on. Just like I said, we find that really interesting to watch items like that.

Well, thanks for that, pointing us in that direction. So, what’s next for the podcast, Craig? Another season?

We’re about to take a season break, so I can get a bit of a rest over the summer, a couple of more episodes to do, but the plan is come autumn time, or fall as you guys say it, the Americans, we’ll come back with another season. And one of the things that you know has been amazing is that, you know, people have been very giving of their time. I’m sure like yourself when you first started, they can be a little bit challenging because people are like, what? What’s it going to be about and what are you going to talk about?

But, you know, now it’s a bit more straightforward because we have all of the episodes, we can approach people who perhaps have never heard us before. We can send them links to the episodes, and they can hear what it is like. So yeah, I’m fingers crossed, another season starting in the fall running into next year and hopefully telling more interesting stories about the news and media business.

Yeah, it does occur to me that we should we probably should have been numbering my episodes as we’ve been going along here. We sort of ad hoc’ed our way into something that became a tradition, and it is going to be a body of work. You get better and better. You get really great guests as you go along. So, congratulations, Craig, 50 episodes from Making the Media, holding it down from Aberdeen, Scotland. Thanks for being here today.

Thanks a lot, Michael. Good to talk to you again and hopefully see you in person sometime soon.

I hope so. You can watch past episodes of Talking TV on TVNewsCheck.com and on our YouTube channel. We’re also available in audio only form on all the major podcast platforms. We are back most Fridays with a new episode. Thanks for watching and listening to this one and see you next time.