Why a competitive NBC news director decided to go for Broke in Philly

Have you ever met a news director who wasn’t hyper-competitive? If so, I’ll bet he or she didn’t remain a news director for long. Anzio Williams is no exception. “I’ve always seen it as my job to put everybody else out of business,” says the veteran news boss at NBC10 and Telemundo 62 in Philadelphia — not a town for shrinking violets.

But despite Williams’s competitive instincts and initial reluctance, his newsroom is now part of an innovative project called Broke in Philly — more than twenty news organizations collaborating to provide in-depth coverage of poverty and other economic challenges in the city. What’s a big NBC O-and-O doing in a group that’s mostly made up of small community and ethnic news organizations? And focusing on a difficult, complex topic that’s never going to light up the sweeps calendar? The answer is a lesson in finding new ways to serve a fragmenting audience and discovering value in coverage that goes beyond the usual daily fare.

For Anzio Williams, it’s a journey that began with an “arranged marriage.” That’s what he calls Comcast’s acquisition of the Telemundo stations, which put Williams in charge of the newsroom for Telemundo 62 along with NBC10. Williams says he came to appreciate that many of Telemundo’s viewers were watching out of “sheer necessity” and “true need” that gave them — and his corps of Latino journalists — a different perspective on the role of the station. “We always talk about having a diverse staff that mirrors the community that you serve,” he says. “We lacked Hispanics, and now we don’t. It has opened my mind to more collaborations and thinking outside of the box. We cannot continue to do it the same way that we’ve been doing it.”

Anzio Williams (Photo courtesy of NBC10 and Telemundo 62).

So even though Williams (and every other TV news director in town) passed on an earlier collaboration focused on prison re-entry, he said yes to Broke in Philly, which launched last year and also targets an underserved population. “I had to take the focus off of me being so competitive and wanting to win win win, and say ‘Okay, how do we provide a better product and a better service that is of value to my audience?’”

The Broke in Philly project is coordinated by a non-profit entity called Resolve Philadelphia, with funders that include The Lenfest Institute and the Knight Foundation (which is our underwriter as well). NBC10 doesn’t draw on any of that philanthropic support, but the station is an active participant and a generous contributor when it comes to sharing resources like graphics or translators. Each partner organization makes its own editorial decisions, but all contribute to the common website, and each is free to publish any story that appears under the Broke in Philly brand. (You can read more about Broke in Philly from NiemanLab’s Christine Schmidt here.)

This lead story on the “Broke in Philly” website links to coverage by NBC10.

Before joining Broke in Philly, Anzio Williams “hated the idea of collaboration,” according to Resolve co-executive director Jean Friedman-Rudovsky. Now, Williams has begun doing projects with various partners on stories that have nothing to do with the Broke in Philly project, she says, “because they’ve had a good experience: ‘Oh yeah, this collaboration thing isn’t so bad. And it’s clearly valuable for us.’”

Why does collaboration seem to be taking off now? Friedman-Rudovsky says that in challenging times, more and more newsrooms are willing to experiment. “Everyone has kind of had to throw the rule book out the window,” she says. For local TV, that ‘rule book’ was written for a game with just three or four competitors. Today, news directors like Williams have to navigate a vastly more complicated playing field and lure viewers away from a tempting array of alternatives. “And I believe what we have to do is increase the value of the content that we are presenting,” he says. “We can’t afford today to waste anybody’s time.”

But that doesn’t make collaboration easy. Friedman-Rudovsky has some tips for any station considering initiatives like hers. One is that each project has to have an actively involved champion in the newsroom. In the case of NBC10/Telemundo 62, it’s the director of integrated media, Wendy Warren. Second: don’t focus on an area where the station is already competitive on its own, but find a topic (like poverty) that will benefit from a group effort, where the whole exceeds the sum of the parts. And third, report on solutions, not just problems: it’s easier to collaborate on answers than when you’re trying to expose wrongdoing.

Part of the value of collaboration for Anzio Williams is that Broke in Philly has forced his newsroom to expand its diet beyond the usual mainstays. “I do believe that we can help the communities that we live in be better, and everything is not falling down around us,” he says. “Sometimes I watch the newscast, and I’m like, ‘Hey, listen, everybody’s not going to be shot today, everybody wasn’t involved in a bank robbery or a car accident. So what else? So what else?’ These collaborations give us the ‘what else.’”

But whether or not collaborative projects are the right ‘what else’ for your newsroom, Williams warns that sticking with the status quo isn’t going to work forever. “We can’t play it too safe,” he says. “We have to be thinking about what’s the next thing we have to do? Where’s that next great idea going to come from? We have to continue to reinvent ourselves. As I told a group of journalists, sometimes you can be on the right track and still get run over. And that’s because we’re not moving fast enough.”

10 Takeaways for News Leaders From Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report

In mid-June, Mary Meeker released her 2019 Internet Trends Report. The annual report is an industry bible of need-to-know data points eagerly awaited by trend-spotters and strategists alike. It’s also usually 300+ pages of data. For news leaders who know they should read the entire report, but can’t find the time, fear not! I read it for you. Here are 10 trends affecting the news industry you need to know.

1. Mobile is officially the First Screen

We’ve intuitively known this from our own device use. In 2019, it became official in the data: Mobile surpassed TV as the first screen for time spent. It’s a good time for news leaders to honestly look at their news content through this lens. For the mobile-first consumer, what does your news product look like? Do you make it easy or hard to consumer your news via mobile? How well does your streaming work on mobile? How about story search? How much time do you spend on your mobile alert strategy? A bad user experience on your mobile experience isn’t just a bad mobile experience. In a mobile-first world, it represents your entire news brand.

2. Mobile + TV: An Untapped Two-Screen Opportunity

Don’t be blinded by the news of this “tipping point” from TV to mobile as the ‘first screen.’ There is a huge opportunity for broadcasters revealed by the percent of consumers who report two-screen use.

Almost everyone (88%) reports using a second device while watching TV. That might seem like even more bad news, eroding the impact of the large screen. That is, until you see the ways in which viewers are taking actions on their mobile device in direct response to what they’re watching on their television. Seven in ten look up content related to what they are watching on TV; and two in five message with friends and family about what they’re watching.

These are great entry points to create two-screen synergy. In ASU’s Cronkite newsroom, our students and faculty experimented with ways to involve the mobile audience in real time with our broadcast via a “Choose Your News” experiment that included multiple entry points for live audience participation. Many local stations utilize simple voting or polling technology. The data suggests that there are far more opportunities, and far more meaningful co-viewing strategies than mere up/down voting.

3. The Social Leaderboard is Changing

Instagram and YouTube are the platforms with dramatic upward trajectory. While these are global numbers, most news organizations will recognize these trends in their own data. The numbers show Facebook daily usage hitting a plateau while Instagram surges; and for video, YouTube is experiencing the most growth. News organizations have limited resources to spend on these off-platform channels. It makes sense to ‘follow the audience’ and, as consumer habits change, shift strategy to keep pace with changing social media habits.

4. Where people really get news on social

When it comes to news, most publishers have seen significant reductions in referral traffic from Facebook as a result of algorithm changes over the past 18 months. Nevertheless, when compared to other social platforms, Facebook remains a significant gateway to news discovery. YouTube shows the most growth as a source for news. Notably, Twitter as a source for news has increased only slightly, and its use for news discovery remains concentrated among a small percentage of the population. For many journalists, Twitter is their first and preferred platform for news discovery and for sharing. However, the old adage applies: “Fish where the fish are.” For news discovery, Facebook is nearly four times more widely used for news headlines.

5. The Rise of Visual over Word-Based Content

When I worked for Gannett Broadcasting, I walked past a sign in the hallway every day that read: “Words in their best order.” My Twitter handle is @frankwords. Like most journalists, I love a bon mot, an elegant line, an incisive nut graph, an artful analogy, and a zinger ending.

In a series of slides in her 2019 trends report, Mary Meeker makes it clear that she sees the image overtaking the word as the form factor of impactful communication. She supports this conclusion with a variety of data, but this slide speaks for itself.

This trend should be great news for broadcasters. Images – still and moving – are our core currency. But Meeker notes the breadth of creativity now on display in visual storytelling (more on this in trend #6 below). There is much TV newsrooms can learn from their print colleagues about when to use a single image rather than moving video to tell the story of an impactful moment. And the standard TV reporter package pales in creativity next to entire threaded conversations composed of GIFs, or video animations. “How can you visualize that?” will become an increasingly critical question to ask.

6. Consumers as Creators

In her trends report, Meeker ties the rise of the image directly to a related trend, the consumer as a content creator. It was only a few decades ago that ‘publishing’ was both difficult and costly. For those two reasons, the channels were controlled by a relatively few publishers, and the audience was primarily a passive consumer. Meeker uses the evolution of Instagram to illustrate the ways that technology changes have empowered the passive consumer to become an active creator.

Constant cycles of product innovation, layered on top of increasingly powerful smartphones and always-on connectivity, have upended the traditional publisher/consumer relationship, flattening it in ways that journalists might resist or resent – but are likely powerless to stop. The strategic question is: How do you harness this firehose of content being created in your community?

7. News Algorithms: Beat Them or Join Them

The data doesn’t lie. For all the concerns around privacy, the data shows most people are willing to give up a little bit of their personal information in exchange for a more ‘personalized’ experience. Platform companies have led the way in combining user data with algorithms to deliver individuals a more customized experience. Notwithstanding some notorious failures around data privacy, consumers continue to reward these companies for those personalized benefits.

Look at how these same companies then apply that data intelligence to gain an oversized market share of digital advertising because of their ability to deliver above-average results. Both elements are key to a sustainable business model.

The hard question this forces on news leaders is: Can you beat the algorithm? Put differently, how do news organizations tell the story of the value of editorial decisions, rather than ‘popularity’ or ‘personalization’ as ways of sorting the news. “Editor’s Picks” is a sorting method. But the data suggests audience prefer the benefits of personalization. So if news organizations don’t want to cede that sorting to platform companies, we’ll need to implement our own ‘Personalized for you” methods of serving our audiences.

8. We Could Learn from Spotify About How to Monetize Digital

Discussions of data and personalization (should) lead directly to a conversation about new, digitally-optimized business models. Newspapers have been unable to transition from an ad-supported model to a subscriber-based model; and, as TV viewing declines, broadcasters face the same headwinds of dwindling spot ad revenue.

Mary Meeker points to the music service Spotify as a case-study in how to develop a subscription-supported business that starts free and ad-supported.

Spotify started as a free way to listen to music ‘in the cloud’, untethered from physical objects like CD’s or digital ownership, like buying and downloading a song from iTunes. Users ‘paid’ for the service via ads here and there between songs.

Meeker notes that Spotify delighted its users with a great experience, and social features like sharing songs and playlists. That delight in the core user experience is what gave Spotify the ability to ‘upsell’ its free listeners into paid users. There are many potential applications of this “Freemium” model for the news business. But it all starts with: Are you delighting your current users via your free experience? Like Spotify, we need to offer value worth paying for.

9. Future Tech is Exciting! And Not Easily Monetized Yet!

Meeker’s trends report has a number of slides demonstrating the rise of the next generation of content formats and consumption devices. It’s no longer ‘news’ that podcasts are soaring in popularity. But the latest data is impressive.

For broadcasters, the real challenge is two-fold: Where in this suddenly crowded content space do you have a ‘right to win’ (what can you do uniquely better than others)? And, do you have a business model for how you’ll monetize your efforts?

The good news in the data is that many of the top-performing podcasts are now being created by mainstream/legacy publishers. Journalists’ core story skills can be transferred to this format. But the podcast space will need to mature before the revenue catches up to the audience.

The same can be said for the boom in voice assistants. For the Amazon Echo alone, the install base is nearly 50 million. With more ‘skills’ added daily, and other platform companies joining in the battle for voice supremacy, local news organizations appropriately feel the pressure to be present on these devices.

Like the other emerging platforms and story forms, the challenge is one of timing and resources. It’s expensive, and often punishing, to be on the bleeding edge of innovation. There’s a fine line between innovating by gaining a presence on Alexa via an easy-to-produce daily Alexa Skill ‘news update’…versus engaging in a resource-taxing ‘vanity project’ that makes for a good company press release but is ahead of both the audience and the business model. Voice for news seems like it’s in the ‘sandbox’ stage, with different broadcast companies experimenting with DIY and partnership approaches to gain a foothold in the voice space. However, the technology continues to evolve quickly, and it’s unlikely today’s workarounds will be tomorrow’s workflows.

10. But Wait, There’s More Disruption Ahead!

Smart watches are poised to become another battleground for attention. Some of your friends (and maybe you, too) are already getting their mobile push alerts…on their watch!

The battle for this even smaller screen has already begun, as some news organizations experiment with the length of the text they send in their mobile alerts to ensure they also display well on the smallest screen yet. Hello, Dick Tracy!

There is a reason that Mary Meeker’s annual Industry Trends Report is legendary within the digital community. Admittedly, the point of this article was to summarize its key findings related to the local news industry for news leaders too busy to read the entire report. However, if you’ve made it this far, you may well want to see the other 323 slides of the 2019 Industry Trends Report.

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Paul’s Extra Point

Five mornings a week, Paul Gerke performs typical morning-anchor duties as part of the Today in Arizona team on TEGNA’s 12 News in Phoenix. But on some Fridays, he steps away at 6 a.m. and delivers a segment of his own — Paul’s Extra Point — that is resonating on social media by breaking away from the standard TV formula.

The segment delves at length into topics from gun violence to sports to immigration, or whatever else Gerke thinks is important enough to deserve a hefty three minutes. But Paul’s Extra Point goes well beyond analysis and into commentary. Forget the impartial anchor who sees two sides to every story. For Gerke, one of them is often the wrong side.

For example, in ‘Diabetes Shouldn’t Be a Death Sentence,’ Gerke rails about drug companies making billions at the expense of diabetics, some of whom admit to rationing insulin because they can’t afford the proper dosage.

And later, he says that regulating prescription drug prices should be Congress’s top priority.

Paul’s Extra Point has found a home on multiple social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, generating thousands of views. Gerke believes that’s because Millennials and Gen-Zers are looking for a change in how news is presented.

“They don’t want to be talked down to by some fancy dressed man or woman who is more attractive than they’ll ever be and makes more money then they’ll ever make, and they’re sitting in their ivory tower and telling them what the news is and how it should affect them,” Gerke said. They want a conversation.

Gerke doesn’t use a neutral ‘anchor voice’ when delivering the segment. It’s more passionate. He said he wants to show the viewers that he has an emotional connection to the story just as much as they might. “It’s supposed to be a conversation starter between you at home and us here in the studio to let you know that our lives are impacted by these events in the same ways that yours are. We’re people too.”

Gerke’s not the only TEGNA anchor who’s pushing beyond the limits of local TV conventions. We’ve written about KUSA Denver’s Next with Kyle Clark, featuring an anchor who ignores many conventional breaking-news stories and delivers the news with an informal and irreverent ‘tell it like it is’ approach. Gerke knows that he’s coloring outside the lines for a TV news anchor. “We’re still a broadcasting entity that owes you the truth. We’re just finding different ways to present it,” he said. “I don’t think of it as much as commentary in my own head, as I think of it as an appeal to reason.”

Do you know an anchor, reporter or meteorologist who is using social media to engage with his or her viewers and deserves to be our next Social Media Spotlight? If so, email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu and we’ll check them out.

The not-so-secret weapon in the 2020 campaign

“A great disservice to the audience.”

That’s how ABC News president James Goldston described the inaccurate assumptions that drove flawed coverage of the last presidential election. With 20/20 hindsight, mainstream media missed the story. With 2020 foresight, network news executives are determined not to let that happen again.

That’s why Goldston and his counterparts, NBC’s Noah Oppenheim and (my former colleague) Susan Zirinsky of CBS, all promise to do a better job this time reporting on what’s really happening among voters around the country. In their first joint appearance, at a conference on “The Future of News” sponsored by the Financial Times, Oppenheim said: “It’s all about those journalists on the ground, telling the story from the ground up.” Zirinsky added: “I feel that in this election, our job is to reveal America to itself.”

The suave British moderator moved on, leaving undiscussed the three executives’ most potent asset in covering the next election: their networks of 200-odd owned stations and affiliates — a journalistic resource no other news organization can match. And it turns out that even at this early stage of the campaign, each of the broadcast networks is taking significant steps to take advantage of this unique alliance.

NBC News

“There has not traditionally been a great editorial relationship between network and local,” admits Chuck Todd, moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press. “ABC, CBS, NBC should never miss anything, considering how much saturation we all technically have in the country…but we have not been able to harness this power.” Todd, who calls the stations an “incredible resource,” is determined to change that. Since April of last year, Todd has been conducting meetings with executives and politics experts from stations around the country, starting with NBC affiliates from different ownership groups but now focusing on individual states.

Todd recently held a Texas session focused on immigration — and came home impressed. “It was a reminder that we actually have some experts in this field. They just happen to be affiliates of NBC News in Texas.” Todd told me he plans to continue meeting with stations right up to next year’s national party conventions. He sees the relationship as a two-way proposition, offering to share resources like a tool that measures campaign spending in any media market. “I’ll share that with any NBC affiliate that wants to track what money is being spent locally. That’s how network-local affiliate partnership should work, right? I can afford to do something on a national scale. And the local affiliates can benefit from it. So these are the little things that we’re trying to do to build some trust, rebuild some trust.”

CBS News

“There is a conception, and it’s probably fair, that the national reporters pop in every four years for the presidential campaign,” says Caitlin Conant, Political Director at CBS News. “And the local reporters in those markets are able to provide some context on not only how things have evolved in their state, but also what is going to affect not just how voters vote on election day, but why they vote.”

In addition to providing local expertise, a close collaboration with affiliates enables the network to hear from more voters in more locations, Conant says. “I want to make sure that we’re in as many places as we can be, so that we’re not only covering the horse race, but we’re talking to voters, and we are making sure that we’re not missing the issues that matter to them.”

CBSN, the network’s 24/7 streaming service, has a regular feature called Local Matters that showcases local journalists, including affiliate reporters. Conant hopes the stations will help keep CBS News on top of a potentially fast-changing story. “Because I think the last thing we want to do in this election is assume anything,” she says. “And the last election just taught us that things are unpredictable. We have to be flexible. And we have to rely on our eyes and ears on the ground, because DC and New York can be very much a bubble.”

ABC News

Rick Klein, Conant’s counterpart at ABC News, also sounds a cautionary note about the danger of assumptions. “I’ve repeated a phrase over and over again to my team since 2016,” he says, “which is to ‘embrace the uncertainty.’ It’s critically important that we think about what we don’t know. And a big piece of that is working with our local reporters. That’s a big strength that the networks have: newsrooms that are actually in the communities all around the country.”

That’s why Klein has regular conference calls with news directors from ABC O-and-O’s and affiliates, who give him feedback on ABC’s coverage and tip him off to critical local issues. Klein’s pitch whenever he talks to his local colleagues: “Tell us what you’re hearing from viewers, from your neighbors. We can never get too much intelligence about what people are talking about, what people are interested in.” He also sets aside an hour a week for on-air talkbacks with local anchors.

All three networks have a corps of dedicated campaign reporters, referred to informally as “embeds,” and some of them are already “embedded” not just in key early-voting states but in affiliate newsrooms. “It means that we’ll have reporters who every day are engaging with the newsroom there,” says Klein. “They’re going to be actually breathing the same air and thinking about stories the same way.”

As the election campaign heats up over the next year, please help us here at the Knight-Cronkite News Lab find interesting examples of collaboration and innovation at both networks and stations. “The relationship with the network is very much a two-way street,” says Klein. “We entirely value their input, their feedback, and we want to hear what they’re hearing.”

For now, network executives are saying all the right things and — wait for it — listening.

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The Paolini Perspective

Look closely at the picture above. That tattooed leg on the left belongs to WTTG – TV General Manager Patrick Paolini — as does the properly-suited and well-shod leg on the right. The self-described “News Junkie. Runner. Opinionated GM at Fox5 DC” is promoting a podcast from one of the station’s most visible personalities: Paolini himself.

Here’s the rest of him.

In his six years as GM of Fox5 DC and its Washington duopoly partner, WDCA (which he re-branded as Fox5 Plus), Paolini has pushed the limits on original production, productivity, promotion, and personality. Depending on which numbers you cite, Fox5 is either “the” or “a” news leader in the market. WRC-TV NBC4 would aggressively dispute the word “the” in the last sentence.

Paolini’s weekly podcast, now nearing its 60th episode, is a series of conversations with contributor Sarah Fraser in which he expounds on politics, pop culture, and whatever else is on Paolini’s restless mind. It is indeed “opinionated.”

We thought it would be interesting to get the “Paolini perspective” on some of the issues we write about here at the Lab. So here are my five (naturally) takeaways from a wide-ranging conversation about how to survive and thrive in today’s local news environment.

1. Bet on local production — you can’t do too much.

Paolini believes the audience’s appetite for news and information is pretty much boundless. “People are tuning in all the time for news. And if you’re not there, you’re dead.” He has expanded the two stations’ weekly output from 51 hours a week when he arrived in 2013 to 78.5 hours as of this July, when Fox5 DC launches a 4 PM newscast.

On Paolini’s watch, the station has added an hour to its morning program; introduced 8 and 9 PM newscasts on the duopoly station; and created two new daily programs: a half-hour of topical commentary with an ensemble cast of four each night at 7 PM called Like it or Not, and a late-night political roundup with solo anchor Jim Lokay called The Final 5 that is competitive with network heavy hitters Colbert, Fallon and Kimmel. It obviously helps that the Fox broadcast network isn’t a player in morning or evening news or late-night, but Paolini is a proponent of replacing tired and/or overpriced syndicated fare with local programming wherever he sees an opportunity.

“Like it or Not” on Fox5.

As Paolini’s own weekly contribution suggests, Fox5 DC has also moved aggressively into podcasting. He commissioned a new studio to produce podcasts ranging from true crime to politics to faith and more. He admits the podcasts are not a big revenue generator for now, but “it rallied our newsroom.”

2. Push your newsroom’s productivity to the limit.

Yes, you can do more with the same number of people, Paolini says. “Most stations now are operating on a legacy model of positions, job descriptions, workflow, and resources,” he says. When he arrived, “there was a mentality, especially in the morning, that if we wanted to create more authentic, innovative content, we had to hire more staff. And I firmly believe that that wasn’t the case.” He admits it was a “major undertaking” that took a few years, but he methodically worked through every job description — non-union and union alike — and says he is doing all that new production with essentially the same number of people.

Which isn’t to say Paolini takes news director Paul McGonagle or the staff for granted, praising them as tireless, creative, and a “fantastic team that cares deeply about the industry and the success of the station.” And with the impending debut of the 4 PM news, even Paolini admits he may have reached the saturation point. “Are you pushing the newsroom too far to create content?” he asks himself rhetorically. “Right now to be candid, we’re about there. I don’t think we could add much more without adding to the resources of the TV station.” Phew.

3. Engage (and sometimes even enrage) with provocative promotion.

In a fragmented media marketplace, Paolini says you can’t count on standard promotion to cut through or resonate, which is why by his own admission “I drive promotion manager Scott Perkins crazy.” Fox5 DC’s edgy promos might offend you, but somehow I don’t think Paolini is losing sleep over that. ‘Weather What the Blank,’ for example, shows regular people reacting to really bad weather with really bad language — but lets you fill in the blanks, as in “Holy _ _ _ _!” or “What the _ _ _ _!?!”

 

4. Encourage your talent to be themselves — and to share their opinions.

Every manager I know uses the buzz word “authentic” to describe the ideal on-air talent, and Paolini is no exception. But at Fox5 DC, that means encouraging the anchors and reporters to walk right up to the line between “objective” journalism and opinion — and sometimes cross it. Paolini admits this is a “gray area” that has to be managed carefully. “I don’t want them endorsing candidates,” he says. “But I’m okay with them saying, ‘That monster should be put in jail forever for raping those children.’ That’s opinion. But I think it’s also real. And I think that’s what viewers expect now.”

It’s a balancing act that permeates the “Paolini perspective,” between delivering on conventional expectations and blowing them up. “Being a fact based news organization is still paramount. If you’re just provocative, you’re not going to be successful. If you’re just the traditional, boring way to deliver news, you’re not going to be successful.”

5. Follow your instincts — and your viewers’ interests — rather than legacy conventions.

Paolini, who goes out of his way to stress that he’s not a journalist by trade or training, unabashedly caters to what he and his team think will grab and hold viewers. “Yes, they are news shows,” he says. “But in this day and age, we have to entertain the public. People have no patience.” Paolini says he keeps Nielsen for his clients but uses digital metrics, the discovery tool TopicPulse, and his own and his team’s instincts, not ratings, to decide what’s working and what isn’t. “I try to step back and be a viewer when I watch the shows, and I get feedback from throughout the building.”

The GM holds sessions a few times a year with groups from the newsroom, who critique a selection of stories from the previous months. He also likes discussing story ideas with the young interns, who wouldn’t watch local TV news if they didn’t work there. ”I think we have to stop making decisions on what stories we’re going to do because that’s what the people in the editorial meeting think people are interested in. We have to ask those questions: Are [the viewers] really interested in this? If so, what do they want to know about it? If so, how are we going to tell the story? And why are they going to share it once we post it on digital?”

Paolini abolished sweeps series as an outdated concept, instead emphasizing “day in and day out content.” His broadcasts don’t have a sports segment, although they cover sports stories they feel are important to the audience. Ditto for investigations: there’s no separate unit, but his reporters are expected to do enterprise reporting. And his newsroom is more likely to double down and stay on a high-interest story — even one that’s not in the market. “I think the Paolini perspective on that is: stop thinking too local, number one, and stop thinking that you have to follow a formula.” That means sometimes skipping or downplaying standard fare — a reporter “standing in front of a building with a dark parking lot for no apparent reason” — that is not necessarily compelling to viewers. “We’re not afraid to forego something to do something we think is going to resonate and work.”

All that said, Paolini is at heart a local broadcaster with a strong belief in the value and potential of local news. He knows that he’s competing not just against other television stations, but against a host of strong newsrooms, especially in Washington DC. “We’re all fighting for a piece of that news audience. The one thing we have that they don’t: We can be local. We are part of the community… and we have to make sure that we’re constantly tapping into that.”

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Does Double the Length Mean Double the Shelf Life in Local TV News?

Our very own Knight-Cronkite Professor of Practice in TV News Innovation Frank Mungeam sat down with TVNewsCheck to talk about what newsrooms can do differently to drive innovation and success. Frank teaches at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism in Phoenix, and was previously the VP of digital audience engagement at TEGNA.

He spoke about the need to overhaul the morning meeting, getting rid of menial tasks, and mining the archives to create digital content. Read the entire interview by TVNewsCheck here.

And check out three of the local newsrooms experiments Frank has conducted for the Knight-Cronkite News Lab with Cronkite News students at the Cronkite School:

  • Want Newsroom Innovation? Start with a STOP List (Read here…)
  • In search of Swiss Army knives for news: Story formats to future-proof your newscast (Read here…)
  • How Simple Lists Can Improve Local Journalism (Read here…)

Better practices for local TV newsroom innovation

A tech-driven spinoff poses new challenges for TV newsrooms

If you’ve seen one anchor, you’ve seen them all.

That’s not me being snarky. That’s me describing Local Now, a news and information streaming service spun out of The Weather Channel. The one anchor is Sasha Rionda, or just ‘Sasha’ as she sometimes introduces herself, and here’s how she describes her duties on her LinkedIn profile:

“She…delivers the daily news of 25 US Markets as well as national news and fun lifestyle pieces for “Local Now”. A very cool app! If you haven’t already, you should check it out.”

Rionda is right — you should. She anchors a customized local news feed for each of Local Now’s 25 premium markets without ever leaving her home base in Atlanta — just one of the ways the upstart OTT and mobile service is upending conventional notions of how to produce and deliver user-friendly local news. As curation, personalization and production become more automated, tech-savvy challengers like Local Now are putting pressure on traditional TV newsrooms to reassess how best to serve and keep their viewers, not to mention attract new ones.

“Local Now” host Sasha Rionda.

Given its parentage, it’s no surprise that a staple of Local Now’s core value is weather forecasts localized to 220 markets: data screens with pre-packaged voice-overs in most cases, but buttressed with Atlanta-based meteorologists in 40 of them, including the 25 large markets the service labels ‘platinum.’ But Weather Channel President Tom O’Brien, a veteran of NBC and Nexstar, sees the chance to go after a broader audience. “The key is using the strength of what we have with The Weather Channel,” he says. “How do we advance that? How do we use technology to be able to create another opportunity for us to do what we do best, which is impart news, weather and information to people across America?”

So there’s much more than weather to Local Now, which is free and 100% ad-supported: national news, business, technology, traffic, sports, recipes, movie roundups, restaurant reviews, wellness and lifestyle segments reported by contributors and freelancers. Like Sinclair’s Stirr, which we wrote about earlier this year, Local Now relies on content partners to supplement its own team. The user can skip around among the verticals or just let them flow.

Some of the city-specific content — in addition to all that weather of course — is as simple as AP headlines set to a perky music beat, but there are also local restaurant reviews from Yelp cleverly spun up into visually appealing top-five lists. Generic voice-overs like “Here’s a local pick you shouldn’t miss” or “Here’s another local pick in our area that’s looking great” add a human touch. There are more conventional national segments too, like Mom Life with Adrianna Costa or the latest business news from partner service Cheddar. No blood and guts, thank you, although Sasha did gleefully tell me about the arrest of the “subway bandit,” who’d been disrupting mass transit by pulling emergency alarms on New York subway cars.

Local Now may not be keeping news directors up at night — yet. Michael Senzon, who leads the project after years as a digital content creator at CNN and CNBC, says some stations have even asked him about potential partnerships. “I think that there’s an opportunity for all of us to play together nicely in the sandbox,” he says. Many station groups are moving aggressively into the OTT arena themselves. Along with the aforementioned Stirr, we’ve reported on CBSN New York and LA as well as Gray’s InvestigateTV.

But if I were running a local TV newsroom, I’d be thinking about “Local Next.” Startups have a way of sneaking up on incumbents, even if they don’t seem to pose a threat in their early stages. And as Senzon points out, it’s not always easy for stations to change. “We don’t have the same limitations on our business to do what we need to do,” he says. “They have newscasts they need to put on the air every day. There’s an audience that expects a certain thing, regardless of whether or not a younger audience is not coming to watch, right? There are people who love their local news.”

“This is an opportunity to reach another audience,” adds O’Brien. “And by the way, deliver more local news, or more news of local interest to communities around the nation than is currently available.” Weather Channel owner Byron Allen agrees. He’s betting that the OTT streaming wars will favor the service because of its local component. As reported in Broadcasting & Cable, Allen told a panel at NAB this spring that Local Now is “an unstoppable beast.”

I suggest to Senzon that “the beast” is still a work in progress, and he bristles a bit. But he goes on to say that customization and personalization will only get better. The service is also creating more locally-focused content, such as a recent ‘explainer’ on why Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Savings Time. The Local Now format is eminently flexible and scalable — it would be nice to give Sasha Rionda a little help — and O’Brien and Senzon are starting to get meaningful data on what’s resonating with users. “We’ve set up a technology platform that gives us the ability to evolve according to what consumers want,” O’Brien says. “I think we can benefit the local news ecosystem.”

One benefit may be that services like Local Now encourage TV newsrooms to double down on distinctive, original enterprise reporting: farm-to-table journalism that can’t be served up from Atlanta — or by algorithms.

How simple lists can improve local journalism

Hospital intensive care units perform medical miracles daily. But in a fraction of cases, minor infections from major surgery are fatal to patients. In 2001, Peter Pronovost, a critical care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, had an idea for reducing patient infections resulting from the insertion of in-line tubes during intensive care. He created a five-step checklist with steps so simple – including “wash your hands” – that they bordered on insulting to the health care professionals. But they worked.

They worked so well, in fact, that the results were hard to believe. Over the course of a year, the five-step checklist was estimated to have prevented 43 infections and saved eight lives at that one hospital. Pronovost then worked with teams to create other checklists and found that simply having doctors and nurses create their own checklists improved care so much that it cut in half the time patients spent in the intensive care unit.

Pronovost eventually was given the opportunity to apply his checklist strategy at ICUs across Michigan. In just the first three months, infection rates dropped by 66%, and over the course of 18 months, it’s estimated that more than 1,500 lives were saved by implementing these checklists.

These are just two examples of the power of simple checklists shared by author and surgeon Atul Gawande in The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. Those benefits are not limited to medicine. Whether it’s flying a plane or building a skyscraper, Gawande makes a compelling case that in many fields of expertise, the primary problem has become the degree of complexity rather than a lack of expertise.

“Substantial parts of what software designers, financial managers, firefighters, police officers, lawyers and, most certainly, clinicians do are now too complex for them to carry out reliably from memory alone,” Gawande wrote.

Get the Stupid Stuff Right

Journalism isn’t brain surgery, as news directors like to point out. But newsrooms could learn a lot from the way experts in other fields have benefited from the simple power of the checklist.

In fact, newsrooms teem with tasks ripe for a checklist approach. Repetitive tasks are one area of opportunity.

“We are not built for discipline, we are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at,” Gawande observed.

Increasingly complex workflows are another: “The volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.”

Finally, some rote and repetitive tasks are so easy they’re easy to miss. As Gawande put it, “you want people to make sure to get the stupid stuff right.”

The Accuracy Checklist

Here in the Cronkite Newsroom at Arizona State University, the most important checklist is the Accuracy Checklist. Lori Todd, Digital Director and Professor of Practice at Cronkite News, helped develop the checklist, adapted from one she used in her previous role as Senior Social Media Editor at National Public Radio. Todd and team edited the list to make it work for all platforms. The purpose of the checklist is to help student journalists develop the habit of fact-checking. Todd notes that students themselves helped enhance the checklist, for example adding a check for preferred personal pronoun. Cronkite’s accuracy checklist is a perfect example of the “wash your hands” type of checklist, filled with simple and even mundane checks (spelling of name and title, checking dates.) Yet any editor will tell you these are the very errors that drive journalists crazy – and erode trust in media.

(Cronkite News Accuracy Checklist courtesy of Cronkite News)

At TEGNA, which operates 49 local television stations in 41 markets, checklists have become a strategic tool. Stations use checklists to not only improve execution at daily tasks but also to refocus newsroom culture on putting the audience first. (Note: I previously worked for TEGNA as VP for digital content, so I’m familiar with such checklists.) The typical station uses three essential checklists, each with its own purpose, according to Joanie Vasiliadis, TEGNA’s vice president of digital content, who has led the checklist efforts. Stations have checklists for breaking news, start of shift and SEO optimization.

Breaking News Checklist

“Breaking news can be very chaotic,” Vasiliadis noted. “There’s lots going on at one time. The checklist makes sure we’re not skipping the foundational things.” Newsrooms are always adding new tools, which require updated workflows. “The checklist helps us make sure we are doing the basics,” Vasiliadis said. “It’s just so easy to forget in the craziness of breaking news.”

Start of Shift Checklist

Producers at TEGNA stations use this checklist to help foster smooth handoffs. Producers can be confident they’ve hit all the important items as they begin their day, such as checking in with reporters, engaging in social listening, and ensuring that digital stories are optimized and have video. “The checklist is a living, breathing document because our world is always changing,” Vasiliadis said.

SEO Optimization Checklist

Different news organizations prioritize different story elements and define story excellence differently, so story optimization checklists are specific to each organization. Some might focus on video, others on search-engine optimization and still others on multimedia or interactivity or word count. TEGNA producers have a checklist that helps them ensure stories contain the key elements (word length, optimized titles and descriptions, etc.) to insure good SEO ranking. The ideal story checklist is one that best reflects that news organization’s priorities.

Creating Effective Checklists

Process counts when creating a checklist for a newsroom. Vasiliadis led a collaborative process that involved all the key stakeholders, from EPs and news directors to digital producers, reporters and photographers. The first draft then was tested in one newsroom, and employees were asked for feedback, which led to refinements. Only then were the checklists rolled out to all of its stations.
“It was a multi-month process,” acknowledged Vasiliadis, who believes the extra time invested in the inclusive process resulted in more effective checklists.
Aesthetics also count. Vasiliadis said the list evolved from “chicken scratch” to a Word document to – in its final form – a sharply designed single-page list polished by the graphics team that easily fits on a desk or desktop.

Checklists as Mission

At TEGNA, checklists also serve a higher purpose: to get everyone aligned with an audience-first focus. “All our checklists are written from the perspective of the audience,” Vasiliadis said. “We are busy sitting behind computers, making calls, et cetera. The checklist helps us maintain the perspective of the audience – for example, how will this look on their phone?”
The inclusiveness of the process was key, she said, “because we wanted to capture all perspectives, but the most important thing was, we wanted to improve the experience of our audience” through the use of the checklists.

Checklists in Your Newsroom

Gawande, the surgeon and author, noted that resistance to checklists is common. In medicine, some professionals felt the checklists were an affront to their expertise.
“It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us – those we aspire to be – handle situations of high stakes and complexity,” he wrote in The Checklist Manifesto. “The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating.”
Brevity and specificity are other keys to creating a successful checklist, according to Gawande. “The checklist cannot be lengthy. A rule of thumb some use is to keep it to between five and nine items, which is the limit of working memory.”

A Checklist of: Key Benefits of Checklists

  • Ensure rote and “routine” tasks are done correctly and completely
  • Creates consistency in applying best practices across all work groups and dayparts
  • Helps adoption of new workflows/technologies
  • Improves execution under pressure, for example, during breaking news and weather
  • Clarifies who’s accountable for doing what
  • Shapes focus of newsroom and fosters alignment of mission

What are the most opportunistic places to use a checklist in your newsroom? Which teams could you turn loose to create concise, actionable workflow lists? Checklists are a powerful way to improve daily journalism excellence in a way that’s as simple as washing your hands.

The Offer She Couldn’t Refuse

Hiring is hard. It’s a combination of science and art, insight and instinct, experience and luck. Same with successful innovation. Every decision is a bet and a risk. As stations evolve to meet the needs of a new generation of consumers, how should recruitment change too? And how might up-and-coming young journalists challenge news directors to think differently?

This is the story of a professional “courtship” between two women who had plenty of reasons NOT to connect. And as veteran and budding journalists alike struggle to navigate a rapidly changing competitive landscape, it’s also a lesson for both stations and candidates in how to forge your own path.

Tracy Sabo is a news director who doesn’t like to hire MMJ’s straight out of school. She’s been burned too many times. “The struggle among news directors in the industry these days, especially when you work in small and medium markets, is the level of quality,” Sabo says. “Your management team has really got to spend a lot of time training — more than they’ve ever had to do before.” Sabo prefers someone with a couple years of work experience, even if it’s not always easy to lure them to KTUU in Anchorage Alaska, Gray’s station in market #147.

Samie Gebers (short for Samantha and pronounced “SAMMY”) is a self-described “California beach girl” who just graduated from our home base here at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. The only time she’s ever been to Alaska is on a summer cruise with her family. “People have actually told me, ‘There are two places in the United States that are career suicide: Alaska and Hawaii,’” she says. “‘You don’t want to go to those places. They’re too far removed. It’ll be hard for you to get back to the [contiguous] United States.’”

Samie Gebers/Screenshot from her website.

You can guess the punch line. Gebers and Sabo met in person for the first time when Gebers reported for work in Anchorage right after Memorial Day. Gebers, a prize-winning student journalist, turned down two jobs in her native California to go to Alaska. (Ironically, given the ‘career suicide’ advice, Gebers’ summer internship last year was at Hawaii News Now.)

Sabo told me she’s had Gebers in her sights for a year. “I’m super excited about her,” Sabo says. “I know it was a competitive effort to get her to see the value of Alaska, but she really got the eye of our chief photographer, because it’s rare that we see that level of exceptional talent coming out of school. Samie just absolutely impressed us as a storyteller. Her writing is well beyond her years, but mostly her eye for video and her ability to look for different angles and to recognize a moment definitely stood out, and that’s what we look for here in almost every hire we make.”

At Cronkite, Gebers pursued her passion for visual storytelling beyond the classroom and the newsroom. She wrangled scholarships to NPPA’s News Video Workshop in Norman, Oklahoma and later its Advanced Storytelling Workshop in San Marcos, Texas. The workshops were “huge game changers for me,” Gebers says. “So I started thinking about, what are stations that value the same things that the NPPA does, which is good storytelling…visuals…compelling characters and knowing the difference between a report and a story.”

Those workshops were game changers in more ways than one. Faculty member Ted Land of Seattle’s KING-TV, who once worked at KTUU, was impressed enough with Gebers to put her on Tracy Sabo’s radar.

But how did Sabo sell KTUU to Gebers? The station’s recognized legacy of outstanding photography and in-depth storytelling was a key factor, as well as a reputation for strong mentoring. New MMJ’s routinely start with weeks of one-on-one training with chief photographer Eric Sowl, a 28-year veteran of the station. “Tracy just seemed to really value the same things that I valued, which was strong storytelling and…having an environment where people can get better,” says Gebers.

And then there is — Alaska itself. It’s not every station that can include a shot of a polar bear in its recruitment video. Alaska’s vast scale — one-fifth the size of the continental U.S. — and its sometimes forbidding terrain make covering the entire state a challenge. “It’s not uncommon for our reporters to get on both commercial flights and bush planes, bush planes to snow machines, bush planes to boats; we’ve gone by dog sled in the Denali [National Park] in the winter before,” Sabo says. If that sounds like fun to you, you understand why Samie Gebers said yes.

Gebers admits she had to fight the temptation to shoot for the biggest market that would take her. If Sabo is right that there’s a shortage of great talent coming out of journalism schools, that (along with pressure on stations to cut costs) has opened up bigger-market opportunities for the strongest candidates. “Nowadays kids can go up to market 30, market 40, Market 50,” Gebers says. “But there are so many wonderful stations that are triple digit market numbers that are doing phenomenal work. And so it’s really important to just assess the station on its own and figure out if that’s going to be a right place for you.”

Gebers will start as an MMJ on the morning news, but (to her delight) there isn’t enough overnight crime in Anchorage to stir into the standard recipe of live shots from the scene, so she’ll be under pressure to come up with compelling original stories from the start. “We don’t want to be the station that spends our limited amount of resources covering every car accident or fire,” says her new boss. “We would rather tell a great human story.”

That emphasis on distinctive enterprise storytelling over routine ‘breaking news’ makes sense at KTUU because of Alaska’s unique attributes and the station’s history, but it represents a growing trend in the ‘lower 48’ as well. Sabo says she’s hearing something new from young journalists today. “I don’t get the same sense of ‘I want to be on TV and I want to be live and I want to tell people what’s breaking,’” she says. “Now what I find is they really want to be more involved in the community. They really are tied to the emotional side of news more than ever, and they’re not afraid to be human in the process, which is very much something that this older generation, me included, really shied away from. And so it’s changing the industry from where I sit, but I honestly think for the better. I think it’s more compelling to watch.”

Sabo says the rising crop of journalists like Samie Gebers has also given her a new perspective on her role. “My valiant effort as a news director isn’t to ‘save television’ or to ‘save television news,’ per se,” she says. “My goal is to be a great journalist and to reach as many people as possible. And I think millennials understand that. And so they come in thinking, ‘How do I reach people?’ Millennials have really challenged me as a news director. And I think they’ve challenged the norms. And I think they’ve challenged the legacy behaviors of broadcast news outlets. And I think that’s a good thing.”

You don’t always need a dog sled to leave your comfort zone.

We’re on the lookout for other examples of recruitments that reflect changing norms and challenge the conventional wisdom. If you know of one, please share it with us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

Good Enough to Eat

KSAT lifestyle reporter David Elder doesn’t have any formal broadcast training — in fact he graduated with a degree in marketing — but that hasn’t stopped him from creating one of the most popular foodie segments in the San Antonio market, “Elder Eats”. In the first two weeks of May alone, the “Elder Eats” segments and promo teases averaged 635K views on Facebook.

What makes Elder’s story of success even more incredible is that he handles every aspect of the show himself. Even as the “Elder Eats” brand has grown, Elder continues to write, shoot, produce and edit each segment. When he first started, the station even gave him a Sony XDCAM to shoot on, but he prefers his smartphone.

“I’ve gotten a rig before where I could set up my mic and have a light, but I just feel like it feels bulky,” Elder said. “When you’re in a kitchen, and there’s some kitchens and food trucks where you have like 50 square feet, it’s nothing. It’s a tiny little space, and you have to get around and be mobile.” In fact there are multiple times that he’s almost dropped his phone in a food frier trying to get around, he said.

In 2018, Elder shot every single “Elder Eats” episode on his phone.

Elder has an iPhone XR, which he says shoots high quality video with great natural sound. He does use an adapter when capturing interview audio to help with the sound quality, but it’s captured on his phone as well. When he’s just posting “snackables” for social media, he’ll even edit them in iMovie and put them out before he gets back to the station.

When Elder first began producing these foodie segments, people in the newsroom asked him what he shot on. They thought for sure he was using a DSLR to get that quality, and were all shocked when he told them it was shot on his iPhone.

“Everybody wanted to know what kind of camera is that? And I was like, ‘I used my phone,’” he said. “And everybody was like, ‘What?’”

The quality is good enough to go on TV, but for Elder his first thought has always been social media. His goal is to produce content that is visually appealing with subjects that are evergreen. “I shoot them that way intentionally,” Elder said. “I don’t focus on a current special. I don’t focus on an event. I shoot them so that a year from now I can share it out again and it’s still relevant.”

Elder’s focus on social media, combined with his lack of formal training, have produced videos that don’t fit a typical local TV mold. “I came in here and I was just kind of like, ‘Well I’m going to do this, this and this.’ And they [station executives] were like, ‘Well, we’ve never seen that before.’ And I was like, ‘Well check it out.’ Then other people [the audience] responded really well to it,” Elder said.

He gets his inspiration from watching food documentaries on Netflix like “Street Food” as well as popular YouTube videos. “I’m hooked on YouTube,” he said. “I like watching videos that are popular. And I watch in two ways, I watch it in the ‘I’m a general person that wants to be entertained.’ And then I also watch it from ‘How can I do this?’”

Elder worked in the restaurant industry since he was in high school, so food was always his passion. When he first began on air he was doing a lot of “feel-good” stories, but “they never felt right,” he said. “They never felt like that was really something I felt passionate about.” So he began gravitating towards food stories, and his passion for the subject fueled its growth.

“All of this is my own will to create this monster,” Elder joked. “If I just decided to stop giving it 1,000%, this wouldn’t happen.”

While the segment has existed in some form on both broadcast and social media since 2016, it really took off on social media. His early videos got a few thousand views each, but once he decided that food was going to be his focus he started getting hundreds of thousands, even millions, of views for each one.

This past February, “Elder Eats” became a dedicated 30-minute segment on SA Live, KSAT’s live daily variety and feature show, every Thursday afternoon. Elder was originally hired by KSAT to be a graphic designer, so he used his graphic design skills to create the logo and the brand.

Just a few months in, and the show has been averaging the highest ratings for a lifestyle show in the market, he said. At this point, Elder said he has visited over 200 restaurants in and around San Antonio. Having a longer show now gives him the flexibility to cover each restaurant differently, with the time the story deserves. Sometimes he’ll have shorter segments covering four restaurants in an episode, while other times he’ll spend the whole show covering a single topic or place — for example, one episode was all about a food festival taking place at SeaWorld.

His success has led to a lot of copycats in the market — outlets looking to tap into the consumer base he has found — and that has forced Elder to continue to innovate. His dream is for “Elder Eats” to evolve into an hour-long segment where he can educate, inform and entertain an audience all about food. Now that the show has earned an audience on broadcast and social media, KSAT is exploring monetization opportunities including sponsorships to make Elder’s dream a reality.

David Elder’s success with “Elder Eats” is an example to all newsrooms that ‘phoning it in’ can be an innovative way to create compelling, original local content.

If you have any examples of reporters using new, different tools in their storytelling let us know at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

In search of Swiss Army knives for news

This article is one in a series of ‘Lab Notes’ — experiments in local TV news innovation implemented at the ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation.

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail,” observed Abraham Maslow, the psychologist best known for developing the ‘hierarchy of needs’ to explain human motivation.

News directors looking to transform their local newscasts may want to stop hammering away with the same story and show formats, and instead switch to a more versatile tool. Content that’s more like a multi-use Swiss Army knife, and less like the repetitive, predictable pounding of hammer and nail.

Over the past few months, the students and faculty in the Cronkite newsroom at the ASU Cronkite School of Journalism have experimented with story and show formats in hopes of creating ‘Swiss Army knife’ content — content that both reinvigorates the current broadcast news format but also can thrive on the digital and social platforms where audiences increasingly choose to get their news.

We focused on key pain points for local newscasts: the predictability of the half-hour format and standard reporter packages; the fact that the primary content elements of a newscast — voice-overs, ‘VO-SOTs’ and short reporter-fronted packages — don’t translate or perform well on the other social and digital platforms today’s news consumers use; and the challenge of finding ways to create new formats in resource-strapped newsrooms busy programming hours of live shows per day.

With those challenges in mind, we engaged in three types of experiments:

  • making ‘video-poor’ stories more visually compelling
  • changing the look, feel and story formats to make the newscast more engaging and less predictable
  • creating content that could work both in the newscast but also cross-platform

Along the way, we looked for opportunities to increase the number of people in the newsroom who could contribute to content creation. Here are three experiments we tried — explainer videos, narrative packages, and via in-depth ‘spotlight’ segments — and what we learned.

Explainer Videos
In my years in local newsrooms, I remember stories being shot down in the morning meeting countless times because they were ‘video-poor’: important, but hard to visualize. Some called them ‘newspaper stories.’ In the new news ecosystem, where the local newspaper may be gone or gutted, those important stories still need to be told. So we set out to experiment in the Cronkite newsroom with ways to visualize these complex and video-poor but important topics.

We found our inspiration on YouTube, where “explainer” videos have thrived for years. I found the ‘whiteboard’ and ‘animation’ videos especially eye-catching and effective for breaking down complex topics. Why couldn’t this popular digital format also work within a newscast?

We did some research, compared product reviews, and settled on a DIY animation tool called VideoScribe by SPARKOL to simply and quickly create animated explainer videos. The tool includes a rich library of images and objects. A storyteller simply picks the objects, puts them in a sequential timeline, types in any desired text, and the tool does all the animation drawing automatically.

We first used VideoScribe to put into context the relative risks of air travel in the immediate aftermath of the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max airplanes.

We also used this method as part of our coverage of the Green New Deal movement, to explain whether giving up eating beef would really impact greenhouse gas emissions.

Then we create an animation to explain the concept of ‘Herd Immunity’ as part of an in-depth set of stories on vaccination rates in Arizona.


(Explainer starts at 6:22)

It’s been great to see this method quickly adopted elsewhere. In Spokane, KXLY used VideoScribe to explain a local school funding issue, days after seeing our Cronkite experiments. Here’s our story on the video explainer KXLY created.

We found that the ideal workflow was to use a standard storyboard script format, with one column for the anchor/reporter narration, and the other column for the companion visuals.
These animations not only gave our traditional newscast a fresh-looking story format and helped visually explain complex issues; this story format also works just as well as a social video or on digital platforms like the news website or YouTube — so it’s truly multi-platform content.

Videos without Video
On our Grand Canyon Spotlight segment, we also explored another format: a video with no video elements. Our inspiration was Ken Burns and his distinctive, compelling approach, which often relies solely on artwork and photography. We sought out the best ‘voice’ in our newsroom; we recruited a member of the digital team to research the best free photography of the Grand Canyon via government and creative commons websites; we collaborated on the writing and found one of our best editors. The result was a micro-documentary on the history of the Grand Canyon that visually relied solely on photography. No crew left the building. We used resources already in the newsroom. The story stood out within the broadcast. Yet it was also ideally optimized for digital and on-demand news consumers.

As with explainer videos, we simply took a story format that digital audiences have already embraced and incorporated it into the broadcast format. In addition, the production process resulted in a collaboration among ‘specialists’ who would not normally work together, each contributing a Marvel ‘superpower’ to create a story none could have done well alone; and all while not impacting our daily reporter resources.

Spotlight Segments
A common criticism of local TV news is that it lacks depth. So we set out to create ‘super-blocks’ – full segments of the newscast devoted to a deep dive into a single topic. We also challenged ourselves to utilize varied storytelling techniques, including ‘by the numbers’ data visualizations, interactive maps, the explainer videos and narrative story formats described above, and more. We restricted ourselves to airing only one ‘traditional’ TV package, and the producers went out of their way to avoid the traditional anchors-on-set look. The goal was to create in-depth content on a single topic. We hoped the outcome would be long-form video that not only worked in the newscast format (without looking like a newscast) but would also perform well on digital platforms.

We created three of these in-depth ‘Spotlight’ segments over the course of three months. The first was tied to the 100th anniversary of the Grand Canyon, the most visited destination in our Arizona coverage area. We did have one traditional reporter package covering current issues facing the park. But we enhanced and diversified our coverage with a ‘by the numbers’ story with key stats, presented not on the news set but by using a green screen; the mini-doc narrative described above telling the history of the canyon using only narrated photography; and a user-content powered segment where we used Tagboard to curate the best viewer images and stories of trips to the Grand Canyon.

We did two more of these Spotlight segments. One focused on wildfire season. The other, on vaccination rates in Arizona, was 12 minutes long — the entire ‘A block’ of the broadcast. The show began with an anchor at an interactive map, showing vaccination rates in key parts of Arizona; next was an enterprise package exploring why some Arizona counties have such low vaccination rates (this was significantly longer than a traditional package — nearly six minutes in length); then we produced the animation described earlier to explain “Herd Immunity.” We concluded the Spotlight coverage with a report on a special set summarizing each of four pieces of legislation proposed in Arizona to address the issues, and a short Q & A with the anchors and the reporter who led the investigation.

Future-Proofing Your Content
The unifying theme for these three content experiments was that they each produced content that gave a fresh look and feel to the daily newscast; yet in each case the content was formatted to work just as well on other screens, and for on-demand and long-tail as well as daily audiences. These approaches also led to greater collaboration and leveraged additional storytelling resources within the newsroom.

When time and money are scarce, it doesn’t make sense to keep hammering away at tired formats. Aiming innovation resources at ‘Swiss Army knife’ strategies can create content that work both for the platforms of today and tomorrow.

More experiments from the Cronkite News Lab:
For more ideas and examples on story and show format innovations from the Cronkite News Lab, check out our interactive “Choose Your News” live newscast; and our ongoing effort to improve transparency and trust via “Full Circle” storytelling. For examples of how technology and partnerships can help drive newsroom transformation, see our tech partnerships case study.

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Meteorologist James Spann utilizes social media and digital platforms to stay constantly connected to his followers

James Spann is the chief meteorologist at WBMA in Birmingham, Alabama, and he’s got something that a lot of social media users can only dream about — his actual name on Twitter.

His handle is @spann. No hyphens, no numbers, nothing.

People always ask him how he managed to get a handle like that. His response: “I’m an early adopter.” Twitter launched in 2006, but it wasn’t until 2008 that it really took off. That’s exactly when Spann joined the platform.

It’s not just Twitter though. He’s been on Facebook since 2009 — the year the social media company saw its first positive revenue — and he’s had a podcast since 2006 — almost a decade before popular podcasts like Serial became a viral sensation.

Spann now has over 550k followers on Facebook, and not just passive followers that like his posts and move on. He has dedicated followers that converse with him, share content and actually engage on his page.

Severe weather is an area where Spann has seen a huge benefit from his followers’ high engagement levels.

Alabama is part of ‘Tornado Alley’ — named for the sheer number of tornadoes that hit the area — so Spann has frequent practice communicating about severe weather to his followers. A few days before, when they know there will be a chance for severe weather, Spann begins pushing out additional content to his viewers, especially through Facebook.

He also gets flooded with images and videos so he is constantly retweeting and sharing relevant content among his followers.

“We know that people don’t do anything when they see radar,” Spann said. “Even as clearly as we can communicate the danger. But if they actually see video of a tornado, of damage, they can see it and go do something.”

Spann and his team use technology to bring the content from social media directly to the air as well. “I’m the only guy that understands what needs to be shown up there,” he said. “We don’t send it over to news to put in some kind of nice graphic system with a little name and all that. It is urgent what I’m doing.”

Severe storm coverage including 6+ hours of live TV coverage with images brought in from social media. (Screenshots from ABC 33/40 Weather on YouTube)

He has such a large following on social media that Spann will even get submissions that are not remotely related to weather. “They send me everything,” he said, fires, crashes everything. “It [is] stunning how much content I get every day not related to weather.”

Spann doesn’t have any training in journalism, so he sends what he can on to the news department. The most difficult platform for him to navigate is Twitter. Without journalism training it is hard to know what to retweet or not — especially when the information is related to sensitive issues like police investigations. “I just try to ask questions of the people I work with to make good decisions,” Spann said.

Spann has also utilized other digital platforms to spread his creative weather wings. He hosts a podcast called Weather Brains, as well as a daily weather vlog, the Weather Xtreme Video, which has become very popular among farmers in Alabama who depend on weather patterns for their livelihood.

He doesn’t pretend to be an expert in social media. In fact Spann willingly admits that he’s constantly learning about how best to utilize the platforms. He does have advice for anyone trying to best use social media in the news.

It’s about more than an eight-hour workday. You have to realize that being successful on social media requires hard work, he said. “To successfully work these social platforms, you’ve got to be there for them all the time,” Spann said. “So I honestly think that’s the trick for me is I’m always there and [my followers] know that. That’s why they send this stuff to me. You know you don’t sleep a lot, but I just think it’s important.”

Do you know an anchor, reporter or meteorologist who is using social media to engage with his or her viewers in an interesting way and deserves to be our next Social Media Spotlight? If so, email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu and we’ll check them out.

Changing the culture is a challenge, even when it’s the boss’s idea

Sometimes you have to look hard to find a good story — and sometimes all you have to do is look around you.

That’s what Tom Cibrowski did a year ago, when he started his new job as general manager of KGO-TV, ABC’s San Francisco station. Cibrowski, who had moved from a big network job at ABC News in New York, would walk to work every day from his temporary apartment. What he saw when he looked around was a catalogue of big-city problems such as rampant homelessness, unaffordable housing, and endless traffic jams — only far more severe than he expected. “Everybody kept saying, it seems worse, it seems much worse than it ever has been,” he told me. “So that just logically leads to ‘Well, what are we going to do about it?’”

Sounds pretty straightforward, but Cibrowski’s new colleagues in the newsroom didn’t share his enthusiasm — at least not at first: “My experience coming in as a brand new person was that the newsroom would face the daily influx of, ‘Oh, you know, I have to do another homeless story, I have to do another traffic story.’ And it was kind of like an eyes-glaze-over situation.” But news director Tracey Watkowski soon went from jaded to jazzed. “Okay, you know, what?” she said. “He’s got a fresh perspective on this. He’s just coming in with eyes wide open.”

The result: Watkowski pitched a new initiative, originally called Saving San Francisco, that quickly morphed into Building a Better Bay Area, a seemingly simple but powerful idea that is transforming how the station covers news and connects with its community.

“BABBA,” as it’s called internally, focuses relentlessly on the biggest issues confronting the Bay Area: concerns like homelessness, transportation, education, the environment, and more. It’s a big commitment of time and resources. When the project launched last October, management made sure everyone was on the same page — literally. Anchors on every broadcast read this promise to KGO’s viewers:

ABC7 is launching expanded coverage of the biggest issues facing the Bay Area today. We’re devoting more time, resources and reporting to the major stories impacting your quality of life. From the housing crisis — to our schools — to getting to work via our freeways and public transit, our goal is to bring you even greater context and perspective. And we’re digging deeper to find solutions. Every day.

“I think once it came out of their mouths, they knew it was the real thing” said Cibrowski. “And now we have to make good on that.”

While there are multiple “BABBA” stories throughout the week now, a signature feature is the occasional “roadblock” — a full week of coverage on all broadcasts and digital platforms around a single issue. The February roadblock on San Francisco’s troubled BART transit system, for example, involved ten different reporters, six of whom rode the rails from 5 a.m. to midnight.

This kind of investment obviously means scaling back some routine spot-news coverage — not an easy change for the newsroom at first. So Cibrowski and Watkowski set about breaking down a mind-set hardened by decades of habit. “All of these things end up being somewhat significant changes,” Cibrowski said. “Even saying directly to the assignment desk, ‘Look, I know you’ve got the scanner on. It’s chirping away, but you are no longer responsible for covering every single little breaking story. That’s in your DNA, that’s in your blood. But we’re telling you, we actually want to spend more time on these much broader issues and devote our resources in a different way.’”

But the newsroom has come around, not least because reporters get more time to dig deeper and press for answers. “I think there’s been a new sense of pride, kind of like a back in business attitude,” Cibrowski said. “I think most reporters would rather get out and cover these larger issues than the smaller breaking story down the block.” Watkowski agrees: “What I love is that the reporters, when they’re pitching a story in our editorial meetings, will say, ‘I have a BABBA story.’ It’s a part of our culture. So I’m really thrilled with that.”

In fairness, KGO-TV was already moving away from a breaking-news image towards a more community-focused approach, re-branding itself five years ago as “ABC7 — Where You Live.” (In the bad old days of the 70’s and 80’s, KGO was seen as so tabloid that its call letters were jokingly said to stand for “Kickers, Guts, and Orgasms.”)

“We can’t position ourselves as the best at breaking news,” which has become a commodity, said station marketing head Candace Hirleman. “We saw that people wanted and expected something more from us.” Hirleman sees Building a Better Bay Area as a strong rallying cry for the whole station. “Our purpose now we can say is to help improve the quality of life for people in the Bay Area, give them the information that they need to help them thrive. It’s something that we can all be really proud of.”

Has the station-wide effort made a difference? Cibrowski cites a small ratings uptick linked to the franchise, but the really encouraging news comes from the research firm SmithGeiger, which found in a January study that 40% of local news consumers were aware of Building a Better Bay Area. Of that group, nearly four out of 10 associated the project with KGO-TV — in just four months, one of the fastest spikes in brand awareness the firm has seen.

Given that momentum, Cibrowski and his team are working on ways to expand and extend the franchise with events, partnerships, and long-form programming. “I think there’s a lot more we can do with this,” says Watkowski. “And just knowing that people are seeing it and recognizing it and identifying it with us is terrific.”

Cibrowski wants an even greater emphasis on solutions. He sees this not just as an opportunity, but his responsibility as a local broadcaster. “With the issues that exist in the local print area and local publishing area, we are still these big television stations equipped with incredibly talented and experienced and veteran reporters. We’ve got helicopters, we’ve got microwave trucks, we’ve got Dejeros. We’ve got it all. How can we use this incredible resource we’re sitting on to make a difference? Just doing your standard everyday newscast is just not enough anymore. We’ve got to figure out a way to plant our flag for the future.”

Hey, here’s an idea. ABC owns stations in other big cities that have plenty of problems and room for improvement, including mine. “BABNY” has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

[Disclosure: Tom Cibrowski and Andrew worked together at CBS News years ago.]

We let our audience ‘Choose the News.’ Here’s what happened.

NOTE: This case study is one in a series of news ‘experiments’ done by journalism students in the Cronkite Newsroom. Thanks to a grant from the Knight Foundation, the results are shared here on the Knight-Cronkite News Lab for the benefit of local TV newsrooms across the country.

What would happen if, for one day, you let your audience decide which stories you covered and the depth of treatment they received, and included the audience’s voice in that coverage? I’m not talking about gimmicks like letting the audience vote on whether the ‘kicker’ story should be the cute puppy video or the water-skiing squirrel (but, for what it’s worth, the water-skiing squirrel gets my vote every time!) I’m talking about empowering your audience to make meaningful decisions about substantive stories and your approach to coverage.

What We Did: ‘Choose Your News’

Students produce a 30-minute newscast every weekday that airs at 5 p.m. on Arizona PBS in Phoenix. On Tuesday, April 23rd, the big difference was that the program was live and the students at the ASU Cronkite School of Journalism produced a 30-minute live ‘Choose Your News’ special for Arizona PBS where we challenged ourselves to give our audience a meaningful voice in shaping the entire trajectory of the newscast.

We divided our broadcast into three segments, each informed by audience involvement. We also employed four engagement tools – GroundSource, MegaphoneTV, Twitter and Tagboard – to help empower the audience. Leading up to the broadcast, we prepared three enterprise reports for the first segment that were chosen with audience input. Then we used live voting to determine what happened next in the show. Ultimately, to account for all the possible choices the audience could make, we had to produce the equivalent of three full shows worth of content. This was not wasted work. We always knew the unaired ‘story journeys’ would be published online as our digital ‘Choose Your News’ experience.

Why ‘Choose Your News’

Our core goal was to go beyond mere token ‘audience engagement.’ We wanted to explore what would happen if we gave the audience a non-trivial voice in our editorial process. At the same time, we wanted to find a way to empower the audience without giving up our journalistic standards and rigor.

In the process, we also wanted to test different kinds of engagement tools to evaluate their ease of use both for us as journalists, and for our viewers and users; and to assess their relative effectiveness at bringing in the voice of the audience.

Finally, as a journalism school, our overriding goal in everything we do is to create a valuable learning experience for our students. The ‘Choose Your News’ experiment was intended specifically to empower our students to stretch their skills at engaging with the audience in a more direct and meaningful way.

‘Choose Your News’: How We Did It

We divided our 30-minute broadcast into three distinct blocks. Each show block featured a different audience engagement technique: The first segment used live audience voting to determine what story would air in the second block; during the second block, we solicited real-time social reaction; and in the third segment, we featured the ‘voice’ of the audience, including live curation of comments from social media.

The process of involving the audience in key editorial decisions started weeks in advance. We decided to feature three enterprise reports in our first segment. We wanted to ‘source’ those stories from the audience, while also applying our editorial standards. Two weeks in advance, we used the interactive texting tool GroundSource to solicit story ideas from viewers in three areas where we have dedicated beat reporters: Sustainability, Health and Borderlands.

We mixed those suggestions with enterprise stories pitched by reporters on those beats, and then created a Twitter poll for each vertical. Over the course of a week, our audience voted on which story we should produce in each of the three subject areas (Sustainability, Health and Borderlands.) We were delighted to receive hundreds of votes, and used this feedback to choose the three featured enterprise stories that made up our first segment.

At the start of our broadcast, we explained to viewers that the three featured stories were the ones they chose. We then let them know that, in the second segment of the show, we’d explore one of these three topics in-depth with a one-on-one interview with a subject-matter expert. The audience would decide which one via live voting enabled by MegaphoneTV.

As each story aired, a live rating displayed in real time as viewers voted on a scale of 1-5 stars the degree to which “I want to know MORE about this story”. Without spoiling the outcome for those who want to watch on-demand below, I can say we were pleased to see that the average “interest” rating was nearly a four out of five.

Of course, we had no way to know in advance which topic the audience would choose for the in-depth interview. So we had to produce three possible versions; each reporter, in addition to the enterprise story, prepared a five-minute one-on-one interview, and our producer built all three options into the show rundown, ready to drop the two that were not chosen.

During that second segment, while the deep-dive interview aired, we kept an on-screen call to action inviting our viewers to join the conversation and share their comments on Twitter via the hashtag #CNrealtalk. A second producer was dedicated to using Tagboard to engage in live curation of the social response.

Because we could not be sure what kind of live social response we’d get, we also prepared a more tradition ‘MOS’ method of including the voice of the audience. Since we already knew the subjects of the three possible story paths, we send three producers out to shoot separate ‘Community Voices’ segments and edited those together as short reaction videos. In our third segment, we aired the community voices video for the topic chosen by viewers, and then we displayed social comments as well.

Since we created three possible show ‘journeys’ and only one aired, our digital team created an online version of ‘Choose Your News’ and, at the end of the broadcast, we directed viewers to our website where they could choose a different story and see the in-depth interview and community voices for each of the other two options. And, we kept the conversation going by using GroundSource to once again invite suggestions for future story coverage. Here is the Choose Your News digital experience.

Results

Overall, students and faculty considered ‘Choose Your News’ a successful engagement experiment. From a measurement standpoint, we received above-average participation in the Twitter polls we used to select the three enterprise stories; we had more than 200 concurrent unique users voting live during our ‘choose the follow-up’ segment; and despite a narrow seven-minute window to solicit audience comments, we received a number of high-quality comments via social media. Our social posts related to the special show also significantly over-indexed compared to the daily averages for Cronkite News.

Arguably our biggest ‘result’ wasn’t measurable in any number. But you could feel it in the air. There was an undeniable electricity in the days and hours leading up to the special. The project involved students and faculty leaders from every part of the newsroom – and was energizing to all. This organic post to social media captures the excitement and camaraderie created by this innovation effort.

What We Learned

One reason we consider the experiment a success is because so many people had small learnings related to their area of expertise within the newsroom. But three big learnings stand out:

1. As journalists, it was a powerful experience for us to watch the audience react to our storytelling in real time. Our reporters and faculty were struck by seeing the audience interest wax and wane in the moment by moment live voting as each of the three story narratives unfolded. We all felt like it made us more alert to the question: Will my storytelling hold the audience’s attention?

2. The tools you use matter. How much your audience engages with you is in large part a function of how easy you make it; and how well you match your tools and platforms to the audience you are trying to reach. For our Arizona PBS audience, we struggled to get viewers to participate with us via text messaging, the method used by Groundsource. We had better success on Twitter; at the same time, we discussed that it would be interesting to try both the voting and commenting using Facebook next time, to see if that social platform was a closer match to our audience. We were thrilled with the easy and instant response we got using MegaphoneTV for live smartphone voting during the show. And Tagboard made it easy, in the very few minutes we’d allowed ourselves, to curate and display the best social responses.

3. Don’t underestimate the positive impacts on culture and collaboration of an innovation challenge, above and beyond any specific content or audience goals.

You can watch the full episode of Cronkite News ‘Choose Your News’ here:

Show Credits: This was a true collaboration by all the students and faculty in the Cronkite newsroom. Thanks go to Christy Bricks and Jim Jacoby who’ve led the producing and crew teams, Melanie Alvarez who pitched the idea, Lori Todd and Michelle Saldano who led social and digital, the vertical directors Heather Dunn, Vanessa Ruiz and Sadie Babbits and Venita James, and Executive Director Christina Leonard.

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A new way to tell a ‘newspaper story’

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? We may never know, but here’s an example of what can happen when someone is around and listening.

In this case, it wasn’t a tree but our very own Frank Mungeam, Knight Professor of Practice in TV News Innovation at the ASU Cronkite School of Journalism. He was talking to a small group of local TV news executives last week about new storytelling tools for newsrooms. The stations are part of Table Stakes, an innovation initiative supported by the Knight Foundation.

One of the new storytelling tools that Frank demonstrated was VideoScribe, a software program that can be used to easily create engaging whiteboard-style animations.

Frank recommended VideoScribe as a way to take ‘video-poor’ or complex topics and create compelling “explainer” videos, and he showed the news leaders this example created by students in the Cronkite Newsroom.

When News Director Melissa Luck of Morgan Media’s Spokane-area station KXLY went back to her station, she took Frank’s suggestion with her. The ideal story presented itself the very next day.

“We’re in the midst of major budget cut talks with our local school district,” Luck explained via email. “These are essential stories for our community, but they’re not very visually appealing. They’re usually covered with file video or school exteriors, coupled with a nondescript sound bite from a school district public information officer.”

But this time, KXLY created a clever animation using Videoscribe to enhance reporter Ariana Lake’s story about the impact of those proposed budget cuts on Spokane schools.

Luck said the feedback has been fantastic. The staff was excited to try something new because it seemed fun and was relatively easy to use.

Later, reporter Lake tweeted out her story, saying how much she loved working in a newsroom where “creativity is encouraged.”

Melissa Luck returned the compliment: “Ariana Lake is really creative, flexible and forward-thinking. She jumped at the chance to try this new tool and, with very little additional effort, she knocked it out of the park.”

KXLY also received great feedback from outside the market. Luck said, “Within a couple of hours, I heard from reporters, producers and news directors in several markets, asking what the product was and how to use it.”

Hat tips to our pal Melissa and our colleague Frank!

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Scripps CEO Adam Symson: “Our product has to be either necessary or lovable”

When Adam Symson, who was then Scripps’s chief digital officer, visited Newsy’s Columbia, Missouri newsroom back in 2013, he liked what he saw. A lot. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is the future of news,’” Symson said. “This is what you would do if you could start over and figure out, without the baggage that we all have as experienced broadcast journalists: How would you build a newsroom?” Later that year, Scripps bought the company for $35 million.

Symson is now Scripps’s president and CEO, and the company has doubled down on its bet. Newsy has added five more bureaus and expanded beyond a collection of online and mobile news packages to an OTT channel and to 38 million cable homes. And while Newsy bills itself as a “next-generation news network” aimed at millennials, its distinctive approach has valuable lessons for local broadcasters striving to adapt to a changing competitive landscape.

Adam Symson (Photo courtesy of Newsy).

What impressed Symson about Newsy was an operation that could forge its own path without the “drag of legacy thinking.” That meant offering stories others weren’t doing, told by young, non-traditional reporters without what Symson calls the “manufactured presentation style” that we’ve come to know all too well.

Newsy’s VP of News and Programming, Christina Hartman, says that new hires sometimes have to unlearn the familiar television news tropes. “We have longer-term ‘Newsies’ who work with our new folks on their anchoring to just kind of shake the robotic out of them,” she said.

No one appreciates Newsy’s eclectic approach to its reporters and hosts more than Cody LaGrow, who co-anchors the morning show The Day Ahead with Ashley Holt. LaGrow remembers applying for on-air jobs at local stations, he told my colleague Sarah Farrell. “I can’t tell you how many interviews I had where people were dancing around the fact of them essentially saying, ‘We hate your voice. We hate your hair. We hate, essentially, we can’t put someone who appears this gay on TV.’ Newsy was the first company that called me, and said, ‘We want you, but like we want YOU. We don’t want the person who thinks they have to talk in this low register.’”

Ashley Holt (left) and Cody LaGrow (Photos courtesy of Newsy).

The Day Ahead’s format is…well, newsy, with packages that average 2:30 in length rather than the 1:30 industry standard, and a daily deep dive into one issue in the third block. “You want to feel more well-rounded after you watch the news,” LaGrow said. “We offer up a platform that’s more similar to the human experience.”

Hartman points proudly to last month’s coverage of the recent Midwest floods — at a time when the cable news networks were focused more on President Trump’s attacks on the late Senator John McCain. “If you were to audit — and I have — the topics that are covered on cable, it is very heavily driven by what the President is tweeting,” says Hartman. “We invest heavily in teams that cover science, technology, world affairs, culture.”

Christina Hartman (third from left) on a local TV news innovation panel at NAB 2019.

Newsy still gets most of its viewers (although it won’t say how many) on its OTT platforms, especially Roku. With its expansion into cable news over the past year, Newsy has added anchored programs (like The Day Ahead) and a linear program grid. In addition to live news and analysis from 7 AM to 11 PM Eastern Time, Newsy has programs on science and health; a series of documentaries; and even a debate show in partnership with the non-profit group Intelligence Squared.

Newsy positions itself aggressively against partisan and polarized coverage on traditional cable news networks. “Be informed. Not influenced,” is the prominent exhortation on Newsy’s home page. And in case that didn’t sink in, the page promotes Newsy’s “full line-up of anti-partisan coverage” — not my italics. Former Gannett Broadcasting CEO Roger Ogden, who has watched Newsy evolve from his perch on the Scripps board, told me he sees Newsy appealing to “millennials wanting news in a different way from people they can relate to and without anyone trying to convince them of one ideology or another.”

To its credit, local TV news is also widely seen as non-partisan and gets high marks for trust and credibility. But I wondered what else Adam Symson, whose bailiwick includes three dozen stations, thinks local TV newsrooms can learn from Newsy.

Here are my five takeaways from our wide-ranging conversation, and what Symson had to say about each of them. His extended comments are in italics.

1. Fragmentation has redefined the competitive landscape

We’ve moved into an era where there’s tremendous fragmentation, and our product has to compete for time. And I believe that means our product has to be either necessary or lovable. When you build something from scratch [as Newsy has], and you do so in a highly fragmented world, you really have to be good to survive and to thrive. And so the first thing I think all of our news directors have to understand is what it’s like to compete in an environment with unfettered competition, because we’re there.

2. Newsrooms should not be afraid to veer away from the pack and invest in enterprise

If you’re allocating resources to cover a franchise topic, it means that you might not cover a commodity piece of news or you might not cover that commodity piece of news the way everybody else does in town. Newsy is, fundamentally at its core, much more about charting your own course. You have to make bold choices. So when Newsy is deciding on a given day to cover a story about alternative energy. It’s not because they saw it on CNN, or they saw it on MSNBC. It’s because they feel a strong responsibility to identify what is important to their target consumer and cover that story.

I personally think it’s easier to hold an audience’s attention with a well told six-minute package on a topic of enterprise than twelve 30-second vo-sots, or squirrels on skis. Enterprise reporting is expensive. It’s difficult. It takes expertise and specialization, but the reason [the Scripps stations are] invested in it is because it gets away from commodity. There’s too much commodity out there. What local journalists can do best is focused on uncovering and telling stories that are unique to their community. And being willing to do so. To stand apart.

3. Newsroom diversity and inclusion are critical components of success

We don’t have a focus on diversity inclusion just because it’s the right thing to do. If you want to create a product that best serves its audience, and if we want to best cover the communities where we operate, we need to be open to understanding the different paths of life that people walk. And so our focus on diversity and inclusion is also informed by the Newsy experience, the fact that if you think about how news is created and generated and ideated at Newsy, it leverages what you would hope you would get in any newsroom conversation: people from diverse walks of life, all who’ve made telling stories about this country their mission and who bring to the table all of that diversity. And I think that’s critical.

4. Newsrooms should embrace new ways of reporting — and new kinds of reporters

There are new forms of storytelling, there are new ways to engage audiences. We have to be unafraid to be authentic. It’s okay to pull back the curtain and explain how we arrived at this conclusion when you’re doing a story, particularly an enterprise story.

We’ve got a big effort to try and open our newsrooms up to high-quality journalists, some of whom come from non-traditional backgrounds in broadcasting — print backgrounds, magazine writers, digital journalists. It’s not about creating jobs for people that aren’t beautiful. It’s because that’s what the audience wants, I think the audience has turned away from some of the perfection or artificial perfection of the past.

5. Respect your audience

Newsy is a product that acknowledges that there’s an entire audience of people who are interested in facts, context, perspective, and then making a decision themselves.

What we don’t pretend to be at Newsy is an authority figure that knows better than our audience. And in that way, it’s awfully close to living up to the motto that we aspire to at this company: ‘Give light and the people will find their own way.’ And that’s an important takeaway, for news directors, Scripps or otherwise, to see from Newsy’s strength and popularity with younger audiences.

Finally, I asked Symson whether Newsy’s move into cable was an attempt to reach older audiences too. He pushed back hard, citing cable’s continued reach across all demos, but he made the interesting point that nowadays, innovation has a way of flowing uphill. “Today, as a result of technology, I actually think we’re seeing a consumer change in which new products are often first developed with a focus on a younger generation. And then they move slightly older and older.”

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5 Takeaways from NAB 2019

“What am I doing here?” That’s what I asked myself seven years ago, about a day into my first NAB show. NAB is the annual gathering in Las Vegas of the National Association of Broadcasters. At the time, I was a Digital Director for a local NBC affiliate, and was part of a cohort of 25 digitally-focused leaders invited by NAB in an effort to update and diversify the content of the traditionally TV-focused conference to be more multiplatform.

I had just attended a welcome lunch where it seemed to me, as one of the token ‘digitals,’ that the conference was trapped in time — an earlier and better time for broadcasters –with a parade of speakers basically trying reassure each other that ‘everything’s fine, everything’s great, TV is great.’

Fast forward to this weekend, where at the NAB Pilot innovation hub, you could pick up stickers that warned: “Innovate or Die.”

The NAB show still features a mind-numbing sprawl of video cameras and booms and rigs, enough to overwhelm even the most rabid broadcast engineer. But NAB has truly evolved to become a gathering that now represents the present and future of media: The major platform companies including Google and Facebook, the cellular companies at the bleeding edge of 5G, the ‘television’ companies powering ATSC 3.0 and addressable TVs; not to mention car companies, who recognize the potential for autonomous vehicles to transform the car into a mobile media center; and rows and rows of digital disruptors.

At a conference so vast, everyone has their own specific experiences and takeaways. Here are five things I’m bringing back as insights from this year’s 2019 NAB Show.

1. The Swim Lanes Are Gone

There was a time when newspapers printed words on paper, TV stations did newscasts, and radio stations broadcast over the airwaves. The ‘swim lanes’ separating media are officially gone. At NAB, there were countless examples of radio shows broadcast and streamed as ‘TV’; successful podcasts from TV news stations (several have been featured here in the Cronkite News Lab); and then there is the announcement by the New York Times of its imminent launch on Hulu and broadcast of its TV show The Weekly.

In this new world, the silos are fading. For sure there are specialists. But the momentum is toward being a media company, creating content for all platforms. It makes sense. Think of how we behave as consumers. Over the course of a day, we move seamlessly from device to device based on what’s convenient for us. Consumers don’t have those swim lanes, and adaptive media companies are leaning in to meet the consumers where they are.

2. The Future is Personalized

I’ve been watching demos and following addressable-TV developments and ATSC 3.0 panels for years. The demo I saw from SONY TV this year was different. We are finally at the tipping point where local broadcasters are going to be able to implement both content and ad strategies that deliver location-specific content within their markets. A “local” newscast for a DMA could have a first block of stories chosen for relevance across the viewing area; and then subsequent news blocks could be geo-targeted to be specifically relevant to targeted counties; weather forecast and other data streams can be presented as overlays based on zip code. Ads can also be geo-targeted. This technology opens up much better hyperlocal coverage opportunities; and it also will create new workflow and staffing challenges as local news organizations will need to figure out how to create these multiple additional geo-targeted content streams.

An “Addressable TV” at NAB.

3. The Car as Media Center

There is only so much time in the day. So there is only so much time for consuming media. Any new media format typically “wins” by taking share from a previous media habit, e.g. print readers migrating to online. The exception is when a technology creates ‘found time’ that wasn’t previously available for media consumption. Podcasts have grown in part because users can turn ‘down time’ into ‘media time.’ There’s no better example than the smartphone, as we know from the parade of people walking around with their heads buried in their phones.

A concept car at NAB.

The car is the next great media battleground for ‘found time.’ Today, the car is a place for listening and talking. Podcasts are a great media match for the attention requirements of driving. But as we move inexorably toward autonomous vehicles, all kinds of media consumption become possible for passive car travel. This ‘found time’ for consuming rich media via screens in cars creates an entirely new opportunity to connect with consumers. Media companies are already thinking about how to win on this new screen. Equally important will be to solve for seamless screen transitions. Media companies focused on their customer will need to insure that users watching a video or listening to a podcast before getting into a car can transition to the car’s media system and smartly ‘resume’ at the point where they left off.

It’s not too soon for local news organizations to be asking: How might I design content to be consumed in cars?

4. Collaboration as a Core Competency

A recent article in the Nieman Lab fairly called out broadcasters as a group, comparing the degree of collaboration to others in the media ecosystem. At NAB, I saw countless examples of “one plus one equals three” synergy, where content companies and technology companies join forces, leveraging the core competencies of each to combine to make something that’s a win for both. It makes sense that, in this fast-changing and digitally-disrupted world, we can’t go it alone.

At both the SPROCKIT Start-up Hub and the NAB Pilot innovation hub, I saw examples where digital technology is enabling and enhancing the core journalism mission of local broadcasters to inform and engage with their communities.

I moderated a panel where two corporate leaders extolled the virtues of these collaborations, and the kinds of opportunities broadcasters should be looking for. Bruce Antley at Verizon described the benefit Verizon gets by partnering with start-ups that can solve problems too small for his company to focus on. Antley, who is head of strategy and innovation planning in the new business incubator at Verizon, noted that startups can be more agile and can enable large media companies to get useful tools faster.

(From left: Frank Mungeam, Sarah Lloyd, Rebekah Dopp, and Dennis Roche. Photo by Tony Shepherd/Social News Desk).

The key is understanding what problems you’re trying to solve, noted John Buerglar who is SVP for growth initiatives at Univision. A good start-up partner will listen to its media partner and co-create a solution faster and better than a large company, with its inevitable layers, can do on its own. The advice to media companies: Identify problems relevant to your business but ones that you’ll be too slow or too poorly equipped to tackle yourself, and look for a partner who can help you both win.

5. Tools are a Means, Not an End

NAB is the ultimate buffet of tools and technology. But one theme was clear. It doesn’t matter how many tools you have, or how much cool technology you add to your operation. What matters is – how well is it adopted, and how well is it applied to advance your journalism and business goals? I moderated a panel on innovation where that point was driven home. Sarah Lloyd, Sr. Customer Success Manager at Social News Desk, a social content management system widely adopted by broadcasters, talked about the crucial role of ongoing training for news organizations to keep current on best practices. Adoption – are people really using the tool, and fully leveraging its capabilities – should be the metric, rather than treating the rollout as the project completion.

Likewise, Rebekah Dopp on Google’s Global Partnerships team talked about the vast resources available to journalists via the Google News Lab. That self-serve portal has value to the extent that newsrooms access it. Google’s approach is to develop practical case studies demonstrating how to use its tools to enhance journalism.

Ultimately, I go home reminded that the future of media is complex, exciting, and scary. The emerging tools and technologies are dazzling and overwhelming. But at the end of the day, our core competency is content. And if content is still king, the queen is surely technology. Prospering in this fast-changing ecosystem will require the best of both.

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Abbey Fernández is “Synced In” to the social media landscape in the Bay Area

Abbey Fernández is all over social media in the Bay Area. It’s not only part of her job description, but it’s also something she uses as a tool to help build her brand as a journalist.

The bilingual Fernandez does it all for NBC Bay Area’s ‘Synced In’ as well as a Spanish-language version on Telemundo 48, ‘Conectados Contigo.’ She writes, shoots, edits, hosts and posts both shows every Monday, Wednesday and Friday on IGTV (Instagram TV), Instagram Stories and Twitter.

 

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‘Synced In’ first aired in January, and Fernández describes it as a show that delivers viewers trending news from around the Bay Area, whether that’s a story about the Warriors’ last game in Oracle Arena or the best spot in the area to take wildflower pictures.

 

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“I think about the stories that we choose as those that you might hear if you’re standing in line at Starbucks, right?” Fernández said. “It’s very much just trending stories around the Bay Area told in under two minutes.”

According to Fernández, it’s about tapping into a market of consumers who don’t watch news on television. “It’s geared towards an audience that’s not your typical broadcast audience,” she said. “It’s geared towards those people, that audience, that consumes everything on mobile.”

IGTV is the perfect platform for that — it operates like a mobile-first version of TV and YouTube. IGTV is still growing since its launch in Summer 2018, but it hasn’t seen the growth that some expected. NBC Bay Area has seen success for this show on the platform though, with nearly 3,000 views per episode.

NBC Bay Area isn’t the only station experimenting with a news brief show on IGTV though. A few months ago, we brought you the story of New York City’s WNBC, and its show, ‘Listen Up,’ which has been getting upwards of 10,000 views an episode in recent weeks.

Outside of being on social media as part of her job every day, Fernández is also locked-in on her personal social accounts. After graduating from Cal State Fullerton in May, Fernández has only been “in the business” for seven months. But she’s taken full advantage of that time to build her brand as a journalist.

She’s active on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook, and realizes — like many people out there versed in social media — that each has a very different audience and purpose. No two posts, on any of her platforms, look alike.

Her content reflects the nuance of each platform. She takes full advantage of Instagram by showcasing stunning photography. “Instagram obviously started as a photo sort of journal,” Fernández said. “So I like to post stuff that I think it’s pretty, it looks nice, or stuff that I’ve been doing.”

Fernández keeps it fun and personal on Instagram. If there’s an opportunity to showcase some good photography, you’ll find it on her Instagram. (Screenshot from her Instagram @abbeyfern)

While on Twitter she realizes that the focus is news, so her content shifts to reflect that as well.

On Twitter, Fernández focuses on the news, sports, as well as promoting what is going on at NBC Bay Area. (Screenshot from her Twitter @abbeyfern)

“If I’m watching sports, I’ll live tweet some stuff,” Fernández said. “I’m really into UFC — Ultimate Fighting Championship — so I do that as well.”

No matter how you use the platform, Fernández echoed the advice from many of our other Social Media Spotlight guests so far. What she posts on social media reflects who she is as a person first and foremost.

And for young journalists in particular, those who are just entering the industry and trying to find their footing, she suggested, “You know just keeping in mind that we’re still ourselves. Social media shouldn’t rob us of expressing ourselves really, but understanding that we do hold a responsibility and a role in society. And that we should take that seriously.”

Do you know an anchor, reporter or meteorologist who is using social media to engage with his or her viewers and deserves to be our next Social Media Spotlight? If so, email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu and we’ll check them out.

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Greta Van Susteren’s Innovative New Show Will Draw on Local Know-How

When she was in third grade, Greta Van Susteren pulled out her Raggedy Ann stationery to write a letter to the editor of her local paper, the Appleton (WI) Post Crescent, about a headline she thought was unfair to kids. Many years later, she still reads her old hometown paper, but by her own admission, Van Susteren has not spent a lot of time watching local TV news. Until now.

With the zeal of the convert, Van Susteren is scouring the websites and streaming the newscasts of stations all across the country. “I know the traffic in Cedar Rapids. There’s a murder in Anchorage that they’re all talking about. I know the student loan problems drowning people in Iowa,” Van Susteren told me over bottles of mineral water during this week’s NAB Show in Las Vegas. “There’s just so much information going on around the world, besides what I have been consumed with for the last 25 years,” she says. “This expands my horizon.”

Why the sudden crash course in local news? It’s all to prepare for the cable news veteran’s just-announced new project, a Sunday public-affairs political program coming this fall to all 93 stations owned by Van Susteren’s new employer, Gray Television, and syndicated to non-Gray markets that want it. (The Weigel stations in Chicago and Milwaukee have already signed up.)

The show is cleverly titled Full Court Press — reminding viewers of Van Susteren’s background as a legal analyst, journalist, and interviewer, while also suggesting gritty tenacity. But it’s not just another Sunday morning talk-fest: the host and her producers plan to draw on the knowledge and reporting of all the company’s stations to create a unique and innovative blend of trusted local authority and national reach: think 90 shades of Gray.

“She has the resources now of our local stations in 90-plus markets, essentially almost as bureaus if you will — feet on the street — and the insights of those local markets that are a resource for Greta and this new show,” says Gray SVP Sandy Breland, who’s overseeing the project.

“Who knows a community better?” asks Van Susteren. “Is it someone who is from Washington — of course I fall in that category — who parachutes in for three hours and leaves, or is it the Gray stations in Iowa whose reporters live and breathe Iowa — and when they’re not on the air, they’re also living and breathing Iowa? Naturally they’re going to be trusted more.”

Breland also helped launch the company’s Investigate TV OTT channel (see our report here), which will contribute to and carry Full Court Press. She believes the time is right for a non-partisan political show that operates at the intersection of national policy and local concerns. “We know that more and more viewers have an interest in what happens in Washington and how it impacts their community. And we think that to address those issues through a local lens is different.”

Van Susteren and Breland say that Full Court Press won’t just pull ideas from the stations but will actually use local stories and reporters on the program. Breland sees it as a chance for Gray’s newsrooms to shine rather than an added burden. “For the news directors, we’re tapping into resources and content they already have. So I think for them, it’s an opportunity to showcase the great work they’re doing in a broader scale, the great work they’re doing at the local level. I think it’s something they’re excited about.”

Full Court Press will be a half-hour show at launch, with a live feed at 7 AM every Sunday for stations to air sometime that morning. A digital component called Full Court Press — Overtime (you can’t keep a good sports metaphor down!) will feature extended interviews and additional content. And the program arrives in time to take advantage of the 2020 presidential campaign.

Breland and Van Susteren are still figuring out the actual format and whittling down a slate of producer candidates. As with any experiment, they expect Full Court Press to evolve and change — based at least in part on the stations’ feedback. “It’s new, it’s different,” says Breland. “We want to respond to what we’re hearing from the markets. We’ll gauge that on a week-to-week basis. We want to make sure we’re answering a need.”

Van Susteren, 64, who was hired in February to be Gray’s chief national political analyst, knows she’s going to have to win the trust of the men and women in the local newsrooms. “I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. I can’t just sort of parachute into Gray TV and expect that, you know, people are going to like me, or want to work with me, or want to do things with me.”

After nearly 25 years working at all three cable news networks, Van Susteren admits she has a lot to learn about local TV news, and she’s hoping her new colleagues will help her. “I thought I knew the news business. This is so complicated,” she says. “I know what I don’t know, and I’m learning this business. I need them to help me, to be another partner with me. I don’t come in feeling like I know more than they do. I come into this thinking ‘Oh, my God, they know so much more than I do.’ I need to learn from them.”

[DISCLOSURE: Van Susteren and Andrew had never met before, but Andrew’s wife Priscilla Painton, executive editor at Simon & Schuster, edited Van Susteren’s latest book, Everything You Need to Know About Social Media (Without Having to Call a Kid).]

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Change your tools to change your news

When I think of disruptive, transformational technologies, I can’t help thinking about fire. Can any of us really imagine what life was like for early humans before fire compared to after fire? The understanding and mastery of this ‘technology’ transformed core aspects of everyday survival, from supplying warmth and protection to improving hunting and enabling cooking. That is the power of transformation through tools.

Broadcast newsrooms struggling to ‘break out of the formula’ could take a lesson from fire. One way to accelerate change is to change your tools.

I saw the transformational impact of new tools in my role as VP of Digital Content at TEGNA. Many broadcast news organizations at that time did not post fresh video to their websites until the end of the day, after the broadcast version of a story was ‘clipped. So we partnered with Videolicious, a mobile app which enabled reporters to quickly and easily create short digital videos while they were in the field working on their broadcast package. Likewise, we were looking for ways to use data to better answer the age-old question: “What is our audience talking about today?” We became an early adopter of CrowdTangle, and developed a method for using it daily for social listening and discovery that changed the conversations in our daily morning editorial meetings.

What could be the ‘fire’ to kickstart your newsroom transformation? Here at the Knight-Cronkite News Lab at Arizona State University, we’re experimenting with several tools that might also help other newsrooms.

For some important stories, social media is the first place – and sometimes the only place – where content appears. Public figures now routinely bypass media and ‘make news’ directly via social platforms. Likewise, breaking news commonly appears first on social media, with initial posts coming from everyday citizens rather than professional journalists. That’s why Cronkite News has partnered with Tagboard, a pioneer in social media curation and display. Tagboard enables our journalists to efficiently create social media narratives optimized for the broadcast screen, using the company’s curation, narrative and display capabilities.

The Cronkite School is also experimenting with mobile storytelling and production. iOgrapher has provided Cronkite students with training and equipment to use their smartphones for mobile reporting. In conjunction with this training, the school has also been experimenting with Switcher Studio, which enables broadcasters to disconnect from the studio production booth. “Switcher Studio enables us to step out of our studio and produce a full show remotely, from anywhere, and all we need are a couple of iOS devices, a tripod and microphones,” said Brett Kurland, Director of Sports Programs at Cronkite News.

Story tracking and story management is a challenge in many newsrooms. Here at Cronkite News, there is a mission-driven focus on telling deeper and more enterprise stories. Tracking story ideas and progress when most of your stories are not ‘day-turns’ can be a challenge. So the team has been experimenting with the ClickUp for tracking story pitches and development. “In a newsroom where multiple reporting teams are working concurrently, ClickUp has helped our teams — photo and video, social media, data visualization – to spot opportunities for collaboration and to jump into action,” said Lori Todd, Cronkite News Director of Digital Production.

Many news organizations are looking for ways to connect more deeply with their communities and make news a conversation. In collaboration with the ASU News Co/Lab, Cronkite News has been experimenting with Groundsource, a text-message audience engagement platform, to solicit story and content input from our audience and have text-based ‘conversations’ about the news that we use to inform our editorial decisions.

Another partner, AlertMe, offers digital news consumers the chance to ‘follow’ and receive story-level alerts when a story is updated. AlertMe enables visitors to www.cronkitenews.azpbs.org to personalize their experience and get AI-powered automated alerts when we do new reporting on stories they care about.

ASU Cronkite is also collaborating with SPROCKIT, a company that specializes in identifying start-ups with innovative technology and pairing them with corporate media partners. Whereas most commercial newsrooms simply don’t have time to try out lots of tools, the ‘teaching hospital’ design of the Cronkite newsroom enables us to test the most promising of these technologies in our news lab. Thanks to funding from the Knight Foundation, we’ll continue to share what we learn here at www.cronkitenewslab.com.

The tools we use shape the journalism we produce. Whether your newsroom goal is to increase the inclusiveness of your reporting, innovate in story and show formats, or simply to develop more efficient workflows to free up reporters’ time for more enterprise content, there are tools that can accelerate news transformation. Time to start a fire.

Examples from these and other collaborations will also be presented at the NAB Show in a panel on “The Future of News” on Sunday April 7 as part of the Digital Futures Exchange. Andrew Heyward, Senior Researcher at the Cronkite News Lab, and Frank Mungeam, Knight Professor of Practice, will share best practice from the news industry and experiments from the Cronkite newsroom, along with other panelists.

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Podium is a new crowd-sourced interviewing platform

Daniel Lewis can’t wait to get back to working full-time on his prize-winning new interview app. And he will — just as soon as the school year ends.

Lewis and his Tufts University classmate Covie Goh are the founders of Podium, which won second prize in the NAB Pilot Innovation Challenge, an annual competition run by the National Association of Broadcasters’ digital innovation initiative. (Our Cronkite School colleague Retha Hill and her students won an “Innovator Award” for their experimental project AR Stories — a cost-effective and accessible tool for using augmented reality in weather reporting.)

The Challenge question this time around was “What is an innovative way broadcasters and other local media could serve communities?” Podium’s premise is to provide a new interactive medium for newsmakers or journalists to engage with consumers while filtering out the noise and distractions of existing social-media platforms.

“A lot of organizations that have tried to do this focus on many-to-many conversations,” Lewis told me when I tracked him down in Europe over spring break. “And many-to-many conversation is not conducive to any form of actual good, meaningful dialogue.” He describes Podium as “a new form of interactive media that allows users to feel like they’re almost having a conversation with an individual, rather than just watching them have a conversation with someone else.”

Note that word “almost.” Podium enables its users to submit questions for an interview subject — a newsmaker or celebrity, say — and then vote on the very best questions, which the subject then answers at his or her own convenience. Think of it as an asynchronous interview in which the subject responds to a set of questions filtered through the wisdom of the crowd. “That concept of crowd-sourced journalism was the impetus behind coming up with Podium,” says Lewis. “We’re trying to create this form of engagement that’s even more direct than Facebook Live and Instagram Stories by actually making it a conversation rather than just a broadcast.”

Podium lives on the web for the moment, but the founders hope to have a mobile app up and running by early next year — just in time for the presidential election. The mobile app will feature video questions; right now, the answers are on video, but the questions are text-based. The questions are to be kept very short — just how short is still to be determined —- and ideally the answers will be too. I asked Lewis whether the product is intended for mosquito-like attention spans. “It’s designed for a little bit bigger than that, but definitely shorter ones, yeah.”

Sample question from a test of Podium at Tufts University.

That said, Lewis has a refreshing confidence in younger consumers’ desire to connect with newsmakers rather than just talk amongst themselves. “Our belief is that genuine face-to-face interaction shouldn’t be between our users, because they often don’t really care what the others have to say, but they do care about what the interviewees have to say in response to their questions.”

Lewis and Goh have come this far on modest means: a $10,000 prize from Tufts and $25,000 more from the NAB Pilot competition. Before they try to raise more money, Lewis says they plan a lot more experiments this summer, mostly with journalists and news organizations, who “want to find new ways to engage with their audiences, but they want to do it in a way that’s not overwhelming.”

Daniel Lewis (left) and Covie Goh.

Lewis hopes that newsrooms will see the appeal of enlisting viewers and users in the question generation and selection process — as well as the appeal of letting Podium provide the platform for that rather than replicating the process themselves. “We’re creating an intimate form of conversational engagement that these news organizations haven’t had before,” Lewis says.

Podium is not yet ready for its close-up. There’s still a lot of work for Lewis and Goh to do: refining the process for culling the questions, especially if the product starts to scale; figuring out the business model, whether it’s a software license or a slice of ad revenue or some combination; balancing priorities between creating original Podium content and making the tool available to news organizations as a “white-label service”; and most important of course, building the video-based mobile app.

But first comes the NAB Show in Las Vegas, where the two founders will be looking for advice and connections. They’ve earned a victory lap — even if it means cutting a class or two.

In Praise of Looking Foolish: Lessons from WTOL-TV’S ‘School Day’ Video

The mockery mounted on social media as a video spread virally showing newscasters from Toledo TV station WTOL in what the majority of users found to be a painful effort to sound ‘high school cool.’

The video racked up millions of views, and seemed especially popular to share within the community of local broadcast newsrooms. Reactions mostly fell in a narrow range between “FAIL!” and “How foolish!” [Confession: I first saw it in an internal SLACK channel, and had the same knee-jerk reaction.]

In the threads I noticed an undercurrent of odd glee bordering on schadenfreude among local TV news folks no doubt relieved that — when it comes to embarrassing oneself on TV — “better them than us!”

An obvious teachable moment emerged when the station published the back story behind the video. Area schools facing poor student test performance results and participation had reached out to local media for help. “When we heard what was on the line, we felt like we had to do something different to connect with these kids,” WTOL Morning Anchor Melissa Andrews explained in the follow-up article. “This was an effort to reach kids where they are — on social media and to give them a laugh at our expense.” The video was made for the school and for social, not produced for broadcast. Props to the team at WTOL who responded to a request for help from local schools by daring to try a nontraditional approach.

In the digital marketplace where video can be shared and spiral virally in minutes, it was a great reminder for all of us. Context is king, and the story is quite different once you know it was done as a community service effort in support of local schools, and not made for broadcast. As journalists, we’d hope we would be more careful about jumping to conclusions before sharing.

I’d argue there’s another lesson here for journalists. We need to be more willing to look foolish.

Think about the core values of journalism. “Getting it right” is at the foundation of our mission. We strive for the human impossibility of being error-free. The accumulated cultural habit in our newsrooms is about “zero defects” – no errors. And, culturally, we sanction our own harshly when we do err. Corrections are not just painful, or embarrassing; for many journalists, they are humiliating. We shame ourselves and other journalists who err. This cultural habit serves us well in our mission to be trusted, reliable sources for the truth in the communities we serve.

This strength contains a corresponding weakness, perhaps revealed in the overly enthusiastic pummeling of WTOL’s video: The cultural bias toward perfection is a real blocker to risk-taking. And experimentation is essential to innovation.

Compare this baked-in cultural habit around risk-taking in journalism with the baked-in habits of tech and platform companies around risk. Over the past five years, through my role managing media strategic partnerships (previously with TEGNA and now as part of the ASU Cronkite newsroom) with both startups and large platform companies, I’ve witnessed their cultural bias to action. These tech companies institutionalize intentional experimentation that’s core to the culture. They value and encourage “smart failures” that generate learnings, which they recognize lead to faster iteration and ultimately innovation.

To be sure, these cultural habits have their own risks. For example, Facebook has experienced first-hand the fallout from pursuing a “move fast and break things” approach that doesn’t contain rigorous review of unintended consequences.

Somewhere in between is the happy medium, balancing smart and purposeful risk-taking with responsible review.

I’ve kept this Teddy Roosevelt quote on my desk for many years, because it reminds me that it is easier to critique what others do than to be the one to take action, because action involves not just possible success but also possible failure and even mockery.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt

As news leaders, we must be aware of our culture of perfection. We should maintain our commitment to ‘getting it right’ on matters of fact. But there’s so much we do in newsrooms beyond reporting facts where our culture might unduly limit experimentation.

So here’s to the news team at WTOL. Here’s to the doers and to the strivers. Here’s to the news innovators for being willing to sometimes look foolish. Transforming local news will require it.

Knight-Cronkite News Lab on “Creating the Future of News”

Knight-Cronkite News Lab Senior Researcher Andrew Heyward and Professor of Practice Frank Mungeam will talk about the future of news on a panel this weekend at the National Association of Broadcasters annual conference in Las Vegas — part of NAB Pilot’s Digital Futures Exchange.

The topic will be Creating the Future of News — experiments in journalism and technology, digital innovation, and building the newsroom of the future.

Joining Andrew and Frank will be Christina Hartman, VP of News and Programming at Scripps’s Newsy and Colin Benedict, VP of News at Morgan Murphy Media, in an interactive conversation that will invite attendees to contribute as well.

Creating the Future of News will take place Sunday, April 7 between 3:20 p.m. and 4:40 p.m. in section N262/N264 of the NAB Show.

If you can’t make the event, join us online as we live-tweet the discussion using the hashtags #NAB2019 and #CronkiteNewsLab.

He brings the small town feel from his community to his Facebook page

We’ve talked to two outstanding social media practitioners from the state of North Carolina already, Molly Grantham and Kristen Hampton both from WBTV in Charlotte, but about an hour away there’s another reporter making a real connection with his followers as well.

Chad Tucker has lived in the Piedmont Triad — the Greensboro, High Point and Winston-Salem area of North Carolina — for most of his life. His familiarity with the area, and dedication to the people that live there, have shown through in both his reporting and his presence on social media.

Tucker is a features reporter and anchor at WGHP, a local FOX affiliate covering the mid-size market of the Piedmont Triad. “We still have that small, hometown feel where everybody kind of knows everybody,” Tucker said of the area. “We just try to get to know our viewers as much as we can, and [social media] is just another way of doing that.”

The station is very family-oriented and involved in the community, he said, and it has been for decades. Tucker’s content on social media reflects that. It is often conversational in tone, and it invites his followers to be a part of his family. “I share what’s going on in my life,” he said, “and people connect with that. They find a connection like ‘Oh he’s going to the same things we go to.’”

What is most important for Tucker is to build that relationship with his followers. “If you’re willing to share [parts of your life],” he said, “I think it makes your connection with the viewers a lot stronger. And in turn, I have discovered, they trust you. When there’s big stories that are happening, you want people to turn to their local news. And you know they feel that connection with you. They have trust in that relationship, and so it’s like they’re turning to a family member.”

He knows that a constant flow of content is an important part of connecting with viewers, but he doesn’t let that impede his life outside the newsroom. Tucker often schedules posts of “evergreen” content for nights and weekends, so that he can spend that time with his family and being a father to his two daughters.

“You have to draw the line, especially when you have children,” he said. “You know I always say, ‘I only get one chance to be a dad.’”

Even though he’s still following the news of the day when he’s not at the station — as any good journalist would be — Tucker understands the value of “unplugging” from the constant barrage of social media every once in a while. “The beauty of social media,” he said, “is that it has the features that allow you to stay connected when you may not be — you may be unplugged that day.”

In the newsroom, Tucker reports for a segment called “Roy’s Folks” — named for WGHP reporter Roy Ackland who introduced the feature series in 1988 — which highlights interesting, historical stories from the area. That content is often positive, local and uplifting, and that’s something Tucker has seen his followers clamor for on social media — especially his followers on Facebook who tend to fall into an older demographic.

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And through a trial and error process over the years, that’s what Tucker knows his followers want — the positive, uplifting content. It’s what they’ll respond to, so he doesn’t try to inundate his feed with news headlines. He knows that if viewers want that information they’ll go to the station’s feed.

His advice to younger journalists – find out what your followers want and then bring them that content. Much like Brian Allen — the anchor and reporter from Sioux Falls, South Dakota that we highlighted with an earlier Social Media Spotlight — Tucker also preaches being attentive to your followers. “Make sure you take time and read the comments,” Tucker said. “I tell people, don’t just post something and walk away. You have to make some time later on — it doesn’t have to be right then — but come back to what you’ve posted and read your comments.”

Most importantly, build that relationship with your followers because when they’re looking for local news they’ll think of you, he said.

What’s worked for me on social media, he said “is simply doing exactly what you should be doing as a journalist, and that’s building connections in the community.”

Do you know an anchor, reporter or meteorologist who is using social media to engage with his or her viewers and deserves to be our next Social Media Spotlight? If so, email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu and we’ll check them out.

A New York news director becomes “part coach, part guru” to change an entrenched culture

When Byron Harmon got his job running the 10 O’Clock News at Fox 5 New York (WNYW-TV) six years ago, his marching orders were clear: “My CEO said, ‘I don’t want to see the same thing that I’m seeing on other TV stations.’”

Easier said than done, especially when you have a loyal audience that likes things the way they are and a newsroom used to replicating the tried-and-true. Harmon remembers suggesting a story early on about his new umbrella, which looked exactly like a samurai sword when closed and got him a lot of strange looks, even in New York City. “No reporter wanted to do the story,” he says. “They were like, what is this story? This is crazy. This is not news.”

Byron Harmon

Harmon is the news director now, and the mantra remains the same: go your own way. “On a good day, I would say we create maybe seven to eight totally enterprise stories that no other station will have.” You may not think of distinctive story selection and storytelling as bold. But you should. For Harmon, who previously worked at both the NBC and CBS stations in town, stretching the familiar formulas is the way to break away from the pack without breaking the mold. Like other news leaders on the broadcast side, he walks a fine line between innovation and expectation.

Harmon created something he calls the ICU, which stands for the Innovation and Creativity Unit (not the Intensive Care Unit as I secretly hoped), charged with generating longer stories, franchises, and specials. Lisa Evers is a well-known New York radio personality who also does reports for the station, and her radio show Street Soldiers has been adapted into a weekly TV program that replaces the last half-hour of the 10 PM newscast every Friday. Reporter Dan Bowens started digging through true-crime cold cases in the station’s files to create a new podcast; that’s become a TV special called The Tape Room. A globe-trotting videographer and model showed up with a trove of footage that became World Citizen with Fitz Henley. A mis-diagnosed case of Lyme disease spawned an ongoing series of reports and specials called Lyme & Reason. While digitizing the station’s film and tape archive, Harmon’s team was inspired to create a new project called Fox 5 Flashback that resurrects decades-old stories from the station’s past, such as its reporting on New York’s notorious 1970’s dance club, Studio 54. (This hit home for me, as I worked for “Channel 5” a million years ago in my first job out of college, when it was a proud and gritty independent station.)

Harmon calls the typical morning editorial meeting, in which the assignment manager reels off items from the daybook and the morning papers, “the bane of any local newsroom.” (Our Lab colleague Frank Mungeam recently wrote about this problem in his essay, “Want Newsroom Innovation? Start With a Stop List.”) At Fox 5 New York, anyone who wants to come is invited to the morning meeting. “My whole goal is to have absolute total contribution by everybody in the newsroom,” says Harmon.“I started bringing a gong to the meetings. And I would pitch a story. Even if people didn’t want to do my story, I’d say ‘Gong or not?’ And they’d say ‘Gong!’ It was really difficult at first. Now, so many people contribute in our meetings, I can’t even get my stories in sometimes.”

Despite the theatrics, Harmon admits he had to be “part coach, part guru” to drive change at the station. “Why are you even here? We don’t work at an assembly line. We get to sit in this room, and think about something amazing. And at five o’clock, our thoughts are on TV. That’s an amazing responsibility. It’s an amazing job.”

Harmon encourages his team to come up with stories that reflect the richness and diversity of everyday life in New York. He doesn’t like the word “feature” and claims the newsroom has stopped using the term. “Because news is news. Any story we put on the air is news. If you don’t know about it, it’s going to spark a thought that you’re going to learn something, or be entertained by it. It’s information. We won’t call it a feature. They’ll say ‘It’s a Fox 5 story’ or ‘This is the kind of story that we do.’ When I started to hear that, I started to feel like, wow, we have definitely changed the culture here.”

But to change the culture, Harmon first had to fight the fear of experimenting and taking risks that’s all too common in newsrooms. “There’s some mythical journalism police out there that prohibits people from taking these chances,” he says. “People think ‘Oh, this isn’t how it was done before. So if we do it, we’re going to get in trouble.’ Who are you going to get in trouble with? I’m the news director, I’m telling you, you’re not going to get in trouble. I’m going to absorb any heat that’s going to come from above, which it won’t because we’re experimenting, as long as we’re not damaging the brand. So let’s go for it.”

In fairness, Harmon does have supportive bosses in General Manager Lew Leone and Fox’s top station brass. Moreover, Harmon blends his experiments into familiar-looking formats that won’t chase away viewers expecting, well, a newscast. “We don’t want it to be jarring to you,” he says, “I don’t want you to come in and say ‘Oh my God, this is crazy, it’s all over the place.’ But when you take a look at how the story was written, the story selection, where we place it in the show, there’s a lot of care and a lot of thought taken into consideration for that. And therein lies the magic.”

Where’s the “magic” in your core broadcasts? Let us know at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu, so we can share it.

KSAT adds a streaming 9 PM newscast on its website and OTT platforms

It’s one thing to come up with grand ideas about innovation, but it’s an entirely different thing to actually execute on them. Case in point: KSAT in San Antonio saw an opportunity to create a brand-new newscast at 9 PM and live-stream it on its OTT channel. That’s when the hard part began. The station shared the challenges behind the program’s creation with the Knight-Cronkite News Lab.

Why live stream on OTT? “As we looked at our audience growth, we saw that a lot of that growth was coming through digital via live stream,” KSAT news director Bernice Kearney said. The station had Nielsen data showing that the portion of the San Antonio market live-streaming content has been continually increasing — not surprisingly, as this is a trend in many major markets throughout the country. “We saw the 9 PM hour in our market was an opportunity with that digital audience growth,” Kearney said.

But creating a new hour of content poses a lot of obstacles for a newsroom, especially when it’s on a completely new platform like an OTT app. KSAT was already active on its OTT channel — KSAT TV — using it as a place to repurpose linear broadcasts, but it had never streamed an original news program on OTT before. And that brought up a lot of questions that the newsroom had to find the answers to.

Technical Challenges

First, and probably the biggest challenge the newsroom faced, was figuring out the technical skills required to stream a newscast. According to Kearney, the staff worked for months to make sure they had the equipment they needed and were properly trained to operate it.

“The playback is different. All the interfaces are different. The mics are different because it’s a different frequency,” Kearney said. “So there’s a lot of technology learning that went into it because we had to reimagine the systems in order to get something on our live streaming app versus on our broadcast.”

The set for News@9 in the KSAT newsroom. Screenshot from KSAT.com

On top of that, they didn’t have a space to produce this show. The 10 PM broadcast needed the studio and control room to get ready for air. So News@9, as the new program is called, moved out into the newsroom — new set, production area, cameras, prompter, lights, and all. “We are smack dab in the middle of the newsroom,” said the show’s anchor Myra Arthur. “The set is not even five feet behind my desk, so everyone is working and talking around me. And I think that just lends itself to a show that’s a little more conversational and a little more off-the-cuff.”

Addressing Workflow Challenges

Like any new venture, there were workflow problems that had to be addressed before News@9 streamed its first newscast. KSAT had just cut its 10 PM program back from an hour to 35 minutes so as to start ABC’s late-night programming at 10:35, so it was able to shift some resources from the late news to the new OTT newscast. “We didn’t have to add a lot of people,” Kearney said. “What we did have to do was rethink how we strategically align those people in our newsroom so that we could support the show.”

According to Kearney, there are only two fully dedicated staff members for News@9 — an editor and producer. The rest of the reporters, digital team members and the anchor that work on the 9 PM show still have other responsibilities in the newsroom. The OTT program borrows reporters to do new stories when it can, but a lot of the content for the newscast is also “borrowed” from other shows.

“A good consumer story or a good investigative story is still a good consumer story, and it’s still a good investigative story,” Kearney said. “And we can repurpose some of that content. And along the way maybe there are tweaks that are made in editing to make it look a little bit more contemporary, or there’s additional information.”

Arthur, the lone anchor for the show, still anchors the 6 PM newscast. While it has required her to balance two very different newscasts, she says the transition has not been too hard for her. “It’s just kind of re-organizing your day,” she said.

“I have the best of both worlds because I get to anchor a traditional hour-long show at six o’clock,” Arthur said. “Then I get to switch gears at nine, and do something completely different for an hour.”

Creating “something completely different”

Even with limited staff and some “borrowed” content, the News@9 producers were determined to create a distinctive newscast — one that appeals to younger, OTT-savvy viewers. “I was kind of looking for something different, a new challenge,” producer Lexi Salazar said. “And [Bernice] said we really want to try to have a primarily digital newscast where we want a lot of experimentation and we just want to target a younger audience. I thought that sounded like an exciting challenge”

Sometimes that means doing fewer stories but adding more perspective than the traditional broadcast formats permit. When stacking the show, “We try to spend more time on things that we think are actually impactful and will really affect the viewers. And we try to tell the stories in a way that is interesting and palatable,” Salazar said. “We might talk about an issue on the 5 or 6 o’clock show, but at 9 o’clock we’re able to take the time to contextualize the issue. To put the story into perspective,” she said.

Kearney, Arthur and Salazar all believe that this newscast is the most beneficial to the station in how it allows reporters and producers to experiment with story formats.

Some of the original content they’ve created so far are segments like “Understand,” “#SpreeThoughts,” “Adulting Hacks,” “9@9” and “Money — It’s Personal.” These segments are longer than the traditional 1:30 package, and they give the reporters an opportunity to experiment with different lengths and storytelling styles. Money — It’s Personal, for example, covers complicated topics like compounding interest using graphics in After Effects — which full-time editor Valerie Gomez has been able to learn — to tell the story.

This kind of content is important for viewers to know, but it hasn’t had a place to live in the past, according to Kearney. It gives the reporters and producers flexibility with a format and platform to tell stories they think are important for San Antonio viewers.

And that flexibility has touched everyone in the newsroom. About once a month, News@9 does a segment called the “Breakdown Booth.” It gives anyone who produces content for KSAT — from reporters to photographers to digital producers — the opportunity to come on the 9 PM show and explain the story behind the story. “This is a chance for them to say, ‘Here’s how we even came across this information. Here’s what you didn’t see happen in the courtroom during that story. Or here’s how I was impacted as a person covering this really touching or tragic event,’” Arthur said.

News@9 will continue to change — and with any luck grow — over time, but Kearney and her staff believe this is a step in the right direction for the station. And they are excited about the creative freedom that comes from doing a digital only show.

“For me, both the beauty and the challenge of this show is that it is one big experiment,” Arthur said.

Is your station experimenting with OTT newscasts? Share your experiences with us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

In the capital of venture capital, investors aren’t the only ones taking risks

When you give your bosses a new idea, it’s always nice to get a fast yes. But the answer Scott McGrew got from his bosses for his new idea came almost too fast.

“They loved it,” he says. “I was surprised at how quickly they said yes. That’s always a little intimidating when you come to the boss and she says ‘Yes, go do it.’ Oh crap, now I have to do it!”

“It” was a podcast featuring in-depth interviews with Silicon Valley investors — a logical move for McGrew, who’s been covering business and technology for NBC’s San Jose-based station KNTV, cleverly branded as “NBC Bay Area,” for 20 years. And “they” were news director Stephanie Adrouny and head of digital Sara Bueno. To get ready for his pitch late last year, McGrew bought a used Tascam audio recorder on eBay for $75 and cobbled together a DIY “pilot” from interviews he’d already done for his weekly Sunday-morning TV show about “the Valley,” Press:Here.

McGrew’s timing was perfect, and not just because podcasts are all the rage. Adrouny and Bueno were looking for projects for a small digital innovation team they were assembling in the time-honored way we all know so well: carefully moving “heads” around the newsroom. “The people on the desk are so consumed with feeding the beast, that to pull people off to produce a podcast is asking for failure,” says Bueno. “We built this team to make things that are native to the digital platforms.” Bueno cites our Lab colleague Frank Mungeam’s metaphor of the “Zodiac” project — the speedy, agile and flexible boat that zips away from the lumbering mother ship.

The new issue of New York magazine covers the podcast craze.

So the Sand Hill Road podcast zipped away this winter, named for the Palo Alto address that’s become synonymous with the Valley’s venture capital scene, with digital producer Sean Myers making sure it sounds anything but DIY.

Sand Hill Road is almost through its first ten-episode “season.” Each week, McGrew sits down for an informal conversation with a prominent investor, such as the so-called “Godfather of Silicon Valley” John Hennessy, now chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet; billionaire Tim Draper, who bets McGrew on the future of bitcoin; or Ann Miura-Ko, who’s been called “the most powerful woman in startups” and is hoping to see her early investment in the ride-sharing company Lyft pay off big-time in an imminent IPO.

It helps that McGrew is a natural — “Scott sounds great, his voice is perfect for it,” says Bueno — with a loose conversational style. News directors always tell young reporters to “be yourself,’ says McGrew, but “maybe you can only be yourself when you’ve got 30 years in the business.”

The podcast format helps too. McGrew says that when people come on TV, there are “a lot of lights and a lot of robotic cameras moving back and forth. You’re thinking about your talking points, where do I look. With no camera, you’re going to be far more relaxed, and the conversation will go places no one expected it to.” As for the host himself, “I”m more loosey-goosey because I’m not on TV either.”

Scott McGrew, host of Sand Hill Road podcast.

McGrew may be loosey-goosey, but the episodes are tight. Bueno quotes one of Adrouny’s maxims: “Earn every second.” And the self-deprecating McGrew agrees. “You have a format that lets you go as long as you want. Don’t.”

McGrew has other tips for stations that may be considering a dive into the crowded podcast pool. “Get the equipment and try it out,” he says. “The barrier to entry is practically zero.” Silicon Valley is admittedly a unique place, but McGrew urges news directors to find reporters like him who are passionate about some specific subject that’s also important to the local audience — college football, or city government, or education. “I’m talking to a relatively small demographic,” says McGrew. “Not everyone is interested in venture capital in Silicon Valley, but that demographic is very interested.”

The station’s sales team is counting on that as it hits the street to find advertisers and sponsors for season two of Sand Hill Road, coming as soon as McGrew and Myer get enough episodes in the can. For NBC Bay Area, competing in a tough market where television viewing levels are notoriously low, getting digital right and getting paid for it are critical priorities.

No one knows that better than Bueno. “We’re reaching audiences that have little to no interest in watching local television news. So how are we getting news and information to them in new ways? That’s the Holy Grail right now.”

That’s a challenge for any local TV newsroom, no matter how far you are from Sand Hill Road.

Do you have adventures in podcasting or other new program projects to share? Email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

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“Local television stations are perfectly positioned to be the dominant players in their market.”

The last thing we need these days is another reminder of the rocky economics of innovation in digital news, but we just got one. Spirited Media, a digital-native local news pioneer, announced that it has sold Denverite, its site in, yes, Denver, to Colorado Public Radio. The company is talking to potential buyers about Billy Penn and The Incline, its sites in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh respectively, as well. Spirited Media’s leaders say the sites were making “a ton of progress,” says CEO and founder Jim Brady, with a model increasingly focused on membership and events, but the company couldn’t raise the next round of investment it felt it needed to “get over the hump.”

Spirited Media’s “pivot” may not seem encouraging for newsrooms trying to figure out how to reach new consumers on digital platforms and get paid enough to do it, but, paradoxically perhaps, it’s also a positive lesson for local TV stations. Who says so? None other than Jim Brady himself. “Local television stations, in my opinion, are perfectly positioned to be the dominant players in their market.” Brady, a battle-hardened veteran of multiple startups in the digital news arena, is now focusing his company’s growing consulting business on — wait for it — local broadcast news, with Graham Media Group as one of his first clients.

Why does Brady like local TV’s chances to dominate digital? One obvious reason is that “television stations still have money,” he says, but “you have to attack it now while you have the resources and the ability to experiment with it a little bit.” Local TV newsrooms “should start moving into some of those places that the newspapers are ceding because of their economic problems. But that requires doing something different than they might do on air.”

Television’s power to promote is another unique asset. “When somebody says something on air, the website often gets traffic right away,” says Brady. “It’s a great promotional opportunity that a lot of newspapers would die for.”

But most importantly, television news enjoys what Brady calls an “emotional relationship” with its viewers based on history in the market and familiarity with the anchors and the rest of the on-air team. That should translate well to digital journalism. “I think younger news consumers want to consume brands they feel like they have a connection with, and television stations have had a connection with their audience for a really long time. Taking advantage of that is really important.”

Screenshot from Spirited Media’s website.

So how should you take advantage of that? Brady starts with these five recommendations.

Invest in more original digital content. “The story mix has to change” to attract users who don’t necessarily watch television or care about the typical broadcast story. “What do the people who are coming to this website want right now?” asks Brady. “It’s hard to believe that they’re looking for what led the 11 o’clock broadcast” last night. If you agree, that means changing your workflow to devote more resources to digital journalism, rather than merely repurposing your TV stories for digital, which many stations still do reflexively.

Deepen the viewer’s connection with the on-air team. “They feel like they know them already. So why not use digital platforms to actually get them even closer to what those people do.” Our set of case studies, including our regular Social Media Spotlight feature, includes good examples of on-air people who are doing this well.

Expand your coverage to reflect a broader range of human experiences. A really good digital experience encompasses “the full range of human emotion,” says Brady. “Sometimes it makes you pissed; sometimes it makes you laugh; sometimes it makes you cry. And I think local television often has a lot of stories that make you cry or pissed. It’s missing a little bit of the humor and a little bit of the softer side of the places that they cover.”

Invest in stories with lasting appeal. In an on-demand world, choosing stories with a longer shelf life than the typical “breaking news” TV lead helps justify your investment in new digital content. Check out our own Frank Mungeam’s argument for this in The Future of News is On Demand as well as his essay Why Local TV News Is Our Best Hope to Save Democracy.

Focus on quality rather than volume. As many digital-native players are learning the hard way, chasing clicks doesn’t guarantee engagement or sustainability. “The answer to having a better digital site is to do less and do it better,” says Brady. “Pick your spots and do good work.”

Refreshingly, Brady rejects the already-tired cliche of “digital first” and acknowledges the obvious reality that the television broadcast still drives the engine. “Nobody is suggesting that you should be ‘digital first.’ You have a broadcast that starts at a very specific time. Of course, you have to build your day around those. But you should be digital the rest of the time. You should not be ‘digital first’ but ‘digital always.’”

Of course, if attracting new and younger consumers on digital platforms was simple, you wouldn’t be reading this, partly because the Knight-Cronkite News Lab wouldn’t exist. And neither would Brady’s consulting practice. But perhaps the challenges of creating a digital business from scratch offer an opportunity to build on what television news already does so well. Spirited Media’s tagline points to the task ahead: Reimagining Local News.

Do you have examples of original digital journalism to share? Let us know at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

TEGNA launches new podcast ‘Bomber’

There are vaults of valuable archive footage and reporting in the virtual — or actual — basement of every local TV news station around the country. TEGNA realized that, and decided to make use of it in a new, innovative way by launching a digital content studio that they’re calling VAULT Studios.

Starting with podcasts, VAULT Studios will offer high-quality storytelling opportunities from the company’s rich archive of real-life cases investigated by TEGNA journalists from around the country.

“Engaging with our audiences in new and innovative ways — across multiple platforms — is essential to our growth,” said Adam Ostrow, TEGNA’s Chief Digital Officer, in a press release. “VAULT will draw on our decades of outstanding local journalism in areas such as true crime, cold cases and unsolved mysteries to create new content offerings for today’s digital consumer.”

This new venture will begin with a collaborative podcast called “Bomber.” The podcast will recount the 19 days in March 2108 when 23-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt planted a series of homemade bombs around Austin neighborhoods, killing two, injuring five others and paralyzing an entire city. “Bomber” will also tell the story of how law enforcement was able to bring the terror to an end, and answer questions that still linger a year later.

The podcast will be produced by VAULT Studios, and will highlight the collaborative reporting between KVUE — TEGNA’s station in Austin — and the Austin American Statesman — the local daily newspaper.

Podcasts have grown in popularity in recent years, and TV stations around the country have taken advantage of telling stories through this medium. A few months ago, we brought you the story of “Cold,” a highly successful true-crime podcast produced by Dave Cawley from KSL Radio in Salt Lake City. In that case, both TV and radio staff combined to investigate and tell the story of this cold case.

“Bomber” will be hosted by a familiar name as well, TEGNA’s national Verify correspondent Jason Puckett. We talked to Puckett and other Verify correspondents recently about the work they do during breaking news events — like the Austin Serial Bomber. While the coverage at the time of the bombing focused on revealing the truth in what people were posting on social media, the podcast format allows reporters to take a deeper dive into what happened during those 19 days and the months that followed.

“Bomber” will launch March 15 with its first episode “A Loud Boom,” and new episodes will be released each Friday through April 19.

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“You can’t do it alone any more”

Traditionally, the TV news claim to authority has been based on three powerful myths: omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. Stations have built their branding on the illusions that 1) we know everything; 2) we are everywhere; and 3) we do this all by ourselves. Stations’ presentations and promotion relentlessly reinforce the messages of uniqueness, ubiquity, and exclusivity.

That’s one reason local TV newsrooms are way behind in a trend that’s transforming local journalism on the print and digital fronts: collaboration. Of the 180 collaborative journalism projects in an ever-expanding database created by the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, only a handful involve commercial local TV stations. Ditto for the 160 news organizations participating in ProPublica’s collaborative Documenting Hate project, or the 160 (oddly, yes, the same number) newsrooms that form the Solutions Journalism Network.

Why don’t TV news people play more nicely in the sandbox? “Journalists are competitive, but TV news journalists are ultra-competitive,” says Stefanie Murray, director of the Center for Cooperative Media. Well, perhaps that made sense when the “competition” was just the other stations down the street, but every news director worth his or her salt knows that the real competition today is all the other ways that consumers — especially younger ones — get their local news and information.

Another factor is economics: struggling newspapers and fledgling digital startups have a greater incentive to collaborate than does a profitable TV station. But that’s changing too, as TV newsrooms stretch to deliver more and more hours of news to shrinking and aging audiences while trying to create a compelling suite of digital products and services at the same time. “With so many different platforms, it’s only natural to look for partners to scale better,” says Murray. “It’s not one to many. It’s really many to many. You can’t do it alone anymore.”

And in fact some stations are now experimenting with joint projects. Two months ago, we reported on the challenging but ultimately successful collaborative investigation by WLBT in Jackson, MS and the digital nonprofit news site Mississippi Today. The Nieman Lab recently followed up on our case study in Christine Schmidt’s series Collaborating with Local TV, which says right off the top that collaboration “may be a key part of how local news remains sustainable.”

Shortly after the Denver Post did a story on Denver hate crimes based on data from ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project, which tracks data and reporting about hate crimes around the country, TEGNA’s KUSA became one of the few commercial TV stations to join the project and created its own original report on why those crimes are so difficult to prosecute. Two news organizations in the same market, both drawing data from the same collaborative resource, each doing its own original reporting. “Understand that stories are going to look different in different mediums,” says Rachel Glickhouse, ProPublica’s partner manager for the project. “They will have value for potentially different audiences.” Glickhouse and her team are publishing a toolkit for newsrooms that want to do more collaborative data-based journalism.

(Screenshot from KUSA-TV story on Denver hate crimes)

The Solutions Journalism Network works with newsrooms to report on viable answers to some of today’s pressing social issues. “These are entrenched problems that you’re covering in the community,” says SJN’s Liza Gross, who has the wonderful title of “VP, newsroom practice change.” Speaking of newsroom change, Gross’s colleague Carolyn Robinson is training 15 local TV newsrooms in solutions journalism techniques with a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And NBC10 in Philadelphia has joined Resolve Philadelphia, a 22-partner consortium of news organizations collaborating on solutions-based projects. Liza Gross has created a collaborative playbook based on an earlier Philadelphia initiative, The Reentry Project.

“Collaboration is important for investigative reporting, but also in general,” says Lee Zurik, who runs Gray’s InvestigateTV OTT channel while anchoring and reporting at WVUE in New Orleans. “Collaboration allows more resources to be thrown at projects. You may be reaching new people that don’t watch or read your product. Also, it’s nice to learn new things, new philosophies.”

InvestigateTV recently collaborated with ProPublica and the Santa Fe New Mexican on a story about radiation poisoning among nuclear industry workers, and Zurik has done Peabody and Murrow award-winning work at WVUE with the New Orleans Times-Picayune and its digital arm, NOLA.com. “Viewership is splintered these days,” says Zurik. “The more people that can see your work and your station branding, the better it is for you” — even if that means collaborating with the local paper and its website. “We were scared for a while: they’re going to publish ahead of us, that’s going to hurt our ratings. In fact it may have helped us.”

If you’re thinking about launching a collaborative project in your market, here are three tips from the experts.

  • Identify a topic that’s important to your viewers and that would benefit from additional resources or skills you might not have, like a data journalist — try to fill a needs gap when you choose a partner
  • Start small — perhaps with a “one-off” event or story, a single partner, and a simple content exchange, for which each newsroom does its own reporting
  • Consider working with a mission-driven nonprofit like the ones we’ve mentioned — they’re not trying to “out-scoop” you

Most important, just try one collaboration and see what happens. As Solutions Journalism Network’s Liza Gross says, “If you’re #1, you’ve got nothing to lose. If you’re #3, you’ve got nothing to lose.”

Do you have examples of collaborative journalism you’d like us to look into? Please share them at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

[NOTE: The Knight Foundation, which funds the Knight-Cronkite News Lab, also provides support to the Solutions Journalism Network and ProPublica.]

Show your work to restore trust in news

Screenshot courtesy of Cronkite News

Only 21 percent of U.S. adults say they have “a lot of trust” in information from national news sources, according to 2018 data from Pew Research Center. Local news fares only marginally better, at 28 percent.

It’s not news that trust in news is low. The question is what to do about it. An innovative story format piloted by Cronkite News at Arizona State University suggests one path.

In February, “Cronkite News: Full Circle” was awarded top prize in the Disrupt the News competition sponsored by TVNewsCheck and the Broadcast Education Association. The approach is like a minidocumentary on the reporting process.

“Transparency and ‘pulling back the curtain’ is not just the ideal way to grow audience trust, it also makes cliché newscasts more interesting, and makes the audience part of the process,” wrote one of the contest judges. “Sort of like a show kitchen, where you watch the chef prepare your food. It’s postmodern.”

The idea grew from a simple question: Why not show viewers what journalists do all day?

The goal of “Full Circle” was to “pull back the curtain on how TV news reporting happens by documenting the behind-the-scenes process from story pitch to the post-newscast meeting,” said Melanie Alvarez, the project’s executive producer.

Screenshot courtesy of Cronkite News

“Students were very motivated by having people understand what it is we do,” Alvarez said.

In the current environment of mistrust, she added, when students would divulge they were in journalism, “people would say, ‘Why would you want to do that?’”

Show your work

Newsrooms perhaps can learn a lesson from math teachers who demand of students “Show your work.” If the audience is going to trust the product – the reported story – they deserve more visibility into the process of how that story was prepared.

“Cronkite News: Full Circle” pairs a reporter with a producer to document the reporting process. Viewers get to see the morning pitch meeting, the process of finding (and getting turned down for) interviews, decision-making in the edit booth and even the after-show postmortem.

“We wanted to show these conversations that happen in a newsroom to help journalists frame a story in a way that serves the public,” Alvarez said.

Such transparency can be scary for a newsroom, Alvarez said. “It puts you in a vulnerable position. I was scared with what the audience might think.”

By being more transparent about its reporting process, the news team opened itself up to even closer review. One lesson: Transparency also results in greater accountability.

Audience response to “Full Circle” was strong, with most viewers intrigued and in some cases even amazed by the process. The most common audience reaction, according to Alvarez, was: ‘Wow, I had no idea it took that much to get that 90 seconds on the air!’

It took the producing team a full extra day to prepare the “Full Circle” version of the story. But based on the positive audience response, Cronkite News plans continued experimentation with this transparent storytelling method. This spring, the Knight-Cronkite News Lab will partner with Smith-Geiger on audience and format testing to quantify how this approach affects trust in news.

We’ll continue to share learnings from this and other experiments in the Cronkite newsroom on the Knight-Cronkite News Lab website at www.cronkitenewslab.com.

A new study suggests the right track may be closer than you think

Screenshot from Northeastern University “remix” of Facebook story

If TV news broadcasts around the world have a universal ingredient, it’s the 1:30 package. The formula, give or take a few seconds, is decades old, numbingly predictable, and arguably far past its sell-date, but also so prevalent and so familiar that it’s hard to picture any other way of telling a hard-news story on TV. That’s the challenge researchers at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism take on in a study released this month in collaboration with Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. And it turns some of the answers are sitting right in your newsroom.

“Everyone’s afraid to try something different because they’re trying to hold on to the audience that they have,” says Northeastern faculty member Mike Beaudet, who doubles as an investigative reporter for Hearst’s Boston station WCVB. “It’s a matter of changing your mindset and telling stories in a different way.”

Beaudet and his Northeastern colleague John Wihbey began their study with a simple but disturbing premise:

The style and substance of traditional local television news stand at odds with the emerging practices and sensibilities of digitally native video news, the kind that is often preferred by younger audiences on mobile and web platforms.

So the researchers came up with a set of elements common to what they call “digitally native video news” — services such as Vox, Vice, Snapchat, and NowThis — and wondered whether traditional TV news stories could be “remixed” to make them more appealing to younger viewers. Here are the attributes identified and appropriated by the Northeastern team:

  • Animation
  • Sound elements
  • More conversational style
  • Higher emotional impact
  • More context: additional reporting
  • New video and sound: historical footage or additional video/interviews

To their credit, six stations of varying market sizes — ABC’s WLS in Chicago and WTVD in Raleigh-Durham, Scripps’s KNXV in Phoenix, Gray’s WBTV in Charlotte and WAFB in Baton Rouge, and Sinclair’s WJAR in Providence — agreed to serve as guinea pigs, submitting a mix of features and hard-news stories for the researchers to dissect and re-assemble. The Northeastern crew, which included faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and “an incredible animator,” drew on a toolkit of techniques including sound effects, music, historical footage, animations, and more and longer interviews. It took all of last summer, but ultimately twelve stories got the “before and after” treatment. You can watch an explanatory video from the researchers here and see a full example, a WLS story about a Facebook breach, right here:

ORIGINAL

REMIX

The original stories and the remixes were shown to a representative sample of viewers in each market, all in the 18-49 demographic, and tested by the research firm SmithGeiger. Interestingly, the remixed feature stories fared no better than the originals. But the hard-news packages? That was a different story:

The results suggest that the most substantive news stories can be imbued with innovative qualities that make them more visually compelling and interesting while also giving the stories more depth and context. Further, audiences may be then more likely to trust and recommend the station from which the story comes, as well as more likely to engage with the news content, taking actions such as sharing the story on social media or recommending the source to a friend.

Wow, Mike and John, really? What on earth did you do to these stories to make all that happen? The good news is: nothing radical or unrealistic. You can check out more before-and-after examples for yourselves below. In my view, the changes are significant but not seismic: the stories are just, well, more satisfying — not so much a “re-invention” as a “re-engineering” of the typical hard-news report.

ORIGINAL

REMIX

ORIGINAL

REMIX

ORIGINAL

REMIX

Wihbey says the study challenges the conventional wisdom that younger viewers want their news dumbed down. “No — they want more depth and context, but they don’t want a sensibility that feels dated or cheesy,” he says. The remixes try to show that you can accomplish both goals —“walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Jennifer Graves, VP/News Director at Chicago’s WLS, says she is “very intrigued by the results” and finds them “heartening.” “Local information is still at the center of everything,” she says. “That’s what we do. The report offers great insight into different ways we can tell those stories and reach new audiences.”

So if the study is right, the answers to “re-engineering” the basic building block of the local newscast are close at hand and well within reach. Remember: the original feature stories in the study tested as well as the remixed versions. Not only can you do this — you already do.

As for the hard-news packages, the researchers say a good place to start is with the young people already working for you. “News directors would be surprised if they gave their own employees more creative license and saw what they come up with,” says Beaudet. “You have these people in your newsrooms. Don’t let them be window dressing. What stories resonate with them? What techniques resonate with them?”

The researchers don’t expect stations to see the study as a copy-and-paste playbook — again, the remixes took all summer to make, with lots of false starts along the way — but as an inspiration to take some chances. Maybe just one chance at first. “It’s unrealistic that someone is going to invent a new story form overnight,” says Wihbey. “If one of the takeaways is start with just one thing, and try something different — that’s great.”

Fixing the 1:30 package is not a panacea, especially given the change in younger consumers’ viewing habits that could make the whole notion of a linear broadcast obsolete one day. But with consumption moving to streaming platforms and mobile devices, the video story itself becomes more important than ever. Why not start making it better right now, right in your own newsroom?

Do you have storytelling experiments and innovations to share with us? Let us know at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

[NOTE: Andrew wrote the introduction to the Northeastern study but was not involved in the research.]

KMOV’s Steve Harris asks his followers for help — and gets a lot more in return

Steve Harris is a feature reporter on KMOV’s morning show in St. Louis. He doesn’t have the biggest following in the world — with just under 5,000 likes on his page — but he has found a way to truly engage those followers and make them part of his reporting process.

He uses his social media — Facebook mostly — as a news gathering tool. Sometimes it’s a way for him to get story ideas, but more often he uses it to get comments and opinions from his followers as elements in his packages.

“As far as interaction, it’s usually when I think it’s something people can relate to,” Harris said. “I know people are thinking this. I’ve heard people talk about this. So I’ll put this on, and I know I’ll get a pretty good response and get some pretty good ideas.”

A typical Steve Harris question. (Screenshot)
Follow-up he posted just before his package (Screenshot)

While this is a fairly new trend in news gathering, Harris said it actually started in 2012 at KMOV. His news director at the time, Sean McLaughlin, made a big push to have reporters integrate social media in their reporting. At the time, Harris said, the staff thought he was crazy and everyone pushed back against it. Mobile and Facebook were in their early stages and TV was still king.

“I was kind of his pet project,” he said. Harris had just made the transition from photographer to feature reporter. At first he wasn’t a big fan of using social media. “It was kind of a chore at first,” he said. “Man, I’m trying to put these packages together, then I gotta do Facebook.”

For one of his early stories, the station sent Harris to the Grammys. They had him pose the question “What would you ask people if you were on the Grammys red carpet?” to his followers. At first he thought it was a dumb thing to ask, but he was amazed when he got over 3,000 comments in response.

Once he realized what an incredible news gathering tool social media could be, he fully embraced it. Now he routinely asks his followers to answer questions like what’s in your junk drawer or what’s your favorite type of hot cocoa.

Another Harris question about a “big picture” topic for a story (Screenshot)

Harris doesn’t ask for his viewers’ input on every story, just the ones where it makes sense — when it’s something people can relate to, he said.

He tries to go through his feed each day, and at least like all of the comments he gets so his viewers know that he’s looking at what they write.

Harris interacts with his followers on Facebook (Screenshot)

When he is looking for comments to include in a package, the ones that stand out to him are those that are clever or those that represent a general consensus.

“I’ll go down through [the post], and find some interesting comments,” Harris said. “And I’ll clip them, and put them on and read them, so they can kind of feel like ‘Well look, I mattered. This guy put me on TV.’”

For Harris, it’s more than a way to gather additional elements — it’s a way to forge a unique and personal connection with his viewers. “They feel like they have more of a voice in what I do,” Harris said.

Do you know an anchor, reporter or meteorologist who is using social media to engage with his or her viewers and deserves to be our next Social Media Spotlight? If so, email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu and we’ll check them out.

Facebook to cancel some news programs on Watch platform

According to Digiday, Facebook is starting to cancel some of the news programs it’s been paying for on its Watch platform and cutting the budgets for others.

https://digiday.com/media/facebook-cancel-two-thirds-facebook-watch-news-shows/

No word yet on what this might mean for the local news programs on Facebook Watch that we’ve reported on here at the Lab — three magazine shows by different station groups and a celebration of local investigative reporting by Alabama Media Group’s Reckon.

We’ll keep you posted.

Want Newsroom Innovation? Start with a STOP List

Newsroom innovation often fails. Too often, it fails for the wrong reason. The new idea wasn’t a bad idea, it just never had a chance.

There is no better way to crush the spirit of innovation than to bring together a group of creative thinkers, turn them loose to brainstorm, allow them to become excited about implementing some of these innovations … and then require them to add new projects to their existing workloads.

There is no “free time” in the typical newsroom today. Adding new activities without eliminating other tasks is a surefire way to sabotage a promising innovation. It’s also intellectually dishonest. When push comes to shove, the new and extra lose out to the demands of the day and the urgency of the now.

That’s why smart managers start their innovation process by brainstorming a “Stop Doing” list before they generate a “Start Doing” list. They create capacity for innovation first.

Pain points are a great place to recoup time. Every workgroup in a newsroom – from producers to assignment desk to production crew – has these frustrations. Let them fill a whiteboard with the barriers that keep them from being more productive. Those are opportunities for process innovation. If the function is important, the innovation might involve doing the task differently. Is there a better, more efficient way? It’s also possible the function isn’t actually important anymore. It may just be “what we’ve always done.”

The “Stop Doing” list should include its best friend and neighbor, the “Do Differently” list. Together, they offer a potent path to creating capacity for new innovation.

Stopping, in Practice

Newsrooms who’ve employed this approach have found many areas ripe for “stopping.”

The daily morning editorial meeting is one of those traditional mainstays ripe for innovation. A shorter, more productive morning meeting yields better story assignments and more time for reporters to report. Just think how much time is spent going through all the reporter pitches, leaving little time for discussion and adding value. One newsroom I know overhauled the format and moved the reporter pitches to their Slack channel, well in advance of the meeting. They gained back time in their editorial meeting to have more strategic conversations about coverage angles; and, pitching via Slack had the unexpected bonus of refining and enhancing story pitches through virtual collaboration.

Another newsroom applied analytics to evaluate the productivity of its digital output. They specifically wanted to understand how different story lengths performed. The data revealed that short and long articles performed disproportionately better with their audience than mid-length articles. This insight led them to reallocate time spent on low-performing digital-story formats and shift toward story lengths that better met the needs of their online audience.

The assignment desk is one of the most traditional aspects of a local TV newsroom. But technology has created opportunities to reimagine the best ways to accomplish its mission of story discovery and story management. For example, how many truly great stories come from police scanners anymore? I’ve worked with many newsrooms that have reorganized into “discovery desks” using data tools like CrowdTangle to create curated “listening lists” of First Responders and key news sources — organizations that once issued press releases but now post information to social media first. This do-different strategy leverages the power of algorithms to accomplish the core mission of story discovery in a faster and more data-driven way.

Photo by Drew Hays

Posting to social media is another newsroom activity with time costs. It’s not uncommon for a member of the digital/social team to spend several hours posting or scheduling link posts to various social platforms. Those platforms drive meaningful traffic to local news websites, but posting and scheduling links is a rote activity. In my previous role as VP of Digital Audience Engagement at TEGNA, I partnered with the social post automation company True Anthem. They and similar companies use AI and automation to pick the right content and automate posting to the right social platform at the right time. Newsrooms benefit in two ways. First, they recoup staff time that can be redirected toward more original content creation. Second, if moderated and reviewed by editors, these uses of AI-plus-automation actually can improve social results. As AI applications grow, there should be many more opportunities to improve inefficient newsroom workflows to free up journalists to focus on content creation.

The “Stop-doing” test should be applied to innovation projects as well. The leadership team at KPLC in Lake Charles, Louisiana, embarked on an ambitious innovation process including original shows and story formats like an “Adulting 101” series made specifically for their OTT channels on Roku and Amazon Fire. But the leadership team made sure they had measurable criteria for success. Several of the initial ideas they liked never found a sponsor, “so that became a ‘stop-doing’ on the innovation front,” explained Janelle Shriner, KPLC’s News Director. “We didn’t think it was worth our time to shoot, edit, find people to put it all together – and lose hours of productivity if we weren’t making money.”

The Stop-Doing conversation helps leaders say “no” to some activities so they can say “yes” to others that could be more productive.

Leading a ‘Stop Doing’ Process

The stop-doing conversation can be applied to specific workgroups, such as producers, assignment desk, digital, reporters and production crews. These groups will likely identify simple changes that can free up capacity. Tackling this topic as a full newsroom requires managing a more complex conversation, but it can produce bold workflow suggestions. The ideas that emerge likely will take more time and strategy to apply, but these tend to be bigger and more disruptive insights that might result in questioning some fundamental assumptions around newsroom workflow that simply don’t apply anymore.

Managers should not miss the opportunity to have their own “Stop Doing” conversation. “We got rid of two department head meetings each month to make way for innovation meetings – so that we stay on top of projects regularly,” notes KPLC’s Shriner. Put each recurring manager meeting under a microscope: How productive is the meeting? Is there always a clear agenda with intended outcomes? Does real work get done or is “attending the meeting” like checking a box? Managers who put their meetings through this rigor often decide to conver some of their recurring meetings to “on-demand” meetings, i.e. someone calls that meeting only when a specific task needs to be done.

Photo by Steve Bowbrick

Questions to Ask

    Here are some questions you can ask as part of a “Stop Doing” brainstorm in your newsroom:

  • What are the activities that take up the most time in your day?
  • How essential are they to your core mission?
  • For the least essential, brainstorm “do different” and “stop doing” alternatives
  • What are the most repetitive tasks you do? The least creative/demanding?
  • If they’re essential, is there a faster or more efficient way to accomplish them?
  • If NON-essential, is there another activity that would be a better use of the time?
  • What aspects of the daily workflow could be automated to free time for more original content creation?
  • What is the highest-value, most productive use of your time in your role? What gets in the WAY of doing that activity more?
  • How might those competing lower-value activities be reduced, eliminated or done differently?

Who hasn’t wished for more time in the day? The bad news, of course, is that there is no “more time.” The good news is: We can take charge of how we spend the time we have. Starting the innovation process with a “Stop Doing” list respects the reality that there is no “free time” in the typical newsroom; it also sets up teams for success when they pursue innovative ideas by creating the time needed to implement them well.

Here at the Cronkite News Lab, we’d like to hear how you are transforming the way you use the resources in your newsroom to better serve your audiences. Send your “Stop Doing” and “Do Different” successes to cronkitenewslab@asu.edu and we’ll share the best examples here on the Cronkite News Lab.

In Sinclair’s new OTT service, online streaming is STIRRed and may be shaken

Users choose from among a menu of cities with Sinclair stations. (screenshot)

Adam Ware knows exactly when his love affair with local TV stations started. He was eight years old and visiting the set of the kids’ show Wonderama at Channel 5 in New York City. Ware remembers being fascinated — not by the show itself, but by everything that went into making it.

Cut to today. As GM of Sinclair’s newly launched streaming service STIRR, Ware is hoping to inspire local stations to binge on new production. If the plan works, it could touch off an explosion of innovation, creativity, and original programming from local TV newsrooms. The goal is to “expand the newsroom into a ‘content room,’” Ware says, “or to use an old-school term, a studio.”

When you sign on to STIRR, you’re asked to choose a city, and that becomes your STIRR City channel. This allows you to stream news, sports, and other local programming along with selected video clips from a nearby Sinclair station. If you live in one of the 71 Sinclair markets contributing channels to the service, you can see local news from your own city. Washington DC, “powered by” Sinclair’s WJLA, which has a good dose of national news, is offered as a default option. And Ware is looking for other news partners in markets where Sinclair doesn’t own a station — maybe even newspaper companies.

Ad-supported STIRR, which is available on the usual suspects — Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, mobile apps and online — has lots of non-local programming already. It’s a “skinny bundle” of 20 national digital networks, with a plan to add about 30 more content partners. STIRR features niche-y lifestyle, sports, and other entertainment — channels you may or may not know depending on your age and interests, like Buzzr (game shows), FailArmy (epic fail videos), MobCrush (mobile gaming), Dust (sci-fi shorts), Dove (wholesome family entertainment), and Pet Collective (you guessed it). There are also homegrown curated channels called Stirr Movies, Stirr Sports and Stirr Life. Buzzy financial-news service Cheddar has a channel, and the Daily Mail’s syndicated show pops up as well.

That may not sound like a Netflix killer, even with the attractive price tag — free. But what sets STIRR apart is the local content. In a clever touch, STIRR City is not just a set of on-demand clips and simulcast news programs from the stations. The hybrid channel weaves local content into a 24/7 linear feed curated by a Sinclair team in Santa Monica — a stream of programs filling the long gaps between newscasts and other original local shows, including the prime time hours. Think of the network affiliate model, with the local station taking over when it has its own content to offer.

We’ve reported here at the Knight-Cronkite News Lab on the growing number of local station forays into OTT, including Gray’s InvestigateTV — a streaming platform for the best investigative stories from Gray and Raycom stations and other partners — and CBSN New York, a 24/7 local news service that will expand to other CBS O-and-O markets.

STIRR is an ambitious addition to the roster, putting Sinclair’s stations squarely in the OTT game by offering a seamless way to stream their local news and other programs. The service aims at younger-skewing cord cutters, including those still sitting on their couches to watch TV. “They’re looking for a lean-back experience in the connected TV space,” says Ware. “How is a local broadcaster going to survive in an HDMI 2 world?”

STIRR is one attempt to answer that question. It still feels like the startup that it is, with relatively little local programming, especially if you don’t live in a Sinclair market, but the potential is exciting, especially if stations rise to the challenge of producing additional content for this expansive new platform.

That challenge is going to fall mostly on newsrooms, and Sinclair’s VP of News Scott Livingston says news directors are excited by the opportunity. “It can be a content lab where we can test new things,” says Livingston. “The sky’s the limit.”

For now, the sky actually is the limit. STIRR has launched a channel devoted to drone footage contributed by the stations, called SOAR — my Lab colleague Sarah Farrell reports on it here. But the real opportunity for STIRR City stations is to contribute to upcoming channels like the one based on the Sinclair investigative franchise Spotlight on America; to offer expanded news stories on demand on their own channels; and to incubate new programs. “In the future, newsrooms will be creating content almost 24/7 for every platform,” says Livingston. “The next phase is more tailored content for OTT. It’s an opportunity for a station to create content that might not have had a place on the traditional platform.”

You may remember our story on how news executives at Fox’s Philadelphia O-and-O responded to a demand for innovative programming ideas by creating The ClassH-Room, a game show pitting local high school students against their teachers that now runs as a weekday local strip on the station. Today, Ware and Livingston and their colleagues are also calling for new ideas from Sinclair stations, and the difference is that the best ones can “go national” on the service — either as a show or even a whole new channel — whenever the bosses think they’re good enough.

Is there a national news channel in STIRR’s future? Despite all the speculation about Sinclair’s interest in mounting one, perhaps as a challenger to Fox News, that doesn’t appear to be in the works at the moment. This could change, obviously, and the STIRR platform is tailor-made for it.

But for now, the emphasis is on compelling new local programs, and Adam Ware is waiting eagerly for another Wonderama moment to come his way.

Read more coverage of the STIRR launch from Variety, TechCrunch, Digiday and Forbes.

Share your OTT and new programming innovations with us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

And here’s one expert’s take on making the move to OTT.

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An experimental Facebook Watch show reports on journalism while trying to reinvent it

“TV stations tend to stay in their swim lanes, but the audience is using the whole pool.”

Those wise and scary words come from our Lab colleague Frank Mungeam. We were talking about Chasing Corruption, an original series funded by Facebook for its Watch service and produced by the Alabama Media Group.

Hearst, ABC, and TEGNA all have strong Facebook-funded shows on Watch too, as we reported last November. They probably don’t think of the Alabama Media Group, which still owns three newspapers in the state, or its digital-media arm AL.com as a competitor — but they probably should.

As video viewing shifts from TV to digital platforms, station groups are doing battle in a new arena, against new challengers. And while local TV newsrooms have decades of experience with video, they can also be trapped in their storytelling ways — their “swim lanes” — while others experiment and innovate around them.

Chasing Corruption is a prime example.

AL.com had already established its place in the video sweepstakes with lighter lifestyle and entertainment fare like This is Alabama and It’s a Southern Thing, whose sketch-comedy show So True Y’all attracts millions of Facebook views. “Our video work has led to the biggest engagement we’ve ever seen,” says Michelle Holmes, Alabama Media Group’s Head of Partnerships and former VP of Content. “Chasing Corruption was an effort to turn that deep connection to the most serious and among the most significant work that we as journalists do.”

That work is exposing corruption in high places and getting something done about it. Chasing Corruption is produced by AL.com’s issues-focused Facebook brand Reckon, which describes itself as “a place for big ideas and tough conversation about Alabama.” But this show ranges across the country, reporting on reporters — local investigative journalists who have broken big stories and effected meaningful change, such as sending corrupt officials to prison. As the hipster-ish host says at the beginning of each of the ten episodes, “My name is Ian Hoppe, and I’m here to show you why local reporters matter.” Facebook’s Josh Mabry, who helped greenlight the project, echoed that thought in an email, “Helping folks understand the process of high quality journalism is important.”

So the subject matter is straightforward and high-minded. But the look and feel? Let’s just say — “distinctive.” Chasing Corruption uses what Facebook’s Mabry calls a “clever narrative style and stimulating visuals” to bring its case studies, some of which date back several years, to life. And Hoppe, whose day job is “managing producer” of news video at Alabama Media Group, works hard to be overtly entertaining in ways that no news anchor would (or in my view should) ever attempt.

Not a standup but a “hangdown” from Chasing Corruption (screenshot)

You’re never going to see WVUE’s buttoned-down investigative star Lee Zurik — himself a subject of one of Hoppe’s flattering portraits — open a show hanging upside down from the monkey bars in a children’s playground, and we are all grateful for that. But Hoppe and Holmes are playing by different rules. Hoppe even goes so far as to wear costumes to fit the subject matter: a sheriff’s uniform in a program about a corrupt Kentucky sheriff, prison fatigues in a show about trouble in Mississippi’s prison system. “Ian’s costumes make [the show] feel relevant to people’s lives, interesting,” says Holmes. “How can we be serious journalists while also saying you have a ton of stuff you could be doing with your time, come spend it with us.“

“Sheriff” Hoppe in a scene from Chasing Corruption (screenshot)

Holmes says her team wasn’t overtly targeting any particular demographic, but Hoppe’s youthful sensibility and disregard for convention are no accident. “If I have a host and his friends don’t want to watch the show, I’ve probably failed,” says Holmes. “We’re happy to entertain and inform and educate and inspire all at the same time.”

What’s the lesson for local TV newsrooms? One question is how far you are willing to stray from the norm — and what risks you are willing to take — to test new ways to tell stories and engage with viewers, especially the new viewers you need to attract in order to thrive. “For us, this was a huge stretch in voice,” says Holmes. But “when you see a chance that aligns with something that needs to happen next, run full force at it.”

In this case, it certainly helps that Facebook paid the bills. But AL.com has formed a production arm to do more of what Holmes calls “modern TV-style programming.” That means new competitive challenges ahead for TV stations that have had the news video landscape pretty much to themselves forever. “We see an unlimited opportunity to play across all fields right now, and that’s really exciting,” says Holmes. “But that’s open to everybody.”

In other words: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

Tell us about some ways in which you’ve ventured out of your comfort zone, and we’ll check them out at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

[Disclosure: Andrew is also affiliated with the MIT Media Lab’s Laboratory for Social Machines and its nonprofit spinoff Cortico, which are working on an unrelated project with AL.com.]

 

“They reach out to us…when they need help of any kind”

When Univision announced expanded local news apps for seven of its top markets this week, one of the platforms for “integrated social media sharing capabilities” was a channel you won’t usually see in similar English-language-station releases. It’s WhatsApp, the world’s most popular messaging app, but one that’s little-used by U.S. newsrooms.

If you want to understand Univision’s embrace of WhatsApp, just ask Esteban Creste, VP of News for Univision’s New York station, Univision 41 Nueva York (WXTV). Creste’s station has a 12-year consumer franchise called 41 A Tú Lado (41 On Your Side) that’s now using WhatsApp as a new way to connect directly with viewers. When A Tú Lado correspondent Berenice Gartner suggested establishing a WhatsApp number for her franchise, “a light bulb went off,” says Creste. “Why didn’t we think of that before?”

Berenice Gartner

Gartner humbly refuses to take full credit for the idea, saying it came up when she and her cameraman were talking about new ways to reach the audience. Gartner believes the WhatsApp messenger is a powerful and valuable tool journalists like her can use to connect with their viewers. “We know all of our viewers have smartphones,” she says, “and they are on them constantly.”

In fact, Pew Research found that 74 percent of Latinos get their news via social media or smartphone app on a typical weekday. At first, the A Tú Lado team got plenty of news tips, Gartner says, but also a fair number of simple greetings: “You know, people who just want to say hello.” She sometimes responds with an emoji so they know the message was received.

What viewers see on A Tú Lado’s Whatsapp.

WhatsApp is a cultural phenomenon in the U.S. Spanish-speaking community. It’s particularly popular with Latinos because it offers a free way to communicate with their relatives in other countries. It’s also considered secure and private.

WhatsApp is perfectly suited to the way Creste’s viewers interact with A Tú Lado, an ambitious feature that runs three times a week, including a Friday segment in which reporter Gartner answers viewers’ questions. Univision has a unique relationship with its viewers, many of whom rely on both the national network and the local stations to be their advocates and allies rather than just purveyors of news. For that reason, the issues viewers share on WhatsApp range from “not having heat to…my husband was deported and I don’t know what to do,” says Creste. “They reach out to us when they have a consumer complaint, but also when they need help of any kind. Sometimes they call us before they call the police.”

It’s producer Sheyla Navarro’s job to wade into the steady stream of voicemails and WhatsApp questions, concerns, and tips — about 100 a day. She diverts the newsier issues to the assignment desk, converts some into fodder for A Tú Lado, and does her best to respond to the rest — questions about DACA and immigration, healthcare, education, and other pressing concerns for Univision 41’s audience. “Our goal is to educate, inform, and make sure the community understands its rights,” she says.

The station promotes the WhatsApp number on the air throughout the day, along with more traditional channels like email and a toll-free phone number. WhatsApp allows the station’s producers to respond much faster to newsworthy stories. “The success of this is really surprising. I didn’t know we’d get this many messages,” says Creste, who is now considering adding a second WhatsApp number for general news.

So, what are the lessons for “Anglo” newsrooms? Most obviously, in markets with large (and increasingly bilingual) Latino populations, WhatsApp may be worth exploring as an additional outreach to viewers. But for any market, Univision 41’s story illustrates the power of understanding your viewers, connecting with them on the channels they use and trust, and most of all, listening.

Creste likes to keep his ear to the ground. He encourages his journalists to walk New York’s neighborhoods and talk to people on their days off. The station collaborates with the city to organize regular phone banks to answer viewer concerns. And the A Tú Lado team tries to host meetings every month or so in the community to hear directly from viewers.

“I’m more and more interested in having unique content,” says Creste. “In order to be relevant to people’s lives, you have to create venues to have direct contact with the viewers…find what they need, and fill the void.”

Esteban Creste calls this “super-serving” his viewers. Tell us what you’re doing to super-serve yours. You can email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu, as we don’t have a WhatsApp number.

Yet.

[Disclosure: Andrew has done projects with Univision’s network news division in the past.]

Related:

KUSA’s Next With Kyle Clark is a refreshing example of innovation’s risks and rewards. Read here.

Kristen Hampton’s Facebook Live segments are a case study in “authenticity.” Read here.

Social Media Spotlight: Molly Grantham

There must be something in the water in Charlotte, North Carolina. Just a few weeks after we brought you the viral Facebook Live posts from WBTV’s Kristen Hampton, we received a reader suggestion about an anchor at WBTV using Facebook in a different way: to be real with her followers.

Molly Grantham’s Facebook cover page.

Molly Grantham has been an award-winning anchor and reporter at WBTV for the past 15 years. For starters, she’s won two Emmys for her work; she was named the RTDNAC TV News Reporter of the Year for both Carolinas in 2011; she’s reported on issues from gangs and terrorism to kids facing uphill medical battles; and she anchors the evening newscasts for WBTV. But she’s also a mother, and she’s not afraid to use social media to talk about the struggles that come with being a full-time working mom.

“There’s no real map on just how to be yourself with cameras and lights and a mask and a costume and makeup and tough headlines,” Grantham said. “There’s a lot of work you have to do to be real with all of that. So if you can figure out how to do that, if anybody in the world can figure out how to do that, that’s a good thing because people are just thirsty for authenticity.”

Right after her second child — her son Hutch who is now four — was born, Grantham started sharing weekly Facebook posts about everything from the sleepless nights with a newborn to fighting about naptime to the struggles of grocery shopping with two young kids. The posts have since slimmed down to monthly updates, but the important thing is that they’re still authentically Molly. “People, viewers, social media people, taught me it’s okay to say how tough it was,” Grantham said. “And it’s okay to be real about missing myself and missing my job when I was on maternity leave.”

Grantham was “trapped in the house with two young babies,” and it wasn’t easy. She received numerous comments on her posts, and “they comforted me,” she said. “It was like ‘Oh wow, it’s a two-way street.’” Through her posts, Grantham is able to communicate that she’s not just the person who reads the news every night; she’s a real person just like each of her followers.

That desire to share what journalism — and being a TV anchor in particular — looks like behind the “mask” is what led Grantham to give a Tedx Talk — “The Real We Are” — in Charlotte this past December. “This is not a glamorous job,” she said, “it just looks that way sometimes. You guys [the viewers] comment on hair and makeup, and that’s not what matters at all.”

Pulling back the “curtain,” and being authentic with your viewers, in your own way, is totally necessary, Grantham said. “Otherwise you’re just this big figure relaying words.” Showing the viewers that you care about what you talk about on TV every night is an important part of the job because “we’re all human.”

She’s even taken her musings about parenthood, and being real and authentic on Facebook, and turned them into a book – Small Victories: The Off-Camera Life of an On-Camera Mom. It covers about two and a half years worth of stories about balancing being both a mom and a TV news anchor.

As far as advice goes, she said the most important thing on social media is to “be smart, but be you.”

Do you know an anchor, reporter or meteorologist who is using social media to engage with his or her viewers and deserves to be our next Social Media Spotlight? If so, email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu and we’ll check them out.

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Social Media Spotlight: Brian Allen

Not every anchor or reporter can be the next social media icon, nor do they need to be.

Brian Allen from KSFY in Sioux Falls, South Dakota is the first to say other anchors and reporters might be funnier or more charismatic. The secret to his success is authenticity. He’s just a normal guy. He’s a husband, father of six and a dog owner. His presence on social media reflects that.

“I try to be as authentic as I can with my viewers and my readers through my social media content,” Allen said. “To let them know that the guy they see on TV every night is a real person. A real person that doesn’t like the cold any more than they do. A person who is just trying to do his best in life.” The only difference between him and his viewers, Allen said, is that they see him on TV three times a night.

Allen values being real on his social media accounts, but he also wants to post content that helps “foster thought and conversation” among his followers. As an award-winning journalist, he tries to maintain a blend of serious reporting and relatable content on his feed. He mixes pictures of his wife and kids with updates about breaking local and national news.

Like both Kristen Hampton — a features reporter for WBTV in Charlotte — and Bob Herzog — a morning anchor at WKRC in Cincinnati — Allen also tries to stress positivity in his posts when he can. “I try to, whenever I can, find examples of people helping other people just because it’s the right thing to do,” Allen said.

He cares what people post on his page as well. He takes the time to read and comment — if necessary — on each post. “If I put out some type of post, and someone takes the time to write a response I read those responses,” Allen said. “And at the very least I try to respond with whatever emoticon might fit.” So the people who follow his page have come to expect that level of thoughtful, two-way communication. “It’s just being respectful of the relationship,” he said.

“I think that might be one of the reasons my professional Facebook page has the success that it does,” he said. “People know that when they respond, they’re not just responding to a void. They’re responding to someone who is genuinely going to take an interest in what their point of view might be.”

His suggestion to other reporters or anchors trying to find their voice on social media is simple. Start by answering one fundamental question: How open are you willing to be? Then, once you’ve set that comfort level, he said, it’s something that you should stay consistent with. Above all else, he echoed what we’ve heard before from other successful social media practitioners — it’s important to just be who you are.

“I don’t take any of [my followers] for granted, and I’m very appreciative of the fact that they find me interesting enough, and hopefully trust me enough, to hang in there and keep following the page,” Allen said. “I’ve had comments several times from people who have said, ‘I watch you on TV more because I know you now. You’re not just some guy on TV.’ When I hear that it makes me feel good because in my mind it is mission accomplished.”

Do you know an anchor, reporter or meteorologist who is using social media to engage with his or her viewers and deserves to be our next Social Media Spotlight? If so, email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu and we’ll check them out.

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Sinclair’s SOAR franchise finds another home on STIRR platform

SOAR, which is a creative acronym for Sailing Over America, takes viewers on a drone tour around the country.

“We call it [SOAR] because we look at drones, and drone technology, not so much as an aircraft technology,” Stan Heist, director of news training and development at Sinclair, said. “It’s really about bringing viewers the experience of flying. The experience of seeing the world from different perspectives.”

When Sinclair launched STIRR — the group’s new OTT platform — in January, it gave the SOAR team an additional platform to share its content. In addition to the one-minute segments that the SOAR producers began with — and still produce for local stations — they now compile exclusively for STIRR.

The new SOAR channel on the platform started with 4 to 5 episodes, has 15 now, and is planning to expand to 22 a year, Adam Ware, GM of STIRR said.

Sinclair has 44 local TV stations around the country with trained drone pilots and visual observers — one person to fly the drone and another to plan out the shots. According to Heist, to be a certified drone pilot for Sinclair, you have to be FAA Part 107 certified and you also have to attend a three-day training course. For those who are just visual observers, there is an online program to complete.

The stations use this technology to cover everything from breaking news to features to weather.
As a group, they’ve been using drones since August 2016, so they had an enormous stockpile of footage.

“We’ve got stations everywhere. There’s all different kinds of geography and landscapes and beauty to America,” Heist said. “Let’s highlight them. Let’s not let this just slip away in the local market. Let’s try to share this across the group.”

In 2018 Sinclair began compiling this footage, asking each station to send in its best SOAR-style drone footage once a month. A producer from the national desk in Washington takes the footage, compiles it around a central theme, and sends it back out each week to the stations to use, if they want, on their website or broadcast.

As Heist explained, the videos do show stunning pictures, but it’s about more than just throwing together the coolest video each week. The SOAR producer works to create a “short vignette” with the content that stations send in each week, so “there’s a little bit of purpose behind each one.”

So far SOAR has explored themes like “Farewell to Fall,” “Sunrises worth waking up for” and “Sailing over frozen rivers.”

Of course SOAR has had challenges with FAA regulations — anyone who’s ever flown a drone would understand that — but Heist credits the education and training of his pilots, which allows them to “look for solutions that fall within regulations.”

On top of that, Heist has even created a one-sheet for the newsrooms to have on the assignment desk or in their conference rooms. It lays out the bare bones of the FAA regulations to help inform everyone in the newsroom before they ask the pilots go out and shoot a drone story. “They have a little bit of a perspective about what our pilots face out in the field, so they can make better decisions sooner,” Heist said.

For Sinclair, SOAR is a way to create a longer flight plan for all that drone footage. “There is great work out there, and to have it only go once, in one market, it’s a shame,” Heist said. “So that’s why we want to highlight it.”

How are you using your drone footage? Share other creative ideas with us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

KXLY Uses Drone Technology to Create a Unique Weekly Feature

When KXLY Spokane got its drone, the staff was expecting to be able to use it to cover all kinds of news stories. What the newsroom didn’t anticipate was how limited the area to fly in was going to be: there are pretty tight FAA regulations around Spokane because of two airports and a military base in the area.

Like any good innovator, station executives didn’t let this setback stop them though. They used it as an opportunity to create a new franchise for the station. They weren’t really able to fly in the city, but the area all around — the beautiful scenery of the Inland Northwest — was fair game.

“We’re a small company, and [station owner Morgan Murphy] saw this as a great innovation and really invested and trusted us to have this really fun, cool tool,” KXLY executive news director Melissa Luck says. “So we really wanted to find ways to use it.”

The final product that they’ve been producing for about a year is a segment called Air 4 Adventures — non-narrated packages that bring viewers “the beauty of the region from the air.” KXLY serves Spokane, Washington and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and according to Luck, there’s no shortage of ideas about what to cover next because there are just so many places to showcase, from snow-covered mountains to trails through forests of towering ponderosa pine.

Air 4 Adventure: Ride the Hiawatha

Most stories run about a minute-and-a-half and include an interview with someone related to the featured place instead of a reporter track, although Luck did mention that there are occasions where it’s pure video. The natural-sound features are broadcast every week on the Friday 6 p.m. newscast and then again on Sunday. “We thought we’ll do them Friday night when people can go into the weekend with a story that makes them feel good about where they live,” Luck says.

Air 4: Rowing on the Snake River

And the audience reaction so far has been overwhelmingly positive. Luck says producers have viewers giving them ideas about where to take the drone next, and “it’s opened up an entirely different world than we ever imagined when we started.” They’ve implemented some of the viewer suggestions so far, but the majority of the story ideas come from the station’s five photographers who are certified to fly the drone.

The photography staff at KXLY was especially excited to be able to use the drone. Brian Belanger, one of the two main drone operators, really embraced the new technology, Luck says. Belanger has been the chief photographer for about 10 of the 16 years he’s been at the station. He’s produced about 90 percent of the Air 4 Adventures and “his eyes light up when he shows us things that he’s shot with the drone, or ideas that he’s had, or just research that he’s done on creative ways to use it.” And the photographers are the ones who shoot, conduct the interviews and produce these segments as well. “Basically we give them full creative license to go out and just shoot a cool story.”

Luck sees Air 4 Adventures as more than just a “cute” weekly feature piece though. “There was a concern at first to think like, ‘Well, are these just features stories set to music?’ And I think you can’t discount the value of that. Of just making people feel good about where they live, and doing it through really cool, great video.”

Air 4 Adventure: Palouse Falls

KXLY still uses the drone for breaking news stories when it can, but the Air 4 Adventures provide weekly practice for the operators to stay on top of their skills, improve their handling and stay up to date on FAA regulations. For Luck, that’s one of the biggest benefits that has come out of Air 4 Adventures. “Unless you do something consistently, it’s going to fall out of habit, or it’s just going to fall by the wayside,” Luck says. “Especially with all of the things we’re dealing with everyday.” So when the station does need to use the drone to cover a breaking news story, the photographers are ready to go.

Is your station experimenting with drone technology in interesting ways? If so, email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu and we’ll check it out.

Accidentally becoming an internet sensation

It was a happy accident, and it made Kristen Hampton a Facebook sensation.

Hampton — then a WBTV Charlotte feature reporter — began her foray into Facebook Live in June 2017 when she saw an advertisement for a three-second eyebrow stamp — literally what you think it is…a way to stamp eyebrows on your face. She decided to test the product for herself, and she turned the camera on while she did it. She was just being her normal, goofy self, and pretty soon she had thousands of viewers. “I think people appreciate you just being no holds barred,” Hampton said. “It’s not a facade. It’s not covering up the imperfections.”

Hampton produced one more Facebook Live video that June, but it wasn’t until April 2018 that everything came together for her. “I saw another thing on Facebook that were these giant red rubber lips that looked like a big clown mouth, but they were advertised as a facial slimmer,” Hampton said. She ordered it, fired up Facebook Live in her “carfice” — the office space she has in her car — and started testing the product. Within a couple of days, the video had almost 10 million views, and after about a week it had almost 20 million, she said.

To this date it’s still her most viewed video, with over 42 million views.

Without intending to, Hampton had just created the social media craze that is Product Testing Tuesday. “All of this happened by mistake,” Hampton said, “but once the mistake happened I’m proud to say that I embraced it and my work embraced it and said, ‘Let her just go be her.’ And they didn’t stop it.”

While she enjoys seeing how many views her videos get, Hampton said she has been blown away by the overwhelmingly positive response she has gotten from her followers. She continues to get emails every week “from people who have cancer, who just had a friend die…they just put their dog down,” she said, “and they’re sending me an email saying they watched one of my videos and it made them laugh.”

Once Hampton came up with the name, she was stuck, though: she had to try out a new product every week. She produced the videos for Facebook Live while doing day turn stories at WBTV for about eight months after the facial slimmer video went viral. The stories she was producing for her TV segment “Good News” were more heartwarming feature pieces than the stories a news reporter traditionally produces, but Hampton believes any reporter or on-air personality can balance a social media persona with credibility. “Just because you’re fun, doesn’t mean you’re not credible,” she said. Audience members understand the difference between the platforms, and “I think they really appreciate being able to see the real you,” she said.

For Hampton, it’s all about being authentic — a quality she says comes naturally or not at all. “When I say authenticity, you know I think everybody’s like, ‘Okay, let me go do an authentic Facebook Live.’ Well, you’ve already screwed yourself up if you say that because authentic is not a way you act. Acting like yourself is authentic.”

Gray Television, which just acquired Raycom Media and along with it WBTV, was authentically impressed: it moved Hampton up from her position at the station to expand her segment “Good News” nationally. But it hasn’t asked her to change a thing about what she does on Facebook Live, which Hampton really appreciates. She says management has treated the segment like “a child and they want to protect it.” Throughout this transition, she has continued “PTT” on Facebook, with no plans to tinker with it or move it to TV, at least for now.

That’s one of the things she’s been pleasantly surprised about since “PTT” took off. “No one has said, ‘Do this, or don’t do that,’” she said. “And that’s because when I started doing this it wasn’t at the direction of anybody. I just got on Facebook Live, and I was 100 percent myself.” And this hands-off approach has allowed her to remain her authentic, goofy self with her followers.

(Hampton says her favorite PTT so far is something she calls the Trilogy. It is three-day adventure that begins with her testing wrinkle face cups)

Her work, and the success of “PTT” on Facebook Live, has not gone unnoticed by the rest of the journalism community. At the end of last year, Hampton was honored with a NewsTECHForum Social Media Excellence Award for her work. She doesn’t know what to do with the honor, she said, because “most honors you feel like you deserve.” And although she did work hard, “I’m not going to take credit for some brainchild incredible thing that I crafted,” she said. “It was an accident. It was a gloriously wonderful accident.”

We at the Knight-Cronkite News Lab found out about Hampton’s work after receiving multiple email tips from our readers in response to a story we wrote about WKRC’s morning anchor Bob Herzog’s Wake Up and Make Up videos on Facebook. Her work, like Herzog’s, is an example of how TV personalities can leverage social media to connect with their viewers.

Do you know someone who is using social media in creative and unusual ways to engage with his or her viewers and community? If so, email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu, and we’ll check it out.

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KUSA’s Next With Kyle Clark is a “refreshing” example of innovation’s risks — and rewards.

Hey boss, got a second? I’ve got a great idea. Let’s take our 6 PM News — yes, I know it’s #1 in the market — and blow it up. Let’s get rid of murders, fires and car crashes unless they’re really bad — no more “flashing light” coverage. Let’s pare back the set and most of the graphics. Let’s not worry at all about what stories the competition is doing — no more “broadcast of record” stuff. We’ll just do what we think is important and/or interesting — and most of all, different. Oh, did I mention that I’ll be the solo anchor? My co-anchor is retiring soon anyway. And I’m going to throw in my opinion from time to time — not just the facts. What do you say?

That was pretty much the pitch KUSA-TV Denver anchor Kyle Clark, made to TEGNA president Dave Lougee and other corporate executives at one of the company’s innovation summits in 2015. Obviously, Lougee said yes, or you wouldn’t be reading this. Next with Kyle Clark went on the air in August of 2016.

What happened next wasn’t pretty — downright ugly in fact. As many news executives have found out the hard way, it’s a lot easier to drive existing viewers away than to attract new ones — one of the reasons innovation is so challenging. Next “generated more buzz than ratings” in its first November book, wrote the Denver Post’s respected TV reporter and critic Joanne Ostrow in December of 2016. The program was down nearly 40% — yikes! — from its predecessor in the time period, threatening KUSA’s traditional dominance. Ostrow wondered, “Is it possible the innovation has alienated viewers who prefer a classic newscast?”

Despite the vertiginous ratings drop, TEGNA executives stuck with the format, and Clark stuck with Next’s unorthodox formula. There’s only a handful of reporter packages, which lean towards civics and away from sensationalism. “We’re not going to chase every shiny object just because we can put a helicopter over it,” says Clark, who also serves as Next’s managing editor. The weather person often gets a minute or less, with little or no banter. Linda Kotsaftis, KUSA’s head of news content, who developed the concept with Clark and still works closely with him, recalls a routine snowfall early in Next’s run when the program devoted just 15 seconds to weather, and she looked up to see the station’s competitors fielding multiple reporters to cover the “storm.” “I was surprised that people didn’t raise their pitchforks and say, ‘Why don’t you have someone standing by the side of the road?’”

But they didn’t. It turned out that at least some viewers were ready for something new and different, in this case a program that spoke to them directly and, even more importantly, listened. “The viewer is the co-anchor, and not in a check-the-box way,” says Clark. “We rely on their collaboration throughout the day.” Indeed, Next’s relationship with its viewers is a critical ingredient in the special sauce. ”We didn’t realize what a big part of the show the audience would become,” says Kotsaftis. “The show is built around [Kyle], but it’s also built around really strong writing, looking for unique content every day, and it’s become hugely about the back and forth with the audience,”

Next’s viewers constantly get on-air credit, not just for suggesting enterprise stories but for contributing to franchises like “The Most Colorado Thing We Saw Today” (e.g. fanatical golfers shoveling snow off a putting green), “Crossing the Line” (photos of cars shamelessly parked in traffic lanes); “It’s a Sign” (e.g. wondering whether a gender-neutral bathroom sign was stolen out of admiration or hate); or “What Do YOU Say?” (how to pronounce exotic local place names like “Richthofen”). “Viewers are ahead of us on this,” says Clark. “They’re already looking for insightful, moving collaborative content. We just need to catch up with them.”

But make no mistake, Next is a vehicle for Clark. The anchor, who is in his mid-30’s and known for his piercing blue eyes and collection of “interesting” sportcoats, is just eccentric enough, edgy enough, and self-deprecating enough to walk away from the pack without falling on his face. The show’s Twitter feed describes Clark as a “beer geek and newsman” (in that order) and quotes a viewer telling him “You’re a talking head on local news in a mid-tier market.” His commentaries are non-ideological: lashing out at Twitter trolls, for example. His quick asides can bite, but not enough to draw blood. When key sources failed to get back to political reporter Marshall Zelinger for a recent report, Kyle admonished them coming out of the package: “Return Marshall’s calls — be big boys and girls.” And his writing is, well, different, like this tease: “A trip to the Stock Show reveals some interesting animal behavior — and your feedback tonight does the same — next.”

Kyle Clark

Ironically for a program that has come to symbolize bold innovation, Next borrows some of its sensibility from the early days of television news. “A lot of what we’re doing is very much a throwback to the roots of what made local news an indispensable part of communities,” says Clark, paying homage to legendary Denver broadcaster and news executive Carl Akers, whose blend of news and commentary helped propel KUSA to the top of the heap in the 1970’s.

But Carl Akers never broke down the proverbial “fourth wall.” Kyle Clark has an uncanny ability to cross that wall without crossing the line. He gives the impression that he’s speaking with you rather than broadcasting at you, and the absence of distracting tropes and trappings makes the connection all the more compelling.

Moreover, Clark’s copy and the program’s aggressive social media outreach relentlessly reinforce the connection between the anchor and the people who watch him. There are full episodes and a steady stream of posts on Facebook, clips and some full shows on YouTube, and of course a lively Twitter conversation on both Clark’s own feed and at #HeyNext.

That dismal first November book came as no surprise to Clark, who expected the program to become a “quirky sidecar” rather than a bullet train. But he and Kotsaftis took aim at the huge majority of Denver-area viewers who were not watching. “I’m not sure you can preserve current viewers while cultivating the other 94%,” says Clark. And over time, the quirky side car began to pick up speed. A lot of speed. Today, the program not only leads the time period in Adults 25-54 but boasts an engaged audience that’s younger and larger than it was before the change — a testament to sticking with a risky move if you believe it’s the right one. The lesson for Kotsaftis: “Be bold — the audience will hold the net for us, and so will the newsroom.”

What’s next for Next? Clark says a word that keeps coming up in the feedback is “refreshing,” and his challenge now is to live up to that challenging description. “We have to continue to evolve in a way that surprises the audience,” he says — no easy task.

If I sound like a fanboy of the program, it’s probably because I am, but Next is not for everyone. And that’s just the point. Clark, who co-anchors traditional newscasts at 9 (on KUSA’s sister station) and 10, doesn’t expect even his own station to follow Next’s example in other time slots. “Newsrooms can produce different products for different consumers,” he says diplomatically. And the more experiments, the better. “I would love to see other stations try something tailor-made for their market.”

The key is not to imitate Next, but to try something different that delivers enough value for enough viewers to be valuable. In our interview, Kyle Clark casually tossed off a line that can serve as a blueprint for the future of local TV news — or its epitaph:

“Creating a product for everyone is creating a product for no one.”

How refreshing.

How has your station tried to break away from the pack? Share your stories with us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu, and we’ll check them out.

RELATED:

Article: Why Every TV Newsroom Needs a “Zodiac” Project. Read here.

Article: The Best New Idea for Breaking the Mold May be 50 Years Old. Read here.

Article: Two Beat Reporters Help WPRI Build Street Cred the Old-fashioned Way. Read here.

Article: Why News Executives Should Overcome the Fear Factor. Read here.

Article: “Bold Ideas” for 100 Please, Alex. Read here.

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Why Every Local TV Newsroom Needs a Zodiac Project

Local broadcast newsrooms need more Zodiacs. No, not the astrology kind, the floating kind.

The problem is that the traditional broadcast news station is like an ocean cruise liner. These large ships are built for the mass audience. They are optimized for efficiency, not personalization, from the group meals and activities to the repeated routines. They travel a familiar, predictable route, and do so repeatedly on a regular schedule. Changing course — deviating from the “norm” — is problematic. The system rewards efficiency and predictability.

The analogy holds for the customers as well. Passengers on the typical popular cruise itinerary all experience the same basic schedule of food, entertainment and activities. There is a ‘one size fits all’ quality that lacks personalization but is at least dependable and consistent. With apologies to Forrest Gump, life on a cruise ship is not like a box of chocolates. You do know what you’re going to get. Based on the clientele, the predictable cruise experience appeals mostly to an older demographic.

Sound familiar?

Today’s television consumers expect and demand to be delighted. The second ‘Golden Age of TV’ ushered in by original programming from disruptors like HBO, Netflix, and Amazon has reset the bar for what a program must do to earn attention. Local TV newscasts haven’t kept pace.

To be fair, there are meaningful advantages to size and scale. Whether you’re in the cruise business or the broadcast business, size and scale create efficiencies. It’s why we’ve seen so much consolidation in the media industry in the past decade.

The dilemma is that big boats turn slowly. The assembly line that efficiently churns out eight hours of local newscasts per day is optimized for efficiency, not innovation. Likewise, as long as local TV is primarily supported by ad revenue, which is based on ratings, News Directors will be reluctant to ‘turn the boat’ out of fear today’s viewers might jump ship.

Broadcast news innovation, within this business reality, requires the ability to engage in small, nimble experiments on the side while continuing to ‘feed the beast’ that funds the journalism.

That’s where Zodiacs come in. I’m talking about those small, inflatable motor-powered rafts you inevitably see onboard large cruise ships or towed behind yachts. Their value proposition is simple: Sometimes bigger is not better.

While the cruiseliner lumbers along the safe and proven (i.e. profitable) main route, Zodiacs can explore. They can check out small ‘islands of opportunity.’ They can go places big ships can’t reach. Perhaps most importantly, they can do so economically. A zippy Zodiac requires less ‘fuel’ (people, time, resources) and can explore and return for a fraction of the cost. Failure becomes affordable. In some cases, the benefit will be to eliminate ports or paths that are simply not worth further exploration. Knowing what roads are NOT worth taking has value. But once in a while, these Zodiacs will make a discovery – a destination or route BETTER than the traditional, well-worn path. These discoveries can be scaled to benefit the entire line of cruise ships, more than paying for themselves.

The strategic and symbiotic roles of cruise ships and Zodiacs offers a model for how to incorporate innovation into mainstream newsroom operations.

The Cronkite School of Journalism is committed to news innovation. We also understand why innovation is so challenging for local broadcasters. The operating constraints of limited staffing, resources, ratings and revenue are real challenges. Thanks to funding from the Knight Foundation, the Cronkite News Lab will engage in ‘Zodiac’ experiments in four areas key to the future of local broadcast news: New show and story formats, news trust/transparency, growing audience engagement, and sustainable business models.

We’ll share any successes because we’re engaged in Open Source Innovation. And we’ll also publish our most interesting failures. These roads not worth taking may save other news organizations time and resources. We hope local newsrooms will join us and create their own ‘Zodiac’ teams. Big boats have their place; but we’ll need more nimble options as well in order to chart the future course of local TV journalism.

How much local news do OTT viewers want? CBS is about to find out

As a loyal viewer (and alumnus) of WCBS-TV in New York, I admit I find the station’s promotional tagline — “Expect More” — unintentionally ambiguous, as in “Frankly, I expected more.”

But all that’s changed now that CBS has rolled out the station’s 24/7 live streaming service, CBSN New York, with other CBS markets to follow. Who could possibly expect (or ask for) more than round-the-clock live breaking news, local coverage and weather, streamed on the station’s website and available on Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV, and CBS mobile apps?

“We want everybody to watch it and use it as a resource. The target is everybody who watches and uses local news,” says EVP and GM of CBS News Digital Christy Tanner. The station promotes the new service all day on the air, but Tanner says that news-binging cord-cutters and cord-nevers as well as what Nielsen calls “savvy streamers” are likely users as well.

CBSN New York’s Facebook cover photo.

The new, ad-supported OTT service is challenging existing New York area cable news channels like Charter Spectrum’s NY1 and Altice’s News12. CBSN New York simulcasts existing broadcasts on WCBS-TV and its Long Island-based sister station WLNY-TV and fills out the many remaining hours of the day with newscasts anchored and reported by the stations’ staff. Adam Wiener, who oversees the new project as EVP/GM of CBS Local Digital Media, won’t say how much all this costs, except that it’s a “substantial investment in building out editorial resources at Channel 2.”

As the name suggests, CBSN New York is an offshoot of CBSN, the streaming service that CBS News and CBS Interactive introduced just over four years ago. Innovating across divisions isn’t easy, but it helps that Tanner is no network snob. She says a lot of CBSN users have expressed interest in streaming local news — especially hard for cord-cutters to find — and she has a healthy respect for local journalists’ expertise. On Tanner’s watch, CBSN has made good use of affiliate reporters to enhance its own coverage.

Moreover, building the local spinoff to work on multiple platforms was a technical challenge — “no small lift,” says Wiener — that both parties agree would have been very tough for the station to pull off on its own. So teams from CBSN and WCBS-TV worked together on newsroom organization, workflow, engineering challenges, day-to-day mechanics, even rehearsals. And the collaboration continues, says Tanner: “The TV station is responsible for creating the content and selling it. CBS Interactive is responsible for helping with the technology and distribution.”


Veteran WCBS-TV anchor Dana Tyler takes on additional duties at CBSN New York (screenshot)

CBS says 80% of CBSN’s audience is in the 18-49 demo, with the average user just 38 years old. But don’t expect aggressive targeting of younger viewers on the local spinoff. “It’s incredibly condescending when news organizations say they’re going after young people,” says Tanner. “People of all ages just want the news.”

So for now, the content on CBSN New York is pretty much local TV news as we know it, although with added breathing room that can “free the operation to create content free from newscast timing,” says Wiener. “The extra nugget you would have put on the web — we have room for it now.” There are also a few “webbier,” younger-skewing segments, like The Dig, reported by Elle McLogan, who happens to be the daughter of the station’s long-time Long Island correspondent.

CBSN Los Angeles is expected to start streaming early this year. The immediate value proposition: local TV news available any time on pretty much any screen. But a 24/7 service and a new user base offer plenty of opportunity for additional innovation. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if time and expansion to more CBS markets and additional platforms and devices bring bolder experiments in tone and content. “We have a media-savvy audience,” says Tanner. “Some of the familiar tropes may not be necessary.”

In other words: Expect more.

Share your OTT innovations with us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu. We’ll check them out.

Related:

Article: InvestigateTV’s bet: If you build it, they will come. Read here.

Article: The Future of News is On Demand. Read here.

Reporter Dave Cawley turns a cold-case investigation into an experiment — and can’t believe the results

In 2009, the nation was rocked by the disappearance of Susan Powell, a young mother trapped in an abusive marriage, from the Salt Lake City suburb of West Valley City. The case got national coverage, with outlets from NBC’s Dateline to TIME telling the story.

Cold is a true crime podcast by KSL Newradio examining the complete story of the disappearance of Susan Powell. (Photo Courtesy of KSL Newsradio)

By 2013, the case was ruled cold, which meant journalists were given the redacted police file. The national outfits had long since left, but local journalists were still trying to investigate and fill in the holes in the case. One of those journalists was KSL Newsradio’s Dave Cawley — a radio reporter at the time, but now the station’s executive producer for digital content. Little did he know that his cold case would become a case study in the red hot medium of podcasting — a way for news organizations to reach new consumers.

For Cawley, this investigation began as a passion project. “When I originally pitched this to my news director, she said, ‘This is a great idea, but given your existing duties we don’t have the time or money to spin you off to work on this,’” Cawley said. At first, he was reluctant to spend his free time investigating this story. “My response to her at the time was ‘That’s great. I don’t work for free.’”

He sat on the idea for about a year, but the story stuck in the back of his mind. So in 2014 he began actively investigating Powell’s disappearance in his free time. Cawley would work a full day at the station and then come home to pore over the police files. He filed numerous documents requests, drove all over Utah and the Powell’s home state of Washington looking for new evidence and conducted dozens of interviews with key players in this story.

“As that work started to bear fruit,” he said, “we were able to go up the chain to management and say ‘Look, this is what we’re uncovering with this investigation. This is why we believe that we need to devote more resources.’”

When they began thinking about the best way to tell this complicated story, Cawley and his colleagues realized it was something that would require more than a 30 second radio wrap every day for listeners to be able to follow along.

Cawley was reminded of an annual IRE conference he had attended in 2014, where he heard a presentation from a print journalist who had turned a longform investigative piece into a podcast with the help of an audio production company. During that same year, NPR’s true crime podcast Serial — now one of the top podcasts in the United States — released its first episode. As a radio station, KSL had all of the staff and technical audio skills required to produce a podcast, so why not try the format out? “And I went to my news director, and I told her ‘Look, print journalists in a lot of ways are kind of eating our lunch,’” Cawley said. “‘In order to keep our listeners, we need to be meeting them where they are. And right now that’s podcasts.’”

KSL is part of Bonneville International, a small media company primarily in markets throughout the Western United States. It owns a number of radio stations as well as a single TV station — KSL-TV in Salt Lake. By mid-2018, KSL had begun to assemble resources from around Salt Lake City — TV producers, radio staff and website managers — to turn the information Cawley had uncovered into a complete project.

KSL-TV news director Leona Wood said that the station’s decision to get involved in Cold really centered around the strength of content that Cawley had compiled. “This is a case that is of high interest to our viewers,” she said, “and Dave Cawley’s top-notch, three-year investigation has yielded important and unique insights.”

Thus, Cold was born. It is a true crime podcast that goes into great depth about every facet of the case surrounding the disappearance of Susan Powell.

The first episode was released on Nov. 13, 2018. To Cawley’s amazement, it went right to the top of the iTunes podcast chart. “To look at that and see KSL right next to the LA Times and the New York Times, I don’t even have words for it,” Cawley said. “It was overwhelming.” And the podcast continues to enjoy popularity nationwide. As of the first of this year, it was number seven in news and politics on iTunes — sharing the list with popular podcasts from NPR and the New York Times among others.

Screenshot of iTunes News and Politics top 10 podcasts Jan. 1, 2019.

And according to both Cawley and Wood, the Bonneville group’s prominence within the Salt Lake City market has been a “strategic strength” for the podcast and really helped expand the audience for Cold. Cawley believes it helped launch the podcast in a way that most radio stations or radio clusters could not manage.

So far, the team has produced and released nine episodes of Cold — with a new episode set to drop every Wednesday. But the producers didn’t stop at just a podcast. “Our strategy from the get go was the podcast first and foremost, but then we will spin off our unique content for each individual platform,” Cawley said. There’s a website to share more in-depth content for each episode. The team uses its newspaper connection, The Deseret News — that shares the newsroom, to produce content for that audience.

The team also produces packages for TV to go along with each episode. KSL-TV executive producer of special projects Keira Farrimond has worked closely with Cawley to curate this content. “The stories we have produced for TV are really just a small snippet of the episode,” she said, “meaning it’s not just a recap of what was in the episode, but rather a story in itself.” And according to Farrimond, Cawley also “had the forethought early on to gather new content that could potentially be used on TV as well as in the podcast,” as he was conducting his investigation.

KSL Newsradio and TV are taking advantage of a medium that has continued to grow in popularity in recent years.

According to this study, 44 percent of Americans have listened to a podcast at least once in their life in 2018. Just ten years ago, that number was just 18 percent. Graph Courtesy of Pew Research Center.

While KSL may have a unique advantage to promote the podcast within the Salt Lake City market, it’s not the only local station experimenting with podcasts as a way to tell longform, investigative stories. WDIV, a Graham station in Detroit, has two seasons of a true crime podcast called Shattered. The first season, Black Friday, came out in April 2018, and it’s currently in its second season, White Boy Rick. And in May 2018, WTTG, a Fox O&O in Washington D.C., released its own true crime podcast called The Mansion Murders.

Radio stations and TV stations alike have the unique skill set required to produce a longform audio story like this, but as Cawley pointed out they have something else in common. Local journalists have an edge telling stories in their own communities that their national counterparts don’t.

“If there’s anything that comes out of Cold to help journalism in general,” Cawley said, it’s that “local journalists can compete and tell stories on that same level.”

Does your station have examples of creative collaborations and unique ways to tell longform, investigative stories? Email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu, and we’ll check them out.

Related:

Article: “Meet your new partner: A Mississippi experiment in collaborative journalism.” Read here.

Article: “InvestigateTV’s bet: If you build it, they will come.” Read here.

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Why Local TV News is Our Best Hope to Save Democracy

Collapsing business models for journalism. News deserts as smaller community newspapers shut down. Charges of “Fake News” and labels like “Enemy of the people.” These are some of the headlines from the news business this year. It’s hard to find reason to be optimistic about the health of our information ecosystem.

It might be even harder to believe me when I say: Local TV news is our best chance. Yes, the same stations that critics dismiss for serving up car crashes, house fires and mug shots, perky morning teams and goofy weathercasters, could also be our best hope for rejuvenating journalism. Here are three macro trends that explain why.

Trend #1: In Community We Trust

We trust our local politicians more than our statewide reps; and we trust our statewide reps more than those pols way off in DC. The same is true for journalism. Studies by Pew Research consistently show that local news sources are the most trusted by their communities, with trust decreasing with distance. Of those local sources, local TV news is actually seen as the singularly most trusted source.

GfK TVB Mentor Survey, Winter 2016

Four out of five people trust the news they get from local TV, according to a Television Bureau Survey. Trust declines with distance. Studies consistently show that local news organizations as a group are more trusted than national news sources.

The bottom line: local TV news providers are in the best position to lead, and be believed.

Trend #2: All News is Local

In the era of Trump, there is a business reward for CNN, MSNBC, and Fox to cover each and every plot twist of our Presidential reality show. We can debate whether that constant coverage is responsible, or good for the country. It is certainly good for viewership for these national cable news outlets. The midterm elections, however, showed that people locally care about the issues and news that affects them. They want to hear about health care and how it can be more affordable; they are concerned about immigration, about living-wage jobs, about school quality and quality of life in their community. Trump news may dominate national cable TV shows because of the viewership it generates, but that effect doesn’t translate locally. As a result, local broadcast news organizations are best able to transcend the DC reality show and focus on the issues affecting the people who live in their own community.

Trend #3: In Local, TV is Poised to Lead

The continued cratering of newsroom staffing at newspapers across the country is well documented. A Google search for “news deserts” now yields pages of results. What’s gone relatively unnoticed is the surprising resilience of local TV newsroom staffing during this period of precipitous newspaper decline. The latest report by Pew Research on the subject shows that total staffing of TV newsrooms is on a trajectory to overtake staffing of legacy newspaper newsrooms. This would mark a true tipping point in journalism resources at the local level.

Meanwhile, the tipping point for reach and audience has long since moved from local newspapers to the local TV stations. For most respondents, local TV news is by far their first source for local news. A Pew Research Project study found that high civic engagement increased this effect. People who always vote were 47% more likely to say they get local news regularly from a local TV station rather than from their local newspaper (63% vs. 43%.) With continued cuts in newspaper newsrooms, as well as reductions in the size and frequency of papers, that trend should only continue.

Pew Research Center, Jan-Feb 2016

From Lightweight to Leader

Among their peers in journalism, local broadcasters have struggled for respect. It’s true there has been much to mock, from the formulaic show formats lampooned so well in the movie “Anchorman” to the “if it bleeds, it leads” story selection.

Recently, however, there’s been a quiet transformation going on in local TV, as news organizations disrupt themselves from within. Station groups like TEGNA (my former employer), Scripps, Graham and Hearst among others have invested in experiments including larger investigative reporting teams, longer-form storytelling, fresh show formats, and more authentic storytellers.

These local TV station groups are poised to win. First, unlike their newspaper colleagues, they still have a solidly profitable business model for their legacy product, giving them the resources to innovate. Second, because they operate locally, they have the trust and the relationships to truly serve their communities. The reporters work and live in the communities they cover. They are rewarded by their communities for covering stories that matter locally. As a result, local TV news is shielded from the ‘Trump Effect’ that can displace discussion of important issues on national news outlets. Finally, local TV news has the audience. As newspapers lose readers, they also lose impact. In many local communities today, the local TV news stations are the community’s first source for news.

The pieces are in place. It’s time for local TV news to shed its clichéd coverage of the past, and take the leadership role in serving and informing our local communities. It’s why I recently joined the Knight-Cronkite News Lab: to collaborate with fellow journalists and engage in purposeful experiments to co-create the future of local broadcast news in the digital age.

If you are using innovative storytelling techniques that we should know about, please email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu. We’ll check them out.

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The Best New Idea for Breaking the Mold May Be 50 Years Old

Eyewitness News. The term has permeated local TV around the country and mutated into so many forms that it’s hard to remember it was once a unique concept that changed the business forever and holds profound lessons for today. But the man who invented the format remembers every detail.

Al Primo was a fledgling news director at KYW in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s when “the whole magic happened,” he says. Most of the newsroom employees, including behind-the-scenes editors and producers, were in the same union — AFTRA. Primo discovered that the union contract permitted him to put any of them on TV and, provided they were reading copy they had written themselves, not pay them a dime more. Eureka!

“I took the four [least telegenic] guys and made them producers,” Primo recalls. He then took the ten others, ascertained what their interests were, and turned them into beat reporters, covering City Hall, the arts, education, medicine, transportation, and more. They may not have been classic TV types, but Primo says “there’s beauty in everyone…they were ‘presentable.’” And within less than two weeks, “they’re coming back with stories that nobody else had” — Primo calls them “mini-scoops.” He peppered the program with on-scene reports and populated the studio with his new team of on-air reporters, overcoming the veteran anchors’ fears of being turned into mere “news jockeys.”

Primo didn’t invent the name “eyewitness news” — Westinghouse was already using it as a show title in Cleveland — but Primo believes the beat system he created in Philadelphia in 1965 was the first of its kind in local TV news. KYW went to #1, and Primo went to NY, to WABC, taking the name and the concept with him.

Al Primo in his Connecticut office with a piece of the original Channel 7 Eyewitness News set. (Photo by Andrew Heyward)

The station was so bad at the time that ABC network head Leonard Goldenson asked Primo: “Why would you want to come here?” But there was a budget to hire reporters and a “wide open” mandate to try something new.

As Primo walked to his office on Manhattan’s West Side every day, he shared the sidewalk with a diverse parade of idiosyncratic New York characters — a sharp contrast to the all-white, all-male newscasts of the day. Primo was determined to fill his team with people more like the people he wanted to reach. “God delivered this beautiful message to me. If you’re going to get ratings and you’re going to get people to watch you, you’ve got to have their kind on the show. You’ve got to find those people.”

Among the people Primo found:

  • Melba Tolliver, a secretary at the company, became the first African-American woman to anchor a network newscast when on-air personnel went on strike and she was tapped to fill in for Marlene Sanders. Primo made her a reporter and launched a long and distinguished career.
  • Milton Lewis was eking out a living as a tipster at City Hall when Primo tapped him to join the staff and assigned him the City Hall beat. His delivery was so odd that Primo gave him a catch phrase — “Now listen to this!” — so viewers would get the point of each story: it became his trademark.
  • Jerry Rivers was an activist lawyer who felt so ready after Primo’s pitch that “trying to make absolutely certain that he didn’t break into the studio and put himself on the air was a challenge.” Primo convinced him to change his name back to Geraldo Rivera. You know the rest.
  • Rose Ann Scamardella was working for the city — she had never reported a day in her life — when one of Primo’s colleagues suggested her to Primo as the “Italian lady” he wanted for the team. Scamardella became a star reporter and anchor who inspired the Gilda Radner character “Roseanne Roseannadanna” on Saturday Night Live.

Presiding over this motley cast and other equally colorful colleagues was the sandpaper-and-silk anchor team of Roger Grimsby and Bill Beutel. “Broadcast journalism is a team sport,” says Primo, and he branded his team relentlessly, down to the smallest details. Primo famously made everyone wear matching blazers emblazoned with the station’s logo, but he also pushed his street reporters to poke the Channel 7 mic logos into as many shots as possible, including the competition’s. “Localism and local news dominance was paramount in my mind from the beginning,” Primo says. “It was infused in everybody in that room…we can make it if we’re the New York station, we’re the New York people.”

It was a potent combination: seasoned anchors providing irreverent wit (Grimsby) and reassuring warmth (Beutel); a lot of laughter and what looked like natural rapport on the set; and bubbling through it all, the “eyewitness news team” — a crew of authentic local types who blended perfectly into the neighborhoods they covered with a relentless focus on the regular people who lived there. “People can tell their stories better than you and I can write them,” Primo is fond of saying.

Channel 7 Eyewitness News went on the air on November 17, 1968. It took 18 months, Primo says, but WABC went to #1 and remains a powerhouse today. Primo eventually became VP of News, adapting his formula to the other ABC-owned markets.

Primo is 83 now, and still working: he created a news show for teenagers, Teen Kids News, that’s syndicated to nearly 200 stations and made available without commercials to thousands of schools. We met in his unpretentious second-floor office on a commercial street in Old Greenwich, Connecticut.

Primo’s legacy? It’s complicated. The “eyewitness news” concept swept the business, but many people remember him for the more formulaic elements of local news as we know it today: the news team as a “family,” the relentless branding, and the often-mocked banter among the anchors. Wikipedia’s entry on “happy talk” credits Al Primo as its inventor.

But what of Primo’s pioneering insights about neighborhood-based journalism by a team of quirky, indigenous beat reporters who are as diverse as the people they cover and who still go after “mini-scoops” that no one else has? Somehow that got lost in translation. “There’s a sameness in broadcast journalism today that’s absolutely frightening,” Primo says. “That’s a big problem that has to be dealt with.”

So what’s his answer? Despite his place in the local TV news pantheon, Primo has no trace of pomposity and offers no easy solutions. “There’s no general formula or prescription for success.” That said, I was able to coax out some advice for today’s practitioners:

  • Concentrate on distinctive reporting — “anything that’s innovative or original” — rather than stringing together routine video.
  • Worry less about the mechanics of live production and more about the stories; try to have at least “one great piece” in every broadcast.
  • Instill a sense of mission in your people so they’re not “getting it done by rote.”
  • Pay attention to as many details as humanly possible.
  • And perhaps most importantly, respect your viewers and reward them for the time they spend with you. “Let the audience know that you take it all pretty seriously, you’re having fun doing it, and it’s important work, and it’s socially redeeming time for them.”

Primo’s story is a testament to the power of truly local journalism, of building engagement and trust by hiring people who know their beats and their communities, who walk the streets where they live, and who talk (and listen!) to people about what matters most to them. 50 years later, that feels like a fresh idea.

Is your inner Primo dying to come out? Share your innovative ideas with us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu. We’ll check them out.

Related:

AUDIO: Eyewitness News with Al Primo. Listen here.

The Future of News is On Demand

Technology-driven changes in consumer news habits were the focus when leaders in broadcast news and technology met December 11-12 in New York at the 2018 NewsTECHForum. The chief catalyst for change? The rise in on-demand and “OTT” viewing as the most direct threat to traditional live linear viewing. Here are five critical things TV news leaders and executives need to understand and respond to now to insure their content remains relevant in this new, disrupted viewing ecosystem.

1. Don’t feel bad if you’re confused about “OTT”

The term “OTT” is like ‘bitcoin’ for many broadcasters. Everyone knows it’s important. No one wants to admit they might not fully understand it. ‘Over the Top Television’ in practice is used as a catch-all term for all the video you can now watch on-demand via your TV without using cable or broadcast.
ROKU remains the leader in terms of audience size among the smart TV applications, followed by Apple TV and Amazon Fire. Others use the OTT term when they are talking about bundled programming services available to consumers, like Netflix and Hulu and YouTubeTV. In its broadest use, OTT encompasses all the new ways that consumers can watch video “on demand,” controlling what they want to watch and when they want to watch it.

Photo by Pinho . on Unsplash

2. On-demand has surpassed live TV viewing

This was the first year that prime time viewing via OTT eclipsed live linear broadcast viewing during prime time, according to SmithGeiger research. Binge-watching and time-shifted viewing are the new norm for younger viewers and that trend will only continue, Andrew Finlayson of SmithGeiger told the audience at NewsTECHForum.
According to SmithGeiger research, 53% of survey respondents said they watched TV via OTT during prime time, one percentage point more than said they watched TV via broadcast or cable. It wasn’t long ago that all viewing was live/linear, and Finlayson says broadcasters should expect the trend toward OTT-first viewing of TV to continue.

3. Who’s My Competition?” has a new answer

Netflix is now a bigger threat to a news director’s evening newscast viewership than that other local TV channel across town. Increasingly, audiences will turn on their TV and ‘default’ to one of these streaming services, bypassing live linear channels altogether.
In this second ‘Golden Age’ of television, audiences have countless episodic shows available to binge-watch. Broadcast content leaders need to ask: ‘How can my newscast compete with Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu?’ Put another way, how much of the typical 30-minute newscast is compelling enough to watch later, on demand? By contrast, what percent of today’s newscast is currently filled with commoditized ‘spot news’? These stories are like old milk. Their short shelf life means their relevance expires quickly. Success in the OTT space will require stories that are compelling live and on demand – worth watching now, and later.

4. OTT rewards a different kind of editorial story selection

Today’s local news story selection bias toward ‘urgent/now/breaking’ is an artifact of an era now over. When all viewing was live, local TV news was rewarded for its urgency. The most obvious examples are those ‘eye-candy’ or ‘wallpaper’ voice-overs of car crashes, fires and police arrests. These stories may have been hard to resist in the moment, but they offer no lasting substance or value.
To be sure, when there is a significant local breaking news or weather story, viewers do return to watch live local news. Too often, however, the slug “Breaking News” has become more gimmick than descriptor.
As the shift from live toward OTT and on-demand viewing continues, a different kind of story selection will be required. In the Darwinian fight for survival, the OTT/on-demand viewing environment rewards the best storytelling. Just look at the programs that drive passionate binge-viewing. The local news stories worth watching on demand will be stories with a “long tail” — stories that are still worth watching a few hours later, or a few days, or even weeks and months later.
Changing newscast content to compete in the on-demand world will require making different decisions at the start of the editorial process. The single most valuable action a content director can implement immediately in each day’s morning meeting is to put all assignments through this simple filter: Is there a way we can tell this story so people will also care about and want to watch it later in the evening, as well as next week, next month and next year?

5. OTT will require made-for-platform news content

Many broadcasters have fledgling OTT apps on ROKU, Apple TV or Amazon Fire. These platforms are still not mature and in the early days, OTT content leaders at the NewsTECHForum panel agreed: Live streaming is for now the most popular use of a TV station’s OTT app. But those broadcast experts also agreed more must be done if newsrooms hope to compete for viewers on OTT.
The no-cost, immediate way to adapt local news content strategy for an OTT world is to filter daily story assignments with a bias toward stories with a long tail. But that is only a bridge strategy.
Broadcasters also need to begin developing content aimed at and optimized for viewers whose default path for TV viewing starts with services like Netflix or Hulu. Broadcasters like Cox, Raycom and TEGNA (my previous employer) are already experimenting with made-for-platform OTT content, from short, on-demand news updates refreshed throughout the day, to an entire OTT channel dedicated to investigative reports.
Another great programming opportunity for broadcasters is to organize and bundle their best franchises – those On Your Side reports, that outdoors reporter, the money-saving guru – that can be hard to find via live viewing. A local TV station can make the most of its channel on ROKU, Apple TV or Amazon Fire by offering these franchises “on demand” in playlists.
The future of news is live and on demand, and OTT will reward news organizations that serve viewers well with both kinds of content.

Related:

Article: Why Stations Need to Forge Ahead on OTT — Read here.

WCPO’s Cartoon Journalist Kevin Necessary Illustrates the Difficult Stories

Kevin Necessary isn’t the kind of reporter you typically find in a TV newsroom, but WCPO’s resident cartoonist sure knows how to tell a story.

Necessary was already freelancing for the station when he was hired full time in 2016 as part of the station’s digital push, which then included a separate digital newsroom.

“We asked ourselves, ‘How can we be different?’” said News Director Chip Mahaney. Necessary’s assignment was to create unique, exclusive content to put behind the station’s paywall. Today, the paywall is gone, and the newsroom is fully integrated across platforms, but Necessary remains, practicing a unique form he calls “cartoon journalism.”

The comic-style illustrations are obviously quite a change from the photos and videos readers expect when they go to a news site. His drawings add another layer to the story, he says, “where the reader would encounter my drawing and it was something that was different. Something that was unique.”

Necessary can bring people and events to life when video or photographs aren’t an option. He once used John Quincy Adams to narrate portions of a story about the Cincinnati Observatory — try finding file tape of him in your archives. Necessary describes his historical renderings as almost “a dramatic re-enactment.”

Image from Necessary’s longform story about the Cincinnati Observatory. (Photo from WCPO.com)

But Necessary also uses the cartoon format to help tell current stories that can be hard to visualize. He has found a way to report on drug abuse, bullying and immigration in innovative ways through his drawings.

He understands the challenges that traditional journalists face where they are “able to show very artistic photos of the backs of heads or shoulders, but they can’t get that emotional context.” And that’s one thing he feels he can add with his cartoon illustrations.

His most recent longform story, Living in the Shadows, tells one family’s story of immigration and the issues they’ve faced as undocumented immigrants in Cincinnati.

Frame from Kevin Necessary’s three part story Living in the Shadows. (Photo from WCPO.com)

Necessary likes the term “cartoon journalist” because it reminds people that he’s still a journalist first. “I look at these pieces almost like documentaries,” he says. On the longer, deeper stories, he does his own reporting, sometimes spending months talking to his subjects before he begins storyboarding and illustrating.

Most of Necessary’s work lives on WCPO’s digital site, but sometimes there is crossover with the TV side. Living in the Shadows is one example. Not only did Necessary produce his own three-part graphic story, but the station also had a reporter, Breanna Molloy, work on a separate piece for TV to accompany it: a 10-minute story featuring Necessary and his work.

Necessary is not the only cartoon journalist in the country — he’s quick to name Dennis Draughon, who works for WRAL in North Carolina — but he and Mahaney believe he’s the only one producing longform content of this kind in the local TV sphere.

Cartoon journalism may not work for every station, in every market, but Necessary believes there is a lot of potential for cartoons to add an extra dimension. “I like to give the reader a moment to pause,” he says, “to reflect a bit on the story.”

For now, his boss is happy that Necessary has the field pretty much to himself. “I want to be different,” Mahaney says. “I’m always looking for us to be different in some way. If we just do the same thing we’ve always been doing, or if we just do the same thing everyone else is doing, our path to any kind of win in a challenging business like this is going to be more limited.”

If you are using innovative storytelling techniques that we should know about, please email us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu. We’ll check them out.

Related:

Article: “But it’s…cartoons?”: Comics and cartoons are coming to life well beyond the printed page. Read here.

Website: The Nib Magazine. Visit here.

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Two beat reporters help WPRI build street cred the old-fashioned way

They say old-fashioned beat reporting — you know, covering City Hall and stopping by the cop shop every day, showing up at budget meetings, keeping tabs on local schools, that sort of thing — is dead or dying. But someone forgot to tell Ted Nesi and Dan McGowan.

Nesi and McGowan pound those beats and more as digital-first reporters at WPRI, Nexstar’s station in Providence RI. They’re no one’s idea of a stereotypical TV reporter. In a 1940’s movie, they’d be the “newsmen” wearing fedoras with press tickets in the hat band. But in a day when the lines between digital and broadcast are blurring, their work is a critical differentiator for WPRI. “Our brand is depth,” says their boss, News Director Karen Rezendes. “They bring that and more.”

And while the two news hounds have been watchdogs in target-rich Rhode Island way too long to be called “innovative,” they’re now part of a growing trend: local stations using digital journalists to strengthen their enterprise reporting.

Ted Nesi on the job. (WPRI photo)

Nesi was a print reporter at a Rhode Island business weekly when he emailed then-GM Jay Howell in 2010, pitching himself as a blogger who could write about business and politics. Howell went for it — Nesi thinks his very affordable newspaper salary didn’t hurt — and soon Nesi’s writing caught the eye of the station’s main investigative reporter, Tim White. With White’s support, Nesi started appearing on TV as well, moving from guest panelist and analyst to regular player on White’s Sunday Newsmakers show.

Nesi (left) with investigative reporter Tim White, whom he credits for his move to TV. (WPRI photo)

Nesi still covers politics and business, although his online writing style has moved from blogging to more traditional journalism. He believes it’s essential for TV stations to invest in beat reporting now that so many newspapers have had to cut back. “I have ink in my veins, but the numbers are what they are,” he says. “This structure is one way local TV can help fill the gap created by retrenchment of newspapers.”

Digital reporter Dan McGowan. (WPRI photo)

Dan McGowan’s veins have their own ink quotient. He was working at a local news startup and developing a reputation for breaking stories at City Hall when he got a call from Nesi in 2012: “They’re going to hire another one of me.” McGowan still covers City Hall and other Providence news. He stops by police headquarters every morning to grab a stack of police reports that he can share with the newsroom. McGowan’s Facebook Group, Dan McGowan’s Scoop on Providence Politics, has close to 7000 members who share leads, feedback, and long conversations with public officials and ordinary residents — no swearing allowed.

When the city held a public hearing about the mayor’s new budget in June, Dan McGowan was not just the only reporter in the room, but the only member of the public.

McGowan’s other passion is education. “We don’t just want to do ‘Are backpacks too heavy?’” he says. For his last back-to-school package, he interviewed every single superintendent in the station’s coverage area. Ditto for a recent story on new statewide standardized test scores: while a TV reporter did an overview for broadcast, McGowan posted comprehensive district-by-district statistics and analysis online, Rezendes told me, enabling users to personalize the coverage by moving from the TV screen to a searchable database on their digital devices. “Our people expect depth, and because the screens complement one another, we can deliver for them,” she says.

Nesi and McGowan work closely with their TV colleagues on stories related to their beats. They see themselves as a new kind of hybrid: part digital reporter, part assignment editor, part TV producer and contributor. “Our relative wonkishness rubs off on the rest of the newsroom,” says McGowan. Rezendes agrees: “The entire newsroom buys in.”

The two reporters and Rezendes see their work as part of a larger station strategy that exploits the respective strengths of the broadcast and digital platforms to achieve a result that’s bigger than either of them on its own. Says Nesi, sounding a lot like a news director himself: “It’s one important puzzle piece in putting together a newsroom and set of news products that drive loyalty and earn the trust of our viewers and readers.”

“These beats that sound like they could be dry and boring actually do have value beyond the articles themselves,” agrees McGowan.

To which Nesi adds: “We went down the rabbit hole, looked around, and came back up with the three carrots.”

Please share your stories of enterprise journalism and collaboration across broadcast and digital platforms by emailing us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

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Related:

Article: Building Transparency in Local TV News. Read here.

Got two minutes, we’ll give you the news

Many stations around the country are experimenting with digital newscasts, but a station that the Knight-Cronkite News Lab featured a couple of weeks ago for its Instagram TV newscast Listen Up — WNBC-TV in New York — followed up to tell us about a new twist with interesting implications for platform and content strategy aimed at new consumers.

Two months ago, the digital team at WNBC began producing a two-minute, condensed newscast called, News 4 Now. It’s a custom, digital-only newscast produced for its OTT platforms — YouTube, Roku and Apple TV. In that short time, this show has already greatly out-performed similar shows that WNBC produced for other digital platforms.

While Listen Up has had mixed results on Instagram TV, according to WNBC’s digital vice president, Ben Berkowitz, News 4 Now’s early success has exceeded even his expectations.

“We have been incredibly heartened by the audience reaction,” Berkowitz said.

According to Berkowitz, the completion rate for News 4 Now segments has been “stunning to us.” He compared it to a daily news brief that WNBC used to post on Facebook — one that the station produced for a few years preceding News 4 Now — and said the completion rate for the current show is about 30 times higher than the Facebook version.

One reason Berkowitz gives for this success: how the platforms are laid out and the audiences on each. “The Facebook audience is transitory,” Berkowitz said. “Scroll, scroll, scroll some more,” which makes actual engagement hard to come by. And on top of that, Berkowitz said, the Facebook audience is not typically looking for news.

On Instagram, the audience — typically younger women — won’t often spend two minutes watching a video as they scroll through their feeds, so the flexibility of skips in the Stories format wins out there.

By contrast, people are actively seeking WNBC’s content when they come to the OTT platforms, he said, “so it’s a much more attractive opportunity for us if we can serve them effectively.” According to Berkowitz, this group of viewers — typically slightly older men — wants the news, but they want it to fit their schedule.

The format for News 4 Now is simple: five stories — short VO’s read by one of the station’s anchors — in a two-minute segment that goes out every day at 7 p.m. on the station’s three OTT platforms.

WNBC wanted to “create something custom for this platform,” Berkowitz said. The digital team looked at what other stations around the country were doing, and decided it wanted to do more than take the TV newscast and put it on other platforms.

What sets this show apart from many other digital newscasts, according to Berkowitz, is that it uses a custom location, custom script and custom graphics that are all created by the digital team and unique to the News 4 Now broadcast.


Screenshots of News 4 Now (left) and WNBC’s nightly TV broadcast (right). (Photos from WNBC YouTube and nbcnewyork.com).

The station tries to make the content somewhat distinctive as well. News 4 Now covers a combination of stories from the evening TV newscast — generally from the A block — and items aimed specifically at the digital audience. For example, former President Bush’s death was predictably the lead on News 4 Now, but the OTT newscast ended that day with a search-friendly story about a Facebook event created by fans of Tekashi 6ix9ine to break the rapper out of jail. This kind of mix is typical because “this is what the audience wants,” Berkowitz said. “You’re trying to tailor the content to the digital audience rather than trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.”

And it’s not just the mix of stories that is tailored to digital realities — so is the staffing. In fact, a single staff member — Darren Price — writes, produces, edits and publishes News 4 Now every day in what Berkowitz said is a less than a five-hour process — and he also writes Listen Up.

“This is achievable” for stations, Berkowitz said. “This doesn’t have to be a heavy lift.”

Is your station experimenting with digital-only newscasts? If so, email us your examples at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu, and we’ll check them out.

Related:

Article: From Nieman Reports: Reinventing local TV news might require going over the top. Read here

Article: Millennials don’t hate the news, they just don’t watch it on TV. Read here.

 

In Case You Missed It

InvestigateTV’s bet: If you build it, they will come

It doesn’t take an Einstein to know that in this age of streaming and on-demand viewing, linear TV notions of time and space don’t apply. But it did take a Breland — Sandy Breland, Group Vice President at Raycom Media — to apply that new reality to investigative reporting. Breland’s back-of-a-napkin-simple idea: create an OTT channel built around Raycom’s national investigative team; bring in other partners to achieve a critical mass of content; and share it all with a broader audience. “We have this work that we think is really important,” she says. “We believe that if we can get it in front of more people, there’s an appetite for it.”

Breland’s brainstorm was in April. Two months later, Raycom Media CEO Pat LaPlatney announced the launch of InvestigateTV at the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conference in Orlando, starting on the Roku streaming channel, now on Amazon Fire too, with Apple TV coming soon.

Lee Zurik exposes substandard public housing in Louisiana. (Screenshot from InvestigateTV)

The mainstay of InvestigateTV is the scarily prolific Lee Zurik, Chief Investigative Reporter at newly-anointed news leader WVUE in New Orleans and head of Raycom’s 15-month-old national unit. A local satirical site, Neutral Ground News, “reported” on a “five-year study” claiming that “Sphincters tighten 93% wherever Fox 8 Investigative Reporter Lee Zurik goes.” (In his spare time, Zurik also co-anchors at 5, 9 and 10 p.m.) It was Zurik’s ambitious multi-part series Licensed to Pill, which exposed doctors prescribing addictive opioids for profit, that inspired the new channel.

(Lee Zurik in a WVUE photo)

Zurik presides over a Switzerland of partners who have “a shared commitment to investigative journalism,” in Breland’s words, and contribute content gratis. They include the prestigious NY-based nonprofit ProPublica, which got nearly $200,000 from the Knight Foundation (which also underwrites this Lab) to upgrade its video reporting; the award-winning News21, a Carnegie-Knight student reporting project based here at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism; NerdWallet, which offers money-saving advice; and a San Diego-based nonprofit called inewsource that specializes in data-driven investigations. The Raycom stations contribute individual stories and franchises, and they can use all of the content from any of the partners.

The result: more stories than you can shake a Roku stick at — at least 200 videos by Zurik’s estimate and counting, with two or three new ones added every week. It’s an eclectic and wide-ranging collection that includes topical exposés of fraud, waste and corruption by Zurik and others; evergreen consumer stories on money, health, and other news you can use from NerdWallet and the stations; and in-depth reporting, like the ambitious multi-state Hate in America series from News21, or the documentary Killing Pavel, which follows the dogged efforts of a group of Ukrainian reporters as they find critical clues the police missed (or ignored) in the car-bomb assassination of a colleague in Kiev. Given the long-form nature of much investigative journalism, “OTT makes perfect sense,” says Zurik. “The content dictates the length.” When’s the last time you heard that in your newsroom?

Killing Pavel documents the search for a journalist’s car-bomb assassins. (Screenshot from InvestigateTV)

Zurik says viewers seem to prefer the longer stories, and in fact average viewing time on the channel is now up to an impressive 25 minutes plus. There have been about 10,000 downloads of the OTT app, and the channel is attracting new viewers to Raycom. Not surprisingly, Zurik’s home base of New Orleans is one of the top five markets for InvestigateTV, but the others are Atlanta, LA, NY and Dallas — cities with no Raycom station.

InvestigateTV is an unabashed celebration of enterprise reporting in all its forms. You can watch a stream of the RTDNA Edward R. Murrow awards — Zurik’s team won two national awards — or an original interview show called Post in which investigative reporters talk about how they got their big story. “In this climate, anything that we can do to show the process of how stories come about and how we report stories is important,” says Zurik. “This is our way to help with media transparency.”

Of course passion alone doesn’t pay the bills, although no one seems too concerned about that for now. “The truly innovative thing we did is going into this without knowing the financial model, how we’re going to monetize it,” says Zurik. “We had to find a way to do this and find the resources and build the product first,” adds Breland. “We’re now looking at the best way to build the financial model. But we believe the support will be there for this kind of quality journalism.”

In the meantime, note to fraudsters, tax cheats, scam artists, swindlers and other lowlifes — you may want to flee to higher ground.

If you are experimenting with new platforms and extending your broadcast content in interesting ways, please let us know at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

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Related:

Article: Would you believe this? Read here.

Article: Showdown on Facebook Watch. Read here.

Would you believe this?

In this era of polarized discourse, declining trust in media and misinformation and disinformation, “transparency” and “authenticity” have become buzzwords thrown around in many newsrooms. While newspapers have added features like sidebars to their print stories and explanatory links online, introducing transparency and building authenticity in the linear medium of television newscasts is a trickier challenge.

But TEGNA has come up with an idea that’s designed to meet that challenge.

Even before President Trump was elected, TEGNA research showed that audience distrust in the media was a growing problem for news organizations. “Verify was needed even before the term ‘fake news’ became part of our culture,” TEGNA VP of News Ellen Crooke said.

So in April of 2016, a group of TEGNA staffers met at one of their regular innovation summits to present ideas based on audience research and TEGNA management objectives. In this case, management challenged them to find ways to build trust in their news reports.

The winning proposal: a segment in which reporters would fact-check the day’s news based on viewers’ questions.

TEGNA funded a pilot at WFAA in Dallas, which puts its own unique spin on the idea: a segment called Verify Road Trip that takes viewers around Texas to answer questions about the news. The idea was inspired in part by Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown.

“All good ideas are just an amalgamation of lots of things building on top of each other,” said David Schechter, a veteran journalist who is the reporter, host and co-producer of Verify Road Trip.

Schechter and his team have criss-crossed the state of Texas, covering everything from the border wall with Mexico, to craft beer in the Dallas Fort Worth area, to sinkholes in West Texas.

Schechter and his team take the viewers through every step of their reporting process, giving the audience a better idea of where and how they source their information.

“It’s a good response to people not trusting you. Show them how you did it. Maybe they still won’t, and that’s fine, but we’re not making it up,” Schechter said.

For some of the segments — especially the longer, more in-depth ones — Schechter even takes an audience member out on the road with him and has him or her help report the story.

“We wanted to have someone who could essentially audit and participate in the journalistic process,” Schechter said. “Somebody that could see everything that we saw. Could ask their own questions. Could reach their own conclusion based on the information.”

These audience members go through a pretty lengthy vetting process before they ever make it in front of a camera, though. Schechter and his team want to make sure the co-reporters will have an open mind about the story, that they’re truly interested in the topic and that they’ll be able to conduct interviews — with Schechter’s guidance of course — while they’re on camera.

(Photo courtesy of WFAA)

WFAA started out producing six-to-ten-minute episodes each week, but the resource drain from that was hard to sustain. So as Schechter explained, Verify Road Trip has evolved into a longer, more in-depth story every other week along with shorter, more traditional fact-checking episodes weekly.

The production costs and the time commitment to produce these longer videos also made them hard to replicate at stations around the country.

So TEGNA innovated once again. As Crooke said, “Innovation is having a seed of an idea; then planting it. You have to keep watering it, pruning it, feeding it, letting it grow.”

The new idea: “snackable” Verify segments that involved reporters fact-checking a same-day story.

This time, a team at KHOU in Houston created graphics and a format — essentially a fact-checking “toolkit” for verification that TEGNA shared with every station. While the segments are not mandatory, the idea caught on around the group: in fact, WUSA in Washington and KPNX in Phoenix do a Verify segment every night.

Eventually stations asked TEGNA for a national Verify team to answer questions about stories that were not necessarily local, but that audiences around the country were asking about.

Now Jason Puckett, who’s based out of WCNC in Charlotte, produces a national Verify segment every day that any TEGNA station can use.

Puckett says his team only focuses on what it can definitively prove true or false, trusting the viewers to make their own judgments based on the facts. “That’s what separates these stories in my mind from a lot of other outlets,” Puckett said.

Most of the stories are day turns on topics that cover anything from your chances of winning the lottery to Taylor Swift as a political influencer. During the Judge Kavanaugh hearings, Puckett and his team addressed a confusing element rather than a single claim: whether senators can order an FBI investigation.

Most daily Verify stories come from viewer questions. But during breaking news situations like the serial bomber in Austin, Puckett’s team is also “constantly monitoring the conversations on all of our digital platforms” and jumps in when misleading claims are gaining traction. The frequent updates on information floating around can often help calm the public and dispel unsubstantiated rumors, he says.

In fact, some of Verify’s greatest success has been during breaking news. News directors scramble a team to help viewers sort out fast-changing information on the fly. Crooke cited KHOU’s coverage of the high school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas.

“Here’s what we know to be true. Here’s what you’re seeing that we know to be false. We’re also going to tell you: here’s what’s out there that we know you’re seeing and we know you’re sharing, but it’s not confirmed yet.”

Screenshot of KHOU’s coverage of the Santa Fe High School shooting.

Back at WFAA, with Verify Road Trip in its third season and talk of a half-hour show built around the concept, Schechter reflects on the opportunity he has had to flex his creative muscles through TEGNA’s innovation initiatives.

“Before this all started I was kind of bored with what I was doing, and felt like I had so much to give and there was nowhere to put it.” Schechter said. “This was the kind of thing I wanted to do, and then all of a sudden I was working for a company that wanted that from me.”

Verify may be good for Schechter’s morale and even good for democracy, but Crooke says it’s also good for business. “The number one thing we can do right now to improve ratings and the bottom line is to improve the trust between our journalists and our communities.”

Do you have examples of new ways to build trust and transparency with your audience? Share them with us at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

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Related:

Article: Understanding how news works in the digital age: Verify, Verify, Verify. Read here.

Article: Finally some good news: Trust in news is up, especially for local media. Read here.

Article: Tegna asks viewers: What do you want to know about the news? Read here.

Article: Americans feel they can best distinguish news from opinion in local TV news; worst, online news sites and social media. Read here.

“Go to them on the platform they’re on”

It’s no secret that TV screens have been getting bigger and bigger in recent years, but with its newest platform, Instagram decided to go in the opposite direction — it wants to turn your phone into your next TV screen with the IGTV app.

And it’s something that some local TV news stations are eagerly experimenting with.

WNBC was one of the first stations to jump on IGTV. Ben Berkowitz, the New York O&O’s digital vice president, said that it started posting content on IGTV about 12 hours after the app was introduced and open to post content on.

Just two months earlier, WNBC had launched its news brief show Listen Up on Instagram Stories. So when IGTV was announced, WNBC already had a successful product on Stories, one that had gone through months of development, that it could easily transfer to this new platform.

Berkowitz described the show itself as a daily news, weather, and lifestyle brief for a millennial audience on the go. It came about because there are consumers out there who care about news, but aren’t going to suddenly change their habits and start watching TV. So, said Berkowitz, WNBC decided to “go to them on the platform that they’re on.”

Screenshots from WNBC’s show “Listen Up” on IGTV.

Something different about this show is that it doesn’t cover A-block news. The producers leave out the crime and traffic accidents to focus on the few stories they think their followers really need to know about each day.

News briefs are not exclusive to IGTV, but the big difference is what the platform adds. IGTV is built unlike any other social video sharing platform on the market.

It was created with both the searchability of YouTube and the immediacy of TV — content populates and begins playing as soon as you open the app, like turning on a TV.

The most unique aspect of IGTV is that it was built just for mobile — specifically your phone. The videos function consistently with how people actually use their phone because they’re exclusively full screen and vertical.

IGTV is an extension of Stories, a feature that Instagram released in 2016, and it builds on Stories by allowing users to post videos of any length — from less than one minute to up to an hour. WNBC’s daily Listen Up segments on IGTV are each about two minutes long.

According to Berkowitz, choosing Instagram as the platform to showcase Listen Up was a no-brainer. Research showed that Instagram is the platform of choice for New York millennials.

On the same day IGTV dropped, the company also announced that it had become the fastest social media platform to reach one billion followers. According to a study by the Pew Research Center in 2018, Instagram is currently the second highest used social media platform — behind YouTube — for American teenagers.

But that doesn’t mean that millennial users are ready to embrace a linear product like Listen Up on IGTV. Berkowitz noted that the completion rate on Stories was four times higher than on IGTV. He believes that is due in part to the fact that on Stories, “if there’s a story you don’t like, you can skip it. On IGTV, you’re locked in for the full 2 minutes.”

Berkowitz says capturing users on Instagram today will pay off in the long haul. “We need to build a brand relationship with them now so when they have kids and move to the suburbs, they think of us,” Berkowitz said.

Has your station begun experimenting on IGTV? Send us your examples to cronkitenewslab@asu.edu, and we’ll check them out.

Get the lab report: The most important stories delivered to your inbox


Related:

Article: BuzzFeed, Instagram to Fund 15 Video Creators’ IGTV Projects. Read here.

Article: Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018. Read here.

Article: BBC among news outlets adopting new Instagram TV platform in bid to reach younger audiences on demand. Read here.

Article: The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote an audience-driven article using Instagram Stories (and it wasn’t even about a hippo). Read here.

Welcome to the Knight-Cronkite News Lab

Welcome to the Knight-Cronkite News Lab local TV news innovation project  — a new initiative from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at ASU.

Our mission at the Knight-Cronkite News Lab is to discover and share experiments from local TV newsrooms around the country, as well as to conduct some of our own. We’re supported by the Knight Foundation: you can read more about the project here and here.

We’re focused on local TV news because it’s the most popular and most trusted source of news for Americans.

But we don’t have to tell you that TV news viewership is declining, and engaging with a new generation of consumers on new platforms while sustaining profitability is a serious challenge.

[Knight Foundation Report — Local TV News and the New Media Landscape]

Everyone calls innovation a high priority. However, many stations admit that they are still replicating the same old formulas that have been tried and true for decades — but are getting pretty tired now. And even on digital platforms, it’s too often a game of clones. So we’re going to report back to you on distinctive innovation: stations that are not just checking the box, but thinking outside it (please forgive the cliché). We’re focusing on five main areas: digital; broadcast; management; technology; and what we’re calling “outside in” — ideas from outside local TV news.

We’ll also be conducting experiments in our own newsroom, including projects that come from you. Leading this effort will be Frank Mungeam, who just joined the Lab as the Knight Professor of Practice in TV News Innovation. Frank comes to us from TEGNA, where his most recent assignment was VP of Digital Audience Engagement.

This is our ever-expanding Innovation Hub, where we’ll be sharing examples and case studies with you — the local TV news community. We know how busy you are, and we won’t waste your time. But we’re hoping you’ll read our weekly email newsletter and then come here to learn more about what your colleagues around the country are trying, as well as contribute ideas and observations of your own. With more than 700 stations producing original local news, there are too many interesting ideas and creative people behind them for us to find on our own. We need your help.

If you haven’t signed up for our email newsletter yet, please do it here and now.


About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Knight Foundation is a national foundation with strong local roots. We invest in journalism, in the arts, and in the success of cities where brothers John S. and James L. Knight once published newspapers. Our goal is to foster informed and engaged communities, which we believe are essential for a healthy democracy. For more, visit knightfoundation.org

About the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

The Cronkite School at Arizona State University is widely recognized as one of the nation’s premier professional journalism programs. The school’s 2,000 students regularly lead the country in national journalism competitions. They are guided by faculty comprised of award-winning professional journalists and world-class media scholars. Cronkite’s full-immersion professional programs give students opportunities to practice what they’ve learned in a real-world setting under the guidance of professionals.

Meet your new partner: A Mississippi experiment in collaborative journalism

Woodward and Bernstein and the Boston Globe Spotlight team may have movies made about them, but most investigative reporters are used to working alone — it comes with the beat. CJ LeMaster is no exception. So the chief investigative reporter at WLBT, Raycom’s NBC affiliate in Jackson Mississippi, admits he didn’t know what to expect when his news director informed him that he was getting a partner.

Her name: Erica Hensley. Hensley is an accomplished reporter with two degrees and a strong track record in data journalism, But Hensley showed up at WLBT with a lot more than her reporting credentials: her work is completely paid for, part of an innovative funding model for investigative journalism. “I would have been crazy to say no to that,” says LeMaster. “I was completely surprised and thrilled,” says WLBT Assistant News Director Charley Jones. “It was a gift.”

It actually was a gift. Hensley works for Mississippi Today, a nonprofit statewide news organization, but her project with WLBT is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as an experiment to see what happens when a print reporter and a TV reporter join forces. The goal: four collaborative investigations by the nonprofit and the station over 18 months.

For Mississippi Today, working with WLBT was an opportunity to learn more about video storytelling, says Editor-in-Chief Ryan Nave. “We don’t have the capacity to do it well, and that’s what they do for a living,“ says Nave. “At the end of this, we may learn that compelling video storytelling should not just be a nice add-on to what we’re doing.”

Investigative collaborations are the new black. No fewer than four duPont Awards just went to “investigative news partnerships, including one to TEGNA’s WTSP and the Tampa Bay Times. ProPublica just announced the second year of its Local Reporting Network, which supports local and regional investigative reporting, with new projects in 14 newsrooms around the country. And we recently reported on ProPublica’s partnership with Raycom’s OTT channel InvestigateTV, also supported by Knight.

Back in Jackson, Hensley proposed an idea to LeMaster and his newsroom bosses.

For their first joint project: an investigation into Mississippi’s high rate of evictions and eviction judgments and how that traps Mississippians in a vicious cycle of poverty. Hensley — a “data miner warrior,” in Charley Jones’s admiring words — had found a rich nationwide database of statistics at the Eviction Lab, based at Princeton University, and was ready to dive in. “I was very excited,” says Henley.

That was last spring. In September, WLBT broadcast LeMaster’s 10:27 story on “The Eviction Trap,” and Hensley published “Eviction Note: How a housing program to help families out of poverty may trap some in it” — the first of several related stories — the same day.

Screenshot from WLBT’s 3 On Your Side Investigation: The Eviction Trap

For the most part, LeMaster and Hensley divvied up their duties according to their strengths — Hensley mining the data, LeMaster working his contacts at the State House and molding a potentially dry investigation into a television story. “Traditionally, no one in print wants to be tethered to video, and no one in video wants to be tethered to print,” says Hensley.

But the two reporters broke out of their comfortable silos to do some joint interviews and reporting trips. Both say they learned from one another. “We were able to use our respective talents to improve each other’s work,” says LeMaster. “We were doing so much to help one another at the end.”

Typical of an innovative experiment, there were glitches along the way. The complex, data-driven project took longer than it should have to come together, says Charley Jones, and there was a scramble at the end to humanize the material with the relatable “people stories” that television does best. That was a lesson for Mississippi Today’s Ryan Nave. “We think about the anecdotal lead, but it’s easy to forget about the compelling human angle in a very data-driven story.”

But here’s the key takeaway: both partners say the ambitious investigation would never have happened without the collaboration.”Our station could not do this level of investigative reporting alone,” says Jones. “Mississippi Today wants to focus on stories that wouldn’t exist if we didn’t exist,” says Ryan Nave. “This is a story that wouldn’t have been told if not for us.”

LeMaster and Hensley are getting ready to embark on their next investigation, the topic still under wraps, confident that teaming up will be easier the second time around. “By the end we realized how each other worked, how we needed to be more accountable to each other — in a good way,” says Hensley. “We need to be more cognizant of each other’s needs,” says LeMaster, sounding more like a man in relationship counseling than the tough investigative reporter he is. “It’s that marriage of our two talents that I’m most looking forward to.”

(Disclosures: the Knight Foundation also underwrites the Knight-Cronkite News Lab, and Mississippi Today was founded by Andrew Lack, moonlighting from his day job as Chairman of NBC News and MSNBC — a former colleague of mine at CBS News and still a friend.)

Do you have interesting collaborations to share? Let us know at cronkitenewslab@asu.edu.

Related:

Article: InvestigateTV’s bet: If you build it, they will come. Read here.

Top 9 Takeaways from NewsTECH Forum

Savvy broadcast executives and news content leaders who want to respond strategically to shifts in the way people consume news should spend more time with engineers! I attended the NewsTECH Forum this week in New York, where leaders in broadcast news technology tackled the challenges and opportunities of emerging tech. Here are nine actionable takeaways for news leaders.

Courtesy: DRs Kulturarvsprojekt
  1. Your Engineering department could be your best cost-saver
    Engineering is typically seen as primarily “an expense line,” noted Hank Hundemer, SVP Engineering at Tribune Broadcasting. The opposite is now more true, he argues. The combined effect of increased computing power and decreased cost of storage enabled by cloud computing has created opportunities for significant cost savings and workflow efficiencies for broadcasters. The engineering department, now more than ever, can be a partner and champion to content creators by using technology to solve workflow problems that lower operating costs, which enables more investment in creating original, unique, differentiated content.
  2. Your chief rival is now Netflix, not that other TV news station
    In 2018, for the first time, consumers watched more on demand than live linear TV, according to
    Andrew Finlayson, SVP Digital at Smith-Geiger. Finlayson says that trend will only increase now that we’ve reached that tipping point. What that means for broadcasters is that more and more consumers begin their “lean-back” viewing experience in an OTT environment (think Netflix, Hulu, ROKU or Apple TV) rather than starting their TV viewing experience in a live linear mode. Netflix is now the chief rival for evening news viewers. If you don’t have a plan to be present with local news in the OTT space, you’re at risk of being left behind.
  3. “There’s gold in your basement
    Nearly every broadcast newsroom in America has an archive of video going back for decades. Often, it’s in the basement or a back room, maybe on half-inch or three-quarter-inch or even film format; and there might be that ‘one guy’ or gal that everyone knows to go to when they are trying to find a clip from ten years ago. This ‘system’ means that most newsrooms are one employee-departure away from having no idea what’s in their archive, or how to access it. Cloud computing and AI have now matured to the point where it is possible to unlock this “gold in the basement,” a local station’s owned video archive. Google, Amazon and others now have the technology to ingest video, semantically analyze and tag the subject matter, and render it searchable and accessible. The digitization of station video archives opens up two huge opportunities, one around licensing and monetizing their archives; and the other around creating new content opportunities, like anniversary and historical specials.
  4. Artificial Intelligence is ready for broadcast
    Artificial Intelligence is an area where technology can help broadcasters. AI assistance can be applied to lower costs and also to power new innovation. “The low-hanging fruit is Closed Captioning,” says Michael Englehaupt, VP and CTO for Graham Media. Englehaupt notes that CC users are vocal, and today’s captioning solutions are often imperfect or costly, or both.
    “It’s something a station is in peril of being fined for by the FCC if there’s a point of failure. AI is an opportunity to rethink the way we do captioning.” Captioning is just a starting point for an entire category of tasks that could potentially be done at both higher quality and lower cost via AI assist.
  5. Technology will reinvent the Assignment Desk
    The traditional TV Assignment Desk is an outdated structure. But TV newsrooms still need to keep track of stories and crews and locations. How do you juggle words and images and video for multiple stories daily, to be used across multiple platforms. That is a workflow problem ripe for a technology solution that leverages the speed and storage power of cloud computing. There isn’t a winner yet. But early entries worth reviewing include “Playbook”, an end to end story workflow management system previewed by AP at NewsTECH Forum; and Mojo X, a start-up that interviewed dozens of newsrooms about workflow pain points and needs, and designed an multiplatform, cloud-based story management platform to ‘digitize’ the legacy assignment process.
  6. Metadata is your new best friend (so is the Cloud)
    “Where was that video shot?” How often does someone in a newsroom ask about location information for video and photography? Location data embedded in digital media – “metadata” – can now not only solve that problem but also create a new storytelling opportunity. In short: Metadata is your new best friend. Digitally encoded location information can be used by newsrooms to verify content; to track and communicate story location information; and, to enable fast and powerful searches after the fact for related content. Hank Hundemer of Tribune cites the famous Colorado “balloon boy” example, where that term wasn’t even coined until several days after the story. Content leaders should collaborate now with their technology teams to insure their newsrooms are capturing this “metadata” seamlessly and frictionlessly, in order to to take advantage of this potential.
  7. Security is not your problem – until it is!
    News content folks often brag about their techo-illiteracy, to the chagrin of their IT departments. How many times has your IT team warned about clicking attachments on emails or “phishing” threats? In this increasingly complex digital environment, data and account security can no longer be just the concern of IT. Executives and newsroom leaders must champion security practices, because they have so much to lose. “All the security in the world fails when someone shows up with a USB jump drive,” notes ABC O&O’s Tish Graham.
  8. A little investment in innovation can go a long way
     “Sprinkle a little bit of technology around,” says Tribune’s Hundemer. “Tell them ‘go break this’ and then see what happens.” He notes that he’s supplied a few passionate employees with drones or VR cameras and the results have been amazing. “The cost is actually quite low, to seed innovation.”
  9. Today’s Edges are Tomorrow’s Mainstream
    “Go to the edges, because the edges will wind up in the middle,” advises Tish Graham, VP Broadcast Technology for the ABC Owned TV Station Group. Graham notes that at NAB, the largest annual gathering of members of the National Association of Broadcasters, “Microsoft used to be at a booth on the edges.” She says she consistently finds tomorrow’s innovation leaders by looking at who’s “on the edges” today. The next time you go to a conference, consider straying from the beaten path of crowded booths to see who’s “on the edges.”

Related:

Article: To Win At OTT, Think Programming. Read here.

Article: Stations Need To Forge Ahead With OTT. Read here.