Author: Alicia Barron

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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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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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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.

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.

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.

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.