Digital

Former DC Entertainment president Diane Nelson is joining Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman’s upstart Quibi. Sources say Nelson — who in June exited Warner Bros., where she also held the title of president of consumer products — will be head of operations at the shortform video venture that was launched earlier this year with $1 billion in investment from all the major film studios and Alibaba.

Ted Nesi and Dan McGowan pound the City Hall and police beats and more as digital-first reporters at WPRI, Nexstar’s CBS affiliate in Providence, R.I. 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.

Middle-age Americans spend the most time consuming video, online content and other media, but younger adults are more likely to be digitally-focused using internet-connected TV devices, apps and the web, a new Nielsen survey finds.

The EVP and GM of CBS News Digital may have found an answer to the aging out of typical TV news viewers.  On average, users of its CBSN streaming service are 38 years old. Now the unit is turning its attention to delivering more local news with the rollout of CBSN Local later this month. (Photo: Jack Pagano)

Creating more long-form, “nuanced” journalism is a way for local stations to grab younger viewers in an era where there is a growing dissatisfaction with the national news media. (Photo: Wendy Moger-Bross)

The winners of TVNewsCheck’s first Social Media Excellence Awards describe how their stations have been able to monetize various experiments in targeting social media audiences that go beyond just repeating what’s in their news broadcasts. (Photo: Wendy Moger-Bross)

NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations group, after rolling out a new plant in Philadelphia without an SDI router that uses as much IP as possible, will be creating a virtualized architecture for KLBR, its Telemundo station in Las Vegas, in which most of the back-end equipment used to run the station, including news production, will be located at a data center in Dallas. And then there’s the new facility NBCU is building in Boston, which will include six control rooms and six studios and accommodate four separate NBCU businesses. A big driver is increased support for the 2110 IP standard from the broadcast vendor community. (Photo: Wendy Moger-Bross)

“You can no longer just be a broadcaster,” says SmithGeiger’s Andrew Finlayson. “You have to go beyond that.” In addition to offering content across digital and social media platforms, broadcasters, particularly TV stations, need to create and promote the usage of mobile apps, both for entertainment content and local news. (Photo: Wendy Moger-Bross)

One-in-five U.S. adults say they often get news via social media, slightly higher than the share who often do so from print newspapers (16%) for the first time since Pew Research Center began asking these questions. In 2017, the portion who got news via social media was about equal to the portion who got news from print newspapers.

Ellen DeGeneres has a new place to spin her favorite tunes: The talk-show host/comedian struck a content and promotion deal with Spotify, under which The Ellen DeGeneres Show and the music-streaming service partnership will promote each other.

Netflix just broke new records on consumer spending in its mobile apps, according to new data app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. In November, Netflix pulled in an estimated $86.6 million in worldwide consumer spending across its iOS and Android apps combined — a figure that’s 77% higher than the $49 million it generated last November. That’s a new record.

Channing Dungey is still at ABC, wrapping things up and working on the transition to her successor as ABC Entertainment president, Karey Burke, but speculation about what she would do next is growing. There is nothing official, and it is unclear whether Dungey has even met with the Netflix toppers yet, but she is considered a great choice to join the company’s executive ranks with her strong Hollywood relationships and the respect she has among her peers.

Kira Goldberg, the executive who worked on Twentieth Century Fox’s current hit, Bohemian Rhapsody, has been tapped to be a film executive at the digital streaming giant. Goldberg will report to Tendo Nagenda, the former Disney exec Netflix poached in August.

Quibi, the upcoming video service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and former HP CEO Meg Whitman, is getting two shows from Stephen Curry’s Unanimous Media as well as director Catherine Hardwicke. Katzenberg and Whitman announced the new projects at Variety’s Innovate summit in Los Angeles on Wednesday, where the duo also shared some additional details on the technology and roadmap of the service.

The new, free OTT streaming service will offer live and on-demand content spanning entertainment, sports and news when it launches early next year.

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 Scripps ABC affiliate in Cincinnati when he was hired full time in 2016 as part of the station’s digital push, which then included a separate digital newsroom.