coronavirus

Sometimes news innovation comes in the form of sheer reporting tenacity, as Graham-owned WDIV Detroit has shown through its long-haul coverage of the pandemic. Led by Kim Voet-Potter, a veteran news director, and featuring physician Dr. Frank McGeorge, the WDIV team has pushed itself to new creative heights in relaying critical information to a virus-weary viewership. This is the latest of TVNewsCheck’s “Newsroom Innovators” profiles, a series showcasing people and news organizations evolving the shape and substance of video reporting. Read the others here.

Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham may be railing against the dangers of the coronavirus and the surging Delta variant, but their bosses and some of their colleagues are singing a very different tune. As the breakdown between the vaccinated and unvaccinated increasingly reflect political perspectives in the pandemic and conjecture over cable news, Fox corporate is embracing the letter and spirit of both the science and recently introduced mask mandates in L.A. County.

Filming is paused indefinitely while the streamer and Shondaland producers create a timetable for a return to production. It is unclear whether a cast or crew member contracted the virus, but they are currently isolating.

The extraordinary decision by the country’s top automaker underlines how polarizing the Games have become in Japan as COVID-19 infections rise ahead of Friday’s opening ceremony. “There are many issues with these Games that are proving difficult to be understood,” Toyota Chief Communications Officer Jun Nagata told reporters Monday.

Broadcasting and streaming the Tokyo Summer Games already had a high degree of difficulty due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Then Japan declared a state of emergency late last week, and banned live crowds, adding all kinds of new hurdles to the massive production slated to kick off July 23. Will the events seem as powerful and captivating without the roar of the crowd? Can sportscasters communicate the spirit and substance of the games without the hoopla fans have come to expect? NBC’s top sports exec insists they can.

Multiple stories of a lifetime arrived in a short period of time, and all had critical local angles that viewers wanted — and needed. Above, KNTV San Jose/San Francisco/Oakland anchor Raj Mathai interviews Vice President Kamala Harris.

Months after Rupert Murdoch got a Covid-19 dose, one of his network’s stars, Tucker Carlson, called a Biden vaccination proposal “the greatest scandal in my lifetime.”

Check the news lately, and if you come across a story pertaining to the coronavirus, it is likely to be about the Delta variant. Headline after headline, chyron after chyron, push alert after push alert — they’re all seemingly focused these days on the dangers posed by this new variant. Now, to be clear, the Delta variant does deserve to be reported on. But it is also very important for newsrooms — in both stories specifically about the Delta variant and others — to zoom out and show audiences the big picture about the state of the pandemic here in the US. Otherwise, they might walk away with a skewed impression of things.

With adoption pushed by the pandemic, cloud editing tools have expanded to cover light-weight, heavy-weight and hybrid workflows as vendors continue to minimize latency problems. Above, Avid’s Edit On Demand provides a fully provisioned and secure virtual editing environment, complete with Media Composer cloud editing and Avid NEXIS cloud storage, that can be deployed and scaled quickly.

Nielsen’s local TV ratings understated viewing during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to preliminary findings of an internal analysis conducted by Nielsen. The analysis, which was conducted in response to requests from industry ratings watchdog the Media Rating Council, found the understatement ranged by market size, daypart and demographic group, but overall was found to be similar to an understatement previously disclosed by Nielsen for its national TV ratings estimates.

With the return to pre-pandemic behavior in newsrooms, critic David Zurawik reflects: “Adaptability, resilience, being nimble and the willingness to improvise are some of the lessons TV can teach us from the last 15 months. But there are deeper aspects of our relationships to the screen that bear further thought, such as how important those screens and the stories told on them have become to our lives.”

Five takeaways to help you tackle “the new normal” as this year’s gradual re-opening is posing significant challenges.

Close to half of local TV news directors and half of radio managers report any innovation their station took on during 2020 was to cope with COVID. Local news managers cited the “enormous logistical challenge” of moving workflows remote and cloud based. “No-contact storytelling” posed another challenge.

Audience members will have to provide proof that they have been vaccinated against COVID-19 before attending shows at New York’s Ed Sullivan Theater beginning June 14. Face masks will be optional.

Technology executives from WarnerMedia, Sinclair and Hearst said at a recent TVNewsCheck webinar that they’re tackling the content management challenge amplified by the pandemic by using cloud storage and leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve indexing and searching.

TV stations that used Magis Media’s election mapping software say a new version that tracks COVID vaccine data is much like the election display — easy to use and visually dynamic for better storytelling.

The extension comes as California is slowly but surely emerging from the grip of the coronavirus. All signs are pointing to Los Angeles County moving into the least restrictive yellow tier of social distancing mandates within another week or so. That will allow indoor gatherings including concerts and sporting events to be held at 75% capacity, which will be a boon to the area’s live performance economy.

The unions representing actors and crews are in talks with the studios about extending — and possibly changing — the safety protocols they agreed on in September.

As the coronavirus infections surge in and around Toronto once again, Star Trek Discovery has hit the pause button on production. Months into shooting its fourth season, the Sonequa Martin-Green-led series has shuttered for the next two weeks due to a contact that was a little too close for comfort for CBS Studios. Discovery is penciled in to turn the lights and phasers back on around May 6.

Broadcasters are warming to using robotics for remote camera operations, having seen crucial improvements in camera movement, better object and face tracking, new movement patterns and stronger overall automation. Above, a camera operator stands behind Ross Video’s remote panbar system, capturing the action on the field at a college baseball game.

In the first year-over-year comparison with a month impacted by the 2020 COVID-related ad recession, the U.S. ad market expanded nearly 25% vs. the same month last year. Importantly, it was the best March since Standard Media Index (SMI) began indexing the U.S. advertising marketplace, and it was up 7.2% vs. March 2019 — more than making up for any erosion in 2020.

Over the past year, the scheduling chiefs at Fox, The CW, NBC, CBS and ABC have busted out every trick in the book in the name of “keeping the lights on,” and especially during a long stretch where it was unclear when productions might resume (and how slow a trickle of episodes would then follow).

Ken Haddad says he began the “Vaccine Hunter” project when he noticed a huge influx of emails and viewer feedback to the Graham Media NBC affiliate from people having trouble finding vaccines. “It is a once in a lifetime opportunity to offer life-saving information to our viewers,” he says.

Nielsen said Friday it will not submit to an audit of its COVID-era ratings measurements, rejecting a request from TV networks who believe their ratings have been undercounted during the pandemic.

CBS, ABC, NBC and other TV networks want the company that audits their audiences every day to submit to an audit of its own. The Video Advertising Bureau, an industry group that represents the TV networks to Madison Avenue, is demanding that Nielsen, the arbiter of TV ratings, submit to a third-party audit from Ernst & Young, the latest salvo in a battle between to the two sides over how TV audiences were counted during the coronavirus pandemic.

Pandemic-impacted newsrooms are increasingly embracing tools that allow more content sharing and collaboration from the field and between stations with the cloud playing an ever-larger role in the remote workflows involved. Above, Bridget Naso, news anchor for KNSD San Diego, uses Dejero’s LivePlus Mobile app on an iPhone to broadcast live from home during the pandemic.

Events that audiences can watch collectively — such as major sporting events and awards shows — increase in value as advertisers have fewer opportunities to reach large audiences all at once. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

The Video Advertising Bureau accuses Nielsen of a “systematic undercounting” of TV program viewership since last March. Nielsen needs to respond to the accusation with more than a white paper.

American Idol judge Luke Bryan will miss Monday’s live broadcast after testing positive for COVID. The ABC series has tapped an original Idol judge to fill in for him. Paula Abdul will fill Bryan’s spot at the judges’ table on Monday, marking her first appearance on the show since it moved to ABC from Fox.

The media industry’s go-to authority for measuring audiences acknowledged on Friday that the recent coronavirus pandemic bent its yardstick, but maintained nothing is broken. Nielsen, under fire from the TV networks that depend on it to count the audiences for which advertisers pay, says pandemic conditions resulted in a smaller panel of consumers it relies on to monitor TV viewing, but believes the trends it chronicles during 2020 remain viable.

The Video Advertising Bureau claims “systematic under-counting” as Nielsen lost 20% of its panelists it uses to measure TV usage during the pandemic.