newsrooms

WZMQ, Lilly Broadcasting’s new CBS affiliate in Marquette, Mich., spent almost a year turning a 150-year-old building into a 21st century television studio. On Oct. 3, the station started airing nightly newscasts at 6 and 11. “We had to build this whole thing from the ground up,” says Brian Trauring, the EVP at Lilly.

Tim Wolff: When I first became a news manager, I made some mistakes. In 20 years of news leadership, I learned a lot, and now I work with newsrooms across the U.S. to help them grow and evolve. This list of 10 things I learned can help any new manager.

Every year at this time, just before the July 4 holiday, the Knight-Cronkite News Lab looks back at the stories that resonated with its readership of local TV news professionals, in the first half of the year. Even with the pandemic still shaping our lives inside and outside the newsroom, stations are innovating on multiple fronts, taking on the challenges of a rapidly changing media, business and social environment. Here’s the Top 10 list.

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

Blake Russell, EVP of stations operations and content development for Nexstar, has spent the past pandemic year building out a new newsroom, studios and infrastructure for NewsNation. Along the way, he’s been eliminating holdover technology from the company’s Tribune acquisition and built a novel, enterprise-level content sharing tool. 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 tensions in newsrooms over reporters’ social media presence are not just about politics. Above, in 2012, David Carr, a New York Times media columnist, spotted the way social media had begun to shift the balance of power in newsrooms.

NBC Nightly News returned home Monday, Nov. 9, after more than six months of anchoring remotely and from alternate setups — and introduced new on-set video wall graphics and a new approach to blocking the show that follows its Decision 2020 editions from Studio 1A.

Coronavirus is a fast-moving and challenging story for every newsroom. The Knight-Cronkite News Lab has curated some of the most useful resources found across the web. We hope these will help you serve and inform your communities while keeping your teams safe and supported as well.

“2020 will be the year when local television news begins the downward slide that has plagued local newspapers,” researcher Rachel Davis Mersey predicted in the NiemanLab Predictions for Journalism 2020. It doesn’t have to be. Instead of issuing predictions for 2020, here are some resolutions every local broadcast newsroom should make, right now, to keep local news strong.

Dalet’s Galaxy five platform uses the cloud to create a borderless newsroom with state-of-the-art remote production capabilities, while AI-enriched archives enable more diverse news stories for audiences across all viewing platforms.

Five takeaways from newsrooms that are starting to re-invent local TV journalism.

Social media platforms are fast evolving, and newsrooms that have come to rely on them are turning to new tools to keep up. From more granular analytics to better tools for incorporating social content into stories, newsrooms — and the vendors they work with on social — are moving along a sharp learning curve.

Automation technology is fast evolving to keep up with demand for content on multiple platforms. Vendors say it helps eliminate redundant tasks and integrates as many platforms as possible without posing a threat to jobs or creative control.

WXTV’s existing 1,800 square-foot set has been redesigned to accommodate new technology that also reduces power consumption and enhances the storytelling experience. It includes a 24-foot long, wall to ceiling, curved monitor wall and a larger Chroma wall to magnify weather maps, animations and enhance the artwork of daily forecasts within the daily meteorology reports.

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.