Tim Wolff

Every story in your newscast is really about humanity. Even if you’ve got 10 or 12 or 24 hours of news every day, it’s still true. News teams that don’t understand the importance of human connection in stories have a hard time understanding why viewers don’t find their newscasts valuable.

Broadcasters continue to turn to artificial intelligence for help with a widening array of tasks heavy on manual process from surfacing trending topics and content to generating transcriptions, tagging with metadata, offering facial and object recognition and offering help with clips, rights management and moderation.

Whether you’re new in the business or a 40-year vet, each sweeps period holds new information. On a grand scale, your station might have tried new strategies, or you might have gone through the same tactics as always, with this year’s stories echoing those of the past. The important thing is to analyze success and failure while you are still fully engaged in sweeps mode because when you come back from the beach, you’ll have a hard time remembering all the finer details of how you executed sweeps coverage.

Newsletters, documentaries, citizen journalism and better-quality UGC are driving better-engaged viewers in higher numbers to stations, leaders from Tegna, Graham Media and Sinclair said at a TVNewsCheck webinar last Friday, where they made clear that quality trumped novelty.