NewsTECHForum: Complete Stories And Videos

News leaders ventured out before COVID’s latest wave for TVNewsCheck’s eighth annual NewsTECHForum in New York last week, sharing insights on how the industry’s continuous and dramatic reshaping is playing out.

Sharri Berg, president of the newly launched Fox Weather channel, joined meteorologists Amy Freeze and Craig Herrera to lay out the ambitious upstart’s plan to shake up the national weather market. Fresh from wall-to-wall coverage of devastating Midwest tornadoes, the three explained how they hope ultra-granular weather technology with give them a competitive edge and how Fox Weather’s digital-only distribution will soon expand to diginets and more. Read full coverage here.

Leaders from ABC News, Fox Owned Stations, WCBS New York, News 12 and FX Design Group said they now emphasize traditional newsgathering and production techniques as much as is safely possible, including in-person field interviews, staffed newsrooms and anchors in the studio instead of their living room. But they also haven’t scrapped any of the home studio setups they installed in the first half of 2020. And they’re continuing to invest in virtual desktop and cloud software as a way to maintain hybrid on-premise/remote production models where they make sense. Read full coverage here.

Executives from ABC News, Fox Owned Stations, Newsday and Avid recounted how remote production workflows are impacting the shape of news coverage with cloud-based production playing an increasingly important role. Read full coverage here.

News leaders and on-air talent from Newsy, Hearst, Fox Owned Stations, Tegna and NBCUniversal Local reflected on how the proliferation of digital distribution channels has dramatically accelerated the evolution of the news product. A reevaluation of social media platforms and expanded use of diginets have been among the changes, as has an reassessment of the anchor’s role with authenticity coming to the fore as an essential attribute. Read the full coverage here.

Digital leaders from Tegna’s Verify, Fox Owned Stations, Graham Media Group and Project Origin shared front line stories from their daily battles against news disinformation and misinformation, explaining their newsroom processes for debunking mistruths and setting viewers straight, along with new tools on the way to help. Read the full coverage here.

IP-centric news trucks became essential ad hoc mobile editing booths during COVID, as described by leaders from WCBS, Fox News, Sinclair and Verizon, who also noted 2 GHz and LTE bandwidth, low earth orbit satellites and 5G networks have also become key tools in an ongoing reinvention of the live shot. Read the full coverage here.

The cloud is being used by some large groups as a “business continuity,” or disaster recovery (DR), tool for news operations in case of a failure in their legacy on-premise hardware, a use case likely to become more widespread, according to executives from Fox Corp., Tegna, Sinclair and Bitcentral. Read the full coverage here.