For Fox Weather’s Sharri Berg, It’s All About The Larger Puzzle

Sharri Berg likes putting things together.

Berg has ridden the Fox wave from the earliest days of the company, culminating most recently with the launch of Fox Weather as a major new streaming channel. She is known as an approachable leader, a mentor with high expectations and the kind of person who has a keen mind for how to use innovative technology in news.

TVNewsCheck is recognizing Berg, Fox Weather president and Fox Television Stations COO of news and operations, along with Judy Parnall, BBC’s head of standards and industry (read her profile here), with 2022’s Women in Technology Leadership award. They will be honored during a reception on April 26 during the NAB Show in Las Vegas.

“When I look back at my career and when I look back at the different programs, the different initiatives and networks that I helped to build, I would say it’s this puzzle that is never fully complete, right? You just keep adding on,” Berg says.

Inspired to enter the broadcasting industry by groundbreaking anchorwoman Jessica Savitch, Berg joined Fox News Channel as a founding member of the launch team. During her 34 years with Fox, some of those news and technology puzzle pieces she has added include launching Fox Weather, creating the multimedia reporter (MMR) program that trains new journalists, and incorporating drone technology in the newsgathering process, which resulted in the formation of the Fox Flight Program.

“Sometimes there’s a need and you have to figure out how to solve it,” she says. Other times, “you have all these things, and put them together and there’s a need you didn’t know you had to answer.”

Often, she would have a vision of something she wanted to accomplish, and “the technology was kind of there” or “there was a hint of it,” such as the ability to do a live shot from a phone, but needed to iterate before it was possible.

“News and technology is like this meandering puzzle that just keeps growing and getting added on to,” says Berg, who earned her B.A. in communications from American University in Washington.

FNC’s Quick Response Vehicle was created by Berg (third from left), then COO of Fox TV Stations and SVP of news operations at Fox News, in partnership with LiveU and Accelerated Media Technologies. The Nissan NV 3500 is a one-stop shop for a photographer and crew covering and chasing down a breaking news story.

Her most recent contribution to the news puzzle was Fox Weather, which launched in October 2021.

“It was a natural extension for our viewers,” she says. “It touches on everything.”

And many Fox resources were called on during the development of Fox Weather. Fox’s MMRs, drones, affiliates, crews and sat trucks all contribute to the nascent outlet, which launched initially on digital and streaming and has since been iterating partly on Fox Business Channel.

“Everyone says Fox Weather is like my wedding, with everyone coming together in one place,” she says.

The Fox Weather OTT platform was built from scratch within the Fox organization over 10 months during the pandemic. She attributes the speed of its creation to Fox’s entrepreneurial roots and flat organizational structure.

“We had a plan, we knew what we wanted to do, when we wanted to launch and we knew there was a huge opportunity coming that fall, so we were able to very quickly, unheard of, build this incredible studio and technology and hire some of the best meteorologists,” she says.

In March of 2021, nine people were working on Fox Weather.

“Today, we’re a fully functional Fox Weather experience,” she says. “It’s great to say you own local weather, and you have America’s weather team for anything that’s outside your local DMA.”

Some of the journalists who work for Fox Weather came up through the Fox News Multimedia Reporter Training Program training program for young MMRs, which Berg helped found more than a decade ago.

“One of my favorite accomplishments at Fox has been developing the multimedia reporter training program,” she says.

The two-year MMR training program, begun about 12 years ago, trains journalists freshly out of school or with one or two years of experience in a small market.

The program, Berg says, was borne of a combination of needs, including providing the “proper training for young journalists before they go out and learn bad habits, or aren’t being trained in the way that they should and being mentored,” she says. “It’s really creating the next generation of journalist, and along the way using the technology that made it possible for journalists to be one-person operations out in the field.”

Mitti Hicks, Fox Weather multimedia journalist, applied for the MMR program in 2018 and has been mentored by Berg. Hicks says Berg has the ability to see in people what they can’t always see in themselves and helps young journalists catch up with that vision.

Berg’s mentorship helped her become comfortable being herself as a journalist.

“One thing Sharri said to me is: ‘You have a great personality, a great smile. Just be who you are on television and everything else would follow. You don’t have to try to be anything other than your authentic self,’” Hicks says. “She allowed me to be myself, and as a Black woman, that is just so incredibly important.”

Berg believes in the power of mentorship and her responsibility to share what she’s learned.

“It’s part of my duty of giving back, to mentor and raise that next generation and expose what I’ve learned, and keep that door open and invite the others through,” Berg says. “I do spend quite a good deal of time mentoring Fox News employees.”

Janice Dean, senior meteorologist for the Fox News Channel, says Berg has been a cheerleader throughout Dean’s career.

“She was very approachable,” Dean recalls about their meeting many years ago. Even now, she says, Berg remains approachable. “A lot of CEOs and presidents, you don’t feel like you can get a meeting with them during the week or reach them by a telephone call.”

Even more important, Dean says, Berg “talks to you as a person, as opposed to as a colleague or someone who works under her.”

In short, she adds, “She is that rare combination of someone you feel you can talk to but someone that you know has your best interest at heart. She takes care of employees.”

Kim Rosenberg, SVP for news programming for the Fox News Channel, says Berg is knowledgeable on “every television job” while also being willing to teach other people how to do those jobs. Rosenberg met Berg more than 20 years ago and Berg taught her how to line produce a show.

“It was not her job, nor was it my job, but I’ll never forget her sitting next to me in the control room,” Rosenberg recalls. “No matter what her job title is, if you need her to hang a light in the studio, she will. If you need her to operate a camera, she will. If you need her to teach a kid how to line produce a show, she will.”

Jack Abernethy (CEO of Fox Television Stations) and Berg at the CAA TV News Party in 2016. (photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images for CAA).

Over the years, Berg has also spent a lot of time seeking out new technologies that would facilitate the newsgathering process.

Scott Wilder, VP of field operations at Fox News Media, says Berg makes sure to spend time at Start Up Nation during each NAB Show.

“There are no appointments in the start-up area. You have to walk through the entire section of that hall and go booth to booth, shaking hands, talking to these folks,” Wilder says. “She loves spending an afternoon meeting people in Start Up Nation.”

Often she offers feedback, he says, but it’s “about making sure she knew what was coming up and what was out there.”

When Berg saw a roto-helicopter at an NAB Show more than 20 years ago, well before the age of drones, she said, “I want these,” and “let’s get a few” because she saw them as the future of aerial newsgathering. At the time, all stations had helicopters, but this offered a means for getting different perspectives and helping give context to stories.

Initially, the lawyers said no.

“But we waited, we watched, and we researched,” Berg said. And shortly after the FAA released its regulations on drones, the Fox Flight Team was fully operational.

The drone program is “one of our most innovative newsgathering tools that we have,” Berg says.

Wilder credits Berg with founding the Fox Flight desk.

“It took a long time to convince corporate leadership and the lawyers that this was going to be OK,” Wilder recalls. “But the laws caught up.”

The Fox Flight team includes more than 100 pilots and follows both FAA and Fox Flight Team rules. Drone pilots are fully trained, and in the years since the creation of the program, a number of Fox’s pilots have received drone piloting innovation awards during the InterDrone conference.

Berg credits Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott, who tapped her to lead Fox Weather, for her leadership style. Berg says she learned a lot of her graciousness from Scott.

“She’s a very good leader, very self-directed and I have learned a lot from just watching her and working with her,” Berg says.

And through each piece of the puzzle that forms her career, she viewed her success through Fox Television Station CEO Jack Abernethy’s eyes.

“He taught me to never, ever, ever, ever stop innovating, ever,” she says. “Success is never stopping, pushing yourself, sometimes pushing your team so they can be better.”

Read the profiles of the other five 2022 honorees here.

In a webinar on Wednesday, April 13, this year’s Women in Technology Award winners shared thoughts on everything from multi-cloud strategies to the rise of machine learning in television workflows to how NFTs, Web3 and the metaverse may affect TV production. Watch the full video here.