TVNewsCheck will present its 12th annual Women in Technology Leadership Awards jointly to Sharri Berg, Fox Weather president and COO of news and operations at Fox Television Stations, and Judy Parnall, head of standards and industry, BBC.
The award will be presented during the NAB Show on Tuesday, April 26, at 6 p.m. in the Las Vegas Convention Center. Berg and Parnall will also join this year’s other Women in Technology honorees in a webinar on April 13 at 1 p.m. ET examining the industry’s technology future and the challenges stretching out before it.
Sharri Berg, who joined Fox News Channel at its inception in 1996, is the driving force behind last year’s launch of Fox Weather, an ad-supported streaming service that is also stretching into cable iterations on other Fox channels. Since 2016, she has also been COO of news and operations for Fox’s owned television stations.
Berg has led multiple newsgathering innovations at Fox, including Fox Flight Operations, an aerial newsgathering program with more than 100 pilots trained within Fox using drones in everyday news coverage; the Fox News Multimedia Reporter Training Program, a two-year development program for next-generation, multiplatform-skilled, aspiring journalists; and the company’s cross-flight team, a collection of station engineering VPs, operations managers and photographers.
Judy Parnall had a successful career leading media innovation in research and development at the BBC before being named head of standards and industry in 2015. In 2018, she was elected chair of the 73-broadcaster-member European Broadcasting Union (EBU) Technical Committee, the highest technology body in the EBU. She was the first woman in the International Broadcasting Union (IBU)/EBU’s 96-year history to be elected to the position, and her work there encompasses media user experience development, program production development and media delivery platform development.
In Parnall’s work at BBC, EBU and SMPTE, she has earned a reputation for in-depth technology acumen, strong management and decision-making skills and formidable presenting skills. She additionally participates in the technical committee of the World Broadcasting Committee and Project Origin, where she was part of the small team that established the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authentication and now serves on its steering committee to influence regulators to incorporate the technology’s use.
“For 30 years, Sharri has been a remarkable leader at Fox, laying the foundations for its technology and bringing teams together across the station group,” said TVNewsCheck Publisher and Co-Founder Kathy Haley of Berg. “That work culminated in last year’s launch of Fox Weather, the embodiment of a 21st century television channel that redefines what a ‘channel’ itself is — digital in its DNA, streaming and linear in its distribution, deeply granular in how it iterates weather information to the viewer. It could not have been built without Sharri’s driving leadership.
“The distinguished career Judy built heading media innovation at the BBC’s highly respected R&D unit established her as a technology futurist and leader,” Haley said of Parnall. “Her election to the chairmanship of the EBU Technical Committee, where she is leading development of the work plan and establishing the strategic programs and interest communities driving media technology development, has expanded her influence to 56 countries, more than 1,200 radio and TV stations and more than 500 digital services.
“Both Sharri and Judy serve as role models to women, all over the world, who aspire to the highest levels of technology management,” Haley said.
TVNewsCheck’s Women in Technology Leadership Award recognizes women who have contributed substantially toward advancing their industry technologically. It supports the National Association of Broadcasters Education Foundation’s Technology Apprenticeship Program, which trains, informs and recruits a diverse workforce that meets the emerging technology and engineering needs within the broadcast community.
Register here to attend the 12th annual Women in Technology Awards Presentation Ceremony and Reception at NAB Show in Las Vegas.
Register here for the TVNewsCheck webinar featuring all six 2022 honorees offering their thoughts and predictions about this year’s most important technology trends.
Previous Women in Technology Leadership Award honorees:
16 May 2024
23 May 2024
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