Here Comes The One-Man-Band Anchor

By now, TV news operations are quite familiar with multimedia journalism, one-man-band journalism, or whatever you want to call it.

It’s the kind of TV journalism where one reporter goes into the field, sets up the camera, audio and lights, conducts the interview, records it, does the editing and transports the story to the station electronically, digitally or in his or her car.

It seems news anchors no longer will remain immune to this type of one-person efficiency if ChyronHego has anything to do with it.

At a press conference today in the Las Vegas Convention Center one day before the exhibit hall opens at the NAB Show, the company introduced Studio MediaMaker the in-studio equivalent to what video journalists do in the field. The product provides an “easy-to-use” way to put news on-air without the need for a control room or technicians, the company said.

Rather, a news anchor alone can use Studio MediaMaker to drive the newscast. “Studio MediaMaker automates the end-to-end process of broadcasting,” says the company’s press release distributed at the event.

With Studio MediaMaker one person can take a news broadcast from planning, through production to “publishing,” or broadcast. “Publishing” seems to be the preferred term because ChyronHego envisions Studio MediaMaker finding homes with “new types of broadcast content producers,” including newspapers, sports clubs and corporations.

For broadcasters, Studio MediaMaker will satisfy the need to do live news cut-ins and give them a less labor-intensive way to package content for growing channel lineups, the company said.

The new ChyronHego product also can be tightly integrated with any MOS-compatible newsroom computer system.

Stations using the company’s CAMIO graphics system to create news and weather graphics for the main newscast can use those same graphics in Studio MediaMaker without any modification.

During the press conference , the company acknowledged that assigning the task of running a news show to an anchor may take some getting used to, but emphasized that the concept has been successfully tested in Europe.

For young video journalists who aspire to one day anchor a newscast, the concept of a single anchor doing everything needed to put a newscast on-air with Studio MediaMaker should seem quite familiar.

Read TVNewscheck’s other NAB Show technology coverage here. Find our full convention coverage here.