Imagining The Newsroom Of The Future

Local TV newsrooms are being challenged like never before to serve at least two distinct audiences whose expectations for news content are vastly different.

It’s the same conflict playing out across the media world between so-called legacy news media that serve older audiences and digital news content consumed by millennials on devices other than televisions. The two groups consume news in very different ways, and yet this greatly varying content is supposed to come out of the one news operation that a typical station operates.

This conflict and the challenge it presents were topics for discussion at a session titled “Imagining the Newsroom of the Future” that opened TVNewsCheck’s annual NewsTECHForum conference in New York on Monday. The panel discussion revealed that content managers and producers in TV newsrooms across the country have begun to realize that the old legacy model of TV news won’t fly on digital platforms.

“Our newsrooms have a real challenge because on the one hand, they serve as this amazingly profitable and still legendary newscast which has got a whole bunch of requirements which are very, very specific,” said panelist Roger Keating, chief strategy officer for Hearst Television.

“[The typical legacy newscast] has got a huge audience, there’s a polish, there’s a cadence to it that our audiences for that product have grown accustomed to,” he said. “And then on the other extreme, we’ve got a digital-mobile audience which has a completely different set of expectations. They don’t want it polished. In fact, to the contrary, it needs to feel authentic.”

Panelists in this session and others throughout the first day of the two-day conference agreed that the idea of simply “chopping up” a newscast into smaller, bite-size, separate story segments and then posting them on a station website is fast becoming an outmoded concept.

One panelist in the “Newsroom of the Future” session suggested that a station’s web content doesn’t really have to have anything at all in common with a station’s news brand. The panelist — Steve Schwaid, VP of digital devices, for Crawford, Johnson & Northcott — said millennials in particular are oblivious to the traits that characterize traditional TV brands.

“Right now a TV station produces content that meets its ‘brand’,” he said. “ ‘This is the type of brand we are, this is the type of content we’re going to produce.’ I think, especially with millennials, the brand of the TV station becomes irrelevant.”

He said he thinks TV stations can create profitable websites that will attract younger news consumers by developing brands that are separate in content and nature from their parent TV stations. “Digital content doesn’t have to reflect that TV station,” he said. “It can reflect multiple points of view.

“If I was building an operation today using technology that’s available to me today, and I was doing digital, I would do a HuffPost and I’d do a Breitbart out of the same operation,” he said. “I’d try to provide as much different content to as many different audiences as I can.… For millennials, the brand is the content,” he insisted.

One way for TV stations to begin to meet the challenges presented by these dual audiences is to step back and reassess the way they present news, particularly when it comes to allocating newsroom resources. One panelist — Sean McLaughlin, VP of news at E.W. Scripps — decried the near constant expansion of local TV news hours in recent years. To him, such efforts wind up diluting the quality of a station’s news.

“The first thing we have to do is step back and be really honest with ourselves about where we are with our content,” McLaughlin said. “I think we have a big problem.… We have a lot of self-inflicted wounds. The answer to every programming decision for the past few years has been, hey, let’s throw on another hour of news and can we do it with two people? As we do that over time, it really thins things out.”

To listen to a recording of this panel session, click here.

Read all about the NewsTECHForum here.