Newsy’s Sabatinelli To Talk Monetizing OTT

Blake Sabatinelli, general manager of E.W. Scripps’ Newsy, will explain how the OTT service’s novel approach to storytelling is building a young audience and revenue at the fourth annual NewsTechForum in a one-on-one interview with Michael Depp, editor of NetNewsCheck.

Set for Dec. 12-13 at the New York Hilton Midtown, NewsTECHForum will gather news, technology, news operations and digital managers to address the challenges and opportunities at the intersection of technology and news.

The conference — co-presented by TVNewsCheck and the Sports Video Group — has been described as “intimate and influential” and offers a rare opportunity for news executives and managers from broadcast and cable networks to confer with their counterparts at TV station groups from across the U.S. NetNewsCheck is TVNewsCheck’s companion service focusing on digital media.

The Sabatinelli interview is scheduled for Monday, Dec. 12, at 1:40 p.m. The conference starts Monday afternoon and runs through Tuesday morning.

Newsy is a millennial-targeted news service that has grown rapidly since its acquisition by Scripps in 2013. It is available in on-demand and linear formats on a wide range of OTT platforms including Apple TV, Sling TV, Watchable, Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Google Chromecast, as well as on the audio network TuneIn and on its website, Newsy.com.

“Newsy was a prescient acquisition by Scripps just as OTT and on-demand viewing were becoming requisite to court new, younger audiences,” says NetNewsCheck’s Depp. “Blake’s work there has charted a path for other legacy media to follow, both in terms of how Newsy is reinventing the form of news content, and how it’s monetizing it via efforts like its new brand studio.”

Sabatinelli oversaw video strategy for Scripps’ digital division before taking the helm at Newsy and has worked as a digital and executive producer in Tampa, Fla., and as head of digital strategy and operations at WJLA Washington.

NewsTECHForum’s keynote speaker is Andrew Morse, EVP of CNN U.S and GM of CNN Digital Worldwide. Other sessions will cover designing digital-first newsrooms; state-of-the-art TV graphics; distributed content; chasing millennials with streaming media, mobile and OTT; the evolution in ENG; managing user-generated content; real-world story-centric workflow; and more.

Previous NewsTECHForum keynoters were CBS News President David Rhodes last year, Sinclair Broadcast Group President David Smith in 2014 and Jack Abernethy, president of Fox Television Stations, in the conference’s inaugural year, 2013.

Because NewsTECHForum is co-located with the SVG Summit, news, digital and technology executives have an opportunity to talk about common issues with sports producers and technologists and to visit the Summit’s Technology Showcase, where more than 60 companies exhibit their newest solutions.

For the full NewsTECHForum program, or to register, please click here.