There wasn’t a ton of industry news made at this week’s NAB Show in New York. The smaller fall installment of the association’s annual convention, held each April in Las Vegas, was a more subdued event that attracted about 12,000 attendees. By our impression, most of those attending were local production industry types who were checking out the wares of the various equipment vendors on the show floor.  We didn’t see any major new technology announcements, as vendors typically save those for the larger NAB Show in the spring.

That doesn’t mean that there weren’t some local TV types in attendance at NAB Show New York.

The good folks at TVNewsCheck hosted their “Local TV Strategies” program on Wednesday, featuring a day-long event that examined the state of the industry through panels on topics ranging from ad buying to local programming efforts. There was one panel featuring nearly all the general managers of the local New York City TV stations. Each delivered a sense of “all is well” that rivaled Kevin Bacon’s notable performance in 1978’s “Animal House."

However, based on the overwhelming amount of local political ads we saw during the local TV newscasts in NYC this week, both for the crazy race for the Mayor of the city and the contentious battle for a senate seat in New Jersey, we would have to believe that those GMs will be making their budgets this year.

There was one headline when Sinclair’s Chief Operating Officer, Rob Weisbord, offered up a noble-sounding defense of his company’s decision to preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on their ABC affiliates last month. While we are tempted to nominate his description of the decision being a “fiduciary responsibility to deliver the truth” as an entry for the “corporate-speak hall of fame,” we do have to agree that the boundaries of the First Amendment when applied to broadcasters are complicated by the fact that a license issued by the federal government is what your business depends on.

Our friends at TheDesk.Net have more coverage on Weisbord’s remarks here.

In another panel on “Programming and Audience at a Crossroads,” there was a discussion about the opportunities that stations are pursuing to develop their OTT and FAST channel offerings in the streaming landscape. NBC Universal Local’s Meredith McGinn, who is the company’s EVP of Diginets and Original Production, detailed how NBC Boston used its streaming platform to deliver gavel-to-gavel coverage of the retrial of Karen Read earlier this year. We’ll resist the temptation to point out that NBC Boston’s global streaming audience probably surpassed its local ratings in the nation’s ninth-largest TV market.

In that same session, WDIV Detroit’s GM Bob Ellis confirmed that his station’s plans to open its own coffee shop are moving forward, and “Foregrounds Coffee,” a clever nod to the station’s channel four brand, will open at the beginning of next year. Ellis expressed his surprise at the number of content partnerships he believes will be hosted at the shop being built in Plymouth, Michigan. He also touted the Graham Media Group’s “story-centric approach,” which has led to a deeper relationship with the community and to covering more stories, more deeply than ever before.

“We’re doing a better job of what we’ve always done” was his answer to the moderator’s question about the state of local programming on his station. Ellis also noted that his ownership group was “leaning into the technology and tools to accomplish the goal of creating more content."

Another Graham Media Group representative on the other side of the Jacob Javits Center echoed that thought.

Graham’s Michael Newman, the company’s Director of Transformation, was on a panel titled “AI and Automation in News Production: Opportunity, Efficiency, and Ethics.” That panel, featuring Hofstra University’s Dean of the Communication School Mark Lukasiewicz and AI Pioneering Meteorologist Amy Freeze, tackled the thorny questions around the adoption of artificial intelligence tools in broadcast newsrooms. Moderator Tara Puckey, the Executive Director of the RTDNA, led the panel through the questions of what is driving the adoption of AI (surprise, surprise, its rooted in the economic challenges facing the industry), the opportunity to deploy AI to eliminate repetitive tasks while building more trust with the audience through deeper dives into the data behind news stories, and the ability to create more content.

Amy Freeze showcased her work on creating her “digital twin,” an AI-generated on-camera version of herself delivering weather content online. It was a fascinating look at a future where data can be directly turned into the kind of weather forecast that TV viewers are familiar with. Freeze noted that the technology has improved dramatically since she began working with it, and that was certainly evident in the examples shown.

Graham’s Newman said that “Broadcasters have to break out beyond the legacy platforms to overcome the impact of 'AI slop.'" That being said, there is a growing amount of AI-generated content that isn’t authentic or accurate. He noted that “AI slop” is scary because the tools currently available are not 100% accurate in detecting “synthetic content."

In simpler terms, there aren’t easy ways to determine what is real and what isn’t, though it mostly looks pretty genuine.

(We’ll take this opportunity to point out to RTDNA’s Puckey that the NAB Show New York sure seems like a potential place for her organization to reincarnate its currently canceled annual conference around in future years.)

Our final stop was an afternoon session with the lofty title of “Trust, Misinformation and News Credibility: Rebuilding the Public’s Confidence in Journalism.” The participants were the notable chroniclers of the media business, Status founder and editor Oliver Darcy, Axios Media Correspondent Sara Fischer, and CNN’s Chief Media Analyst Brian Stelter. Moderator Patrick Healy, the Assistant Managing Editor for Standards and Trust at The New York Times (who dutifully noted that his job didn’t even exist until a few months ago) got things off the a quick start by asking what was to blame for the declining trust in news to which Oliver Darcy came out swinging with his swift response: “The US President and his propaganda machine.” With that, we were off to the races, and Brian Stelter responded that while it is important to “state the threat,” it is also critical to “recognize what is and isn’t within our control."

(It must have been interesting to be around Darcy and Stelter when they worked together previously at CNN. We got the impression that these two must have had some fascinating conversations across the cubicle walls back then.)

Axios’s Fischer was seated between the two, and she dove into the recent news that Disney lost twice as many subscribers to its Disney+ and Hulu streaming platforms in the wake of “Kimmelgate,” ABC’s brief “suspension” of its “Jimmy Kimmel Live” late-night franchise. Fischer called out the “capitulation of local broadcasters” in that situation. However, we would note that neither Nexstar nor Sinclair, whose stations kept Kimmel off the air even longer than the network did, really are “local broadcasters.” As pointed out by the aforementioned Rob Weisbord from Sinclair, those decisions came from the corporate headquarters of the two companies that own multiple local ABC affiliates across the country.

But Fischer accurately cited that the cancellation of Kimmel, however brief, led GOP lawmakers to “draw a red line” for FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and his podcast remarks that certainly ignited the delayed controversy over Kimmel’s monologue about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Even though Chairman Carr took on the child-like denial of having anything to do with ABC’s suspension of Kimmel, it is interesting that in another podcast just this week, he did appear to rattle his regulatory saber by stating that “Broadcast licenses are not sacred cows."

Back at the panel in NYC, all four participants agreed that the public backlash to “Kimmelgate” had demonstrated that the power of consumers is still significant. Darcy and Stelter tangled more on the idea that “normal Republicans” still check in with news sources like The New York Times, and explored the current controversy about the press corps at the Pentagon. Darcy would call the newly installed Pentagon press corps “right-wing whackos.” Stelter would counter with the plea that journalists have to continue “meeting people where they are."

Fischer brought forth two points that might have been the most salient in the discussion. The first was that “we don’t hold those in the private sector as accountable as those in the public sector.” That was a follow-up to a Darcy note that “News needs to cover Silicon Valley as a new seat of power.” He asked why Elon Musk is never described as “a right-wing influencer” in press coverage, but is usually described as “a billionaire businessman.”

She also pointed out that “two things can be true at once” and that the press needs to convey both the political and business aspects in its stories. She noted that tech platforms “only respond to market forces,” and she raised the provocative question of whether they should be regulated like utilities.

But all on the panel agreed that, for journalism, the most important thing is putting new information out to the world.

Which reminded us of the lyrics to Don Henley’s song, where he correctly notes that “Everything can change…in a New York Minute."

And yes, that song was playing on our AirPods as we left the Javits Center to head out into the metropolis that is New York City.

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