One of our “must follow” sources for industry news is The Desk, run by our friend Matthew Keys. (And that’s not just because he carries some of our columns from here at The Topline.) Matthew’s breaking news emails are always solid, and today was no exception when he pushed out an item that immediately caught our eye:

TEGNA’s new phone apps: Like TikTok, but for News

We could almost feel the grumpy old men inside of us feeling the need to yell at some kids to “get off our damn lawn,” but seeing as there is nothing but snow and ice currently outside—we decided to supress that reaction and read on.

It seems the future expansion teams of the Nexstar Nation aren’t sitting around waiting to be conquered; they're actually doing some new stuff, like launching a new app focused on content personalization and vertical video. Well, color us intrigued, so we immediately checked in on our hometown TEGNA station, only to be disappointed to learn that they weren’t one of the first stations to roll out this new app.

As The Desk reported, only four TEGNA stations were in the first round of this deployment: WXIA in Atlanta, KUSA in Denver, WTHR in Indianapolis, and KING in Seattle. (We’ll leave it up to you to speculate on why those four markets in particular, we have our own suspicions.)

So we downloaded the nifty new app for Denver’s 9 News after realising that the station doesn’t use its KUSA call letters much, and searching for that in the app store turned up some confusing results. Once we located the correct app, we installed it on our iPhone. We began to check out what was in “the new mobile experience...tied directly to TEGNA’s ongoing transformation of its local stations into around-the-clock, story-first newsrooms.”

The new apps feature a sign-up process, forgive us, that should have read, “a localized onboarding,” that asks about setting up where you live and want weather information for “customizable forecasts” along with those content categories each user might find of most interest. Frankly, it was no more odious than any other local station app we have signed up with in the past year.

We found it amusing that the app touted “Better Journalism, Supported by Ads” as a reason to allow their activity to be tracked across other companies’ apps and websites. This is something that all apps in the Apple ecosystem must present users with the option to enable, and, like every other app we install, we did not allow 9 News to track our activity. We suppose we will have to live with less than “better journalism.” Of course, you may choose whichever option you are comfortable with. You can also sign up to give the station even more information about yourself and enable location tracking so your weather information is tailored to your precise location.

Adrienne Roark, who is TEGNA’s Chief Content Officer, told The Desk that the apps “reflect how local journalism is increasingly consumed, with audiences expecting immediate access to reporting on the devices they use throughout the day.” And that might be true if your consumption of news is more likely to be from the “doomscrolling” of short vertical videos on TikTok, Instagram’s Reels, YouTube’s Shorts, or Snapchat. Hold that thought for a moment.

For some reason, the Denver 9 app is strangely labelled on your iPhone screen as “Denver Newsf…” We’ll leave it to you fill in just what the “Newsf…” word might be. Opening the app, you see a clean presentation of the station’s top news stories in a vertical scroll on the first of just four “buttons” at the bottom of the app. The next button gives you a scrolling feed of those vertical videos from the station’s reporters and anchors, Each video is of the typical “snackable” variety, be it a reporter talking into a camera as if they were “vlogging” or a clip from a traditional newscast, with the anchor being shown in one box, stacked on another with the relevant b-roll of a news story.

We were disappointed when the morning meteorologist began giving us a “conversational style” chat about the local weather forecast, only to turn her smartphone’s selfie camera to shoot the weather graphics off of the computer she was using to prepare her broadcast presentation. We can only hope that the workflow of a business that is built on video presentation can figure out a way to get graphics into a vertical video format other than shooting them off the screen like an influencer living in their parent’s basement.

(Maybe that was the look they were going for?)

Listen, it would be easy to snark all over this idea to present the news in a different way on screens other than regular television ones. TEGNA told The Desk that they saw “a 40% increase in use” in terms of video in this new app, and increased engagement overall. We hope that those test results hold up and improve going forward. Every local TV station’s news programming should be exposed to as many viewers as possible, especially as audiences for traditional linear broadcasts have gone downhill faster than racers on Pike’s Peak.

That problem isn’t just a local news one. While we promised ourselves that we would go at least a week here without mentioning the name Bari Weiss, the media industry complex was overrun yesterday with the details of Ms. Weiss’s all-hands meeting in the NYC newsroom of CBS News. We concur with the editors of the new “Mediaite One Sheet” daily newsletter, who pronounced that Oliver Darcy on Status had the best all-around coverage from inside the meeting.

Aside from presenting herself to many of the CBS employees gathered for the very first time (even though she has been in her post as “Editor-In-Chief” since last October) and trying to address the unease that she is turning the news division of CBS towards a much stronger “tack to starboard” as the late Walter Cronkite would have said aboard his beloved 64-foot Hinckley sailboat named “The Wyntje.” (For the less nautical amongst us, that means she would be turning hard to the right.)

Weiss answered some tough questions and presented her vision for what she wants the storied news organization under her leadership to look like. She announced the addition of some social media “celebrities” as new contributors to CBS News. The content history of the new contributors suggested they would be comfortable appearing on FOX News, so those big reveals didn’t exactly elicit applause. Nor did morning anchor Gayle King’s bemoanment of leakers in the newsroom, speculating on King’s contract renewal under the Weiss administration.

But Weiss did deliver some remarks that sounded like they might have come from anyone taking a new job to lead a newsroom over the last decade. She addressed the biggest questions facing every one of those newsrooms, namely, where did our audience go and can we get them back? Stating flatly that the news business has “changed more in the last decade than in the last 150 years,” she added that “the transformation isn’t over yet.” According to Oliver Darcy’s account of the meeting, Weiss “served up clichés about being digital-first and meeting audiences where they are on social platforms.”

Just like every local TV news director has been preaching for more than the last decade or so.

Maybe Weiss should call Adrienne Roark at TEGNA and talk about this new app and embracing vertical video, as if they were trying to turn their local news content into something more like TikTok? While it is easy to deride the effort, it isn’t the worst idea to attract folks who aren’t watching much news on broadcast television that we have seen.

Plus, at this point, Roark may know the names of more folks in the CBS Newsroom than Weiss does. After all, Adrienne was in that same newsroom for nearly four years before Bari’s arrival.

All of this leaves us with just one pressing question to ponder: If Cronkite were alive today, would he be doing vertical videos from the deck of “The Wyntje” Maybe he would have explained how all of his boats were named with “a nod to a Dutch ancestor, the first woman to marry into the Cronkite line in New Amsterdam in the 1640s.”

Now that would be a vertical video we’d watch.

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