Our weekend scanning of YouTube was interrupted by a video the Google algorithm served up to us. From the YouTube account representing “Google Small Business” came this headline: “Google and Graham Media Group Are Making News.” (Click on the link to play the video.)

The three-minute video proceeds to document the story of how Graham Media’s KPRC-TV in Houston is, to quote Graham’s Director of Transformation, Michael Newman, “not just reporting the news, but helping to shape its future.”

Color us intrigued.

The video explains, through interviews with various folks on the 2 News staff, just how this transformation is happening. Spoiler alert: the star of this effort is the groundbreaking technology…built right inside the Google Pixel 10 smartphone.

Yes indeed, the latest model of Google’s flagship Pixel phone line has become an essential new tool because, well, to hear reporter Rilwan Balogun tell it, “Big thing here is innovation, while also telling true storytelling.” Photographer Adrian Montes picks up the narrative and lets you know that: “Just recently, we were issued a Google Pixel as part of the technology to be able to shoot our stories.” The video goes on to expound on how good the Google Pixel’s camera is, along with other features that allow photographers and reporters to not only capture high-quality video but also transcribe, edit, and transmit live video from the field.

It would be easy for us to be cynical and make some snarky comment about how we’re glad that the good folks at KPRC and Graham Media Group have discovered that smartphones now come with cameras, but that would miss the larger questions for every television newsroom that this promotional video from Google actually raises. (Not the least of which might be any details about the business relationship between Graham and Google, which isn’t disclosed in any manner within the video.)

Leaving aside that detail, we actually applaud the effort to acknowledge that a current state-of-the-art smartphone can produce video and audio that are definitely worthy of the label “broadcast quality” that engineers used to be fond of. That label could be (and often was) used dismissively about video and/or audio produced with less than professional-grade equipment. It often looked or sounded as such.

They weren’t wrong in their assessment, but in recent years, a few things have happened that have eliminated the gap between what professionals and everyday folks can produce with the tools anyone can now purchase at their local Best Buy.

The first was that the gear got much more capable and accessible. In the two decades since the first iPhones and Android phones came onto the market, the hardware and software improved by leaps and bounds with each successive year’s model. To be clear, while Graham may have settled on the Google Pixel for whatever reason, Apple’s iPhone can do all of the same things—though having used both devices as “daily drivers” in recent months, there are currently some AI-based features that Google is ahead on now, as Apple’s struggles to roll out its own “Apple Intelligence” integration into the iPhone and other devices.

The second thing was the arrival of the covid pandemic. When newsrooms were forced to come up with creative ways to keep the news on the air, we accepted people appearing on webcams from their homes and news video from cellphones, because it was often the first and only footage to be had.

Another point to consider is that the economics certainly make it appealing to put a $1,000 smartphone in the hands of every member of the newsroom, for far less than the $5K-25K price of a single professional electronic newsgathering camcorder. Not that those units don’t have several features that can produce superior footage, at least when in the hands of a trained, experienced photojournalist.

Call us old-fashioned, but we still believe that not everyone can pick up a camera and do the same job that those who carry and use cameras as their primary job every day can. Sure, you can take anyone with a driver’s license and sit them down in a Formula 1 race car. They won’t automatically be able to win a Grand Prix race. Hell, they might not even be able to start the engine.

The point is that having the tool doesn’t guarantee you can produce the same results as a trained professional.

Besides, we haven’t seen a professional camcorder that lets you edit the video, write the script, and distribute the finished story to the world, as any flagship smartphone can. The good folks at Apple have been telling us for years that an “off the shelf” iPhone can shoot “cinematic footage” worthy of being in a movie, or at least a primetime commercial—assuming you have all of the additional “accessories” needed to do so.

A lone journalist equipped with a smartphone is a step towards the current trend that television news has been embracing of late, where “Newsrooms Are Adopting Creator Tactics To Engage Skeptical Audiences.” That was the title of a session at last December’s “NewsTECHForum” that has been put on by the good folks over at TVNewsCheck.com for years now. The session explored “the blurred line” between broadcast journalists and content creators, within the context of the “twin pressures of audience fragmentation and an industry-wide crisis of trust.”

In its article about the session, the publication reports that a narrative emerged among the panelists: “success in the modern media ecosystem no longer relies on the size of the camera or the polish of the studio, but on the authenticity of the voice and the transparency of the reporting process.”

Of course, the size of a camera or the polish of a studio doesn’t equal success in earning the public’s trust.

When Boston’s WBZ-TV first went on the air on June 9th, 1948, its new television studio wasn’t completely finished, so newsman Arch MacDonald is said to have put a piece of wood across two barrels, right in front of one of the station’s brand new cameras. He then sat down at the improvised “news desk” and delivered the station’s first news report at 6:15 pm. He’d keep the job for the next two decades.

But MacDonald would probably not be a success in the “modern media ecosystem” because, as TVNewsCheck.com puts it, “the most effective storytellers are those who have abandoned the ‘voice of God’ anchor cadence in favor of a more intimate, transparent and platform-agnostic approach.”

Which is what so many stations are now trying to perfect, including apparently those of the aforementioned Graham Media Group. Obviously, the television business is now a far cry from what it was when it first flickered onto screens across the country in the late 1940’s. In glorious black and white, no less.

In Houston, KPRC-TV would follow WBZ-TV’s broadcast debut in Boston some six months later on January 1st, 1949.

The technology used to put Houston’s very first television station on the air was as transformational then as what the station is deploying today. But as always, the most important reason people choose whether to watch any news story, whether on their televisions, computers, or mobile devices, is how they judge the quality of the journalism presented.

Yes, the audience is more fragmented than ever. The landscape of “the modern media ecosystem” is way more crowded, definitely more tribal, and in some cases, far more trivial than perhaps at any point in history. Trust and authenticity matter most, regardless of the tools used to create and deliver news stories--on any given platform.

For decades, television stations spent countless hours (and dollars) promoting their latest technological acquisitions to the audience, in the hopes of solidifying their position as “The News Leader” or whatever branding position was trendy at the time. Then the industry recognized, somewhat reluctantly, that the people seen and heard mattered more than the latest technology. More recently, promotional efforts have centered on how a station delivers “Stories That Matter.”

All of that is basic advertising, designed to attract a larger audience and make them loyal to one news source over another.

But viewer loyalty is more perishable these days than a just-made ice cream cone on a warm day. Television news continues to compete for its place in that same “modern media ecosystem” being governed by the new rules from the audience who are continually asking, “what have you got for me in the next minute,” rather than “what did you bring me in the days, weeks, or even years before?”

Technology changes. Human nature doesn’t. And that undeniable truth is what’s truly shaping the future.

Of pretty much everything.

-30-