We have published fifty original articles on “The Topline” so far, and none of them has generated the level of feedback that our Monday edition has about the lack of attendance at the annual RTDNA convention, held last week in New Orleans. Much of what we heard was in agreement with our genuine concern for the event’s future, if not for the organization itself.

We have also gained additional insights from individuals with direct knowledge of how things may have reached this point.

A reminder that our concern stemmed from the word that the attendance at the 2025 RTDNA event was reported to be considerably less than 200 people. Our initial figure came from Rick Gevers' weekly newsletter, which is typically published on Sunday nights. Gevers chose not to attend the annual RTDNA event for the first time in some 47 years. We found his decision noteworthy because he has supported the organization for such a long time, both as a former News Director and as a talent agent serving the industry.

Since our Monday item, we have heard from some who did attend the convention and found themselves surprised by more than just the low turnout. Especially since the RTDNA was reportedly offering free conference registrations to local TV newsrooms across Louisiana, in an effort to encourage more in-state attendees and boost the attendance total slightly. We have no idea how many people took up the RTDNA on this offer. (To be clear, we don’t begrudge those who may have accepted–it probably made the difference for those folks being able to attend.)

Speaking of being able to attend, we’ve heard from others concerned that the RTDNA has been selecting pricier hotel venues in recent years to host the annual convention. For example, the New Orleans convention hotel, the Hotel Monteleone, was charging nearly $250 a night for a room. Certainly, hotel rooms everywhere are more expensive these days. However, we’ve learned that the hotel was charging only $150 a night for a room booked through the Louisiana Association of Broadcasters to attend their annual conference, held just last month in the same location.

The cost of hotel accommodations has been a pain point for the past few years. We heard mentions that the expense of staying in the convention hotel was “a bit pricey” for previous events in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and prior locations. This cost may have also reduced some journalism students' participation at the convention, which typically has made up a decent percentage of the attendees.

Our original article hypothesized that the annual convention was a significant source of revenue for the organization. However, multiple sources indicate that the RTDNA’s primary source of revenue is now the administration and awarding of the Edward R. Murrow awards each year. The Murrows are reported to have generated over half of the organization’s revenue in recent years. It is unclear whether the RTDNA is losing money on its annual convention. Still, with no exhibit floor to speak of, only a few corporate sponsorships, and dwindling attendance, it wouldn’t be hard to believe that is the case.

Monday’s post also drew a comparison between the turnout for the RTDNA convention and that of the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), which was also held in New Orleans last week. Multiple readers pointed out that the IRE’s agenda is strongly focused on practical topics and hands-on sessions. As one news director put it to us, “People go to the RTDNA mostly to be seen. They go to the IRE to learn new things and bring that knowledge back to their newsrooms. So if I only have room for one in the budget, the IRE is a much better investment.”

Those looking to recruit for their news organizations also note that the IRE’s annual convention is way more beneficial for that purpose as well. That may explain why there were nearly ten times as many registered for the IRE event as for the RTDNA. While we were only half-serious in proposing that the RTDNA hold its annual convention concurrently with the IRE, more than a few people asked about revisiting the idea of holding the RTDNA event in conjunction with the big NAB show each April in Las Vegas.

As we wrote back in April, we think News Directors should absolutely attend the NAB show. Having the RTDNA adjacent to that event made a ton of sense when it was done for a few years in the past. We’re told that two factors led to the end of the arrangement: the first was that the NAB stopped offering financial incentives to do so, and that some members of the RTDNA board at the time weren’t happy sharing the spotlight with the larger industry event. This same sentiment may have also led to the end of partnering with the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and other groups of journalists during the annual conferences that were held under the “Excellence In Journalism” banner.

Whatever the reasons, and whatever egos may have been involved in the seemingly fateful decision at the time, it is apparent to many that the time has come to reconsider the merits of even holding an annual conference in the future. As long-time news executive Jacques Natz replied to us on LinkedIn, “There are too many other ways to get professional growth sessions and leadership connections. Change the name and mission: focus on the Murrows.”

While we haven’t reached the conclusion that would be the best course for the RTDNA, Natz does have a point. If the association isn’t providing the opportunity to grow the next generation of newsroom leaders through an annual professional development event–whomever it can be held in conjunction with–the RTDNA board of directors needs to carefully examine, in the words of Murrow himself, “the hard and demanding realities which must indeed be faced if we are to survive.”

And for that, a great deal more than just “good luck” will be required.

Some three months and and seventeen days ago we asked the question in one of our first posts here on The Topline, “Can One Hire Save Tegna.” That hire was Adrienne Roark, who was decamping from the mess at CBS to take the helm as Chief Content Officer at television group owner Tegna—where a mess of a different sort awaited.

We’ve waited since then to see what course she would chart to start dealing with problems that have been years in the making. Yesterday, we learned of one of them. Well, three of them actually, with the announcement of three new Vice Presidents of Content at Tegna.

Carol Fowler from the company’s WXIA-TV in Atlatna, Julie Wolfe from KING-TV in Seattle, and Chris Peña, who has been with the consulting firm Blue Engine, will step into the new VP roles with regional responsibilities for stations in the Mid-South, West and Midwest regions, respectively. Given that the announcement of their new positions detailed them covering only 23 of the company’s 51 current markets, we’d expect there are more Vice Presidents yet to be named, assuming each market will be overseen by someone at a VP level.

Tegna recently made annother announcement that it is adding over 100 hours of local news programming across its portfolio of stations. That would seem like a major expansion, except that the bulk of those hours are said to be expanding morning local news programming into the 7 to 9am hours, via each station’s “plus” branded streaming outlet. So this appears more of an extension of existing local news programming to an online-only audience, while network programming is being carried and where local competitors are likely to be already in place—both with over the air and over the top coverage.

The larger challenge that still awaits the content C-Suite in the Tyson HQ is turning “the ship” around after the recent years that it has been a bit adrift. Ever since the Joel Cheatwood-led attempt to install a news template across the stations that was built on following social media trends. The audience didn’t follow, but then there was the extended period of uncertainty from Standard General’s 8-billion dollar bid to take over Tegna, which ultimately failed, but not before depositing $136 million into Tegna’s treasury. Hopefully that helped cover the exit packages for the corporate leadership under previous CEO Dave Lougee, who all began disembarking “down the gangway” as it were.

And we almost forgot about the recent decimation of all creative services & promotion types at the stations, in favor of a handful of regionalized CSD’s, which the company seemed to have to reverse course on in record time.

All of this has left many of the company’s strongest stations far less than their former selves, while weaker properties have been working hard just to tread water. We wouldn’t presume to sort which stations fall into each of these groups, though we are relatively certain that is just what Adrienne Roark has been working to figure out for the past three months…and say, sixteen days. Now it appears that she has recruited three trusted lieutenants to help the cause. And perhaps there are a few more yet to join the team.

Or perhaps there are a few markets that might be sold or traded when the FCC starts its promised deregulation effort and breaks the dam on station trading that we forecast last Wednesday. (Get your own cool metaphor, TV NewsCheck.)

One interesting aspect of Tegna’s Monday announcement for the three new VPs of Content is a description that along with overseeing news content for a regional group of stations, each will also oversee an area of “content priority” such as weather coverage, morning news strategy, sales and sponsorships, solutions-based journalism and so forth. Given the press release’s language that states “each will be well-positioned to help identify trends and when appropriate, foster cross-station collaboration that enables journalists to produce more in-depth stories from local perspectives.”

We sure hope that isn’t some lofty-sounding corporate speak that translates into more centralizing or “hubbing” of content into so-called “centers for innovation.” The business has seen enough of that hidden iceberg in the past decade, which others have run into at full speed—all while thinking they were on course to reach a destination of success.

Call us hopeless optimists, but we are pulling for the team at Tegna to succeed on their transformational voyage. The broadcasting industry needs more healthy local stations that are doing more real innovating than focusing on collecting a huge pile of industry awards that the audience doesn’t see as treasure of any kind.

Don’t even get us started on that rant.

Long-time industry observer and talent agent (his day job), Rick Gevers, pointed out a rather uncomfortable truth in the latest edition of his must-read weekly newsletter, which tracks the comings and goings of television news directors. He chose not to attend last week’s annual conference of the Radio Television Digital News Association, held in New Orleans. No criticism from us about that, we chose not to attend as well.

But in Gevers' case, it’s the first RTDNA conference he has missed since 1978. Even our journalist-impaired math skills can calculate that it was the end of a 47-year streak. Being a class act, Rick didn’t make a big deal about it. So leave it to us to point out why it really is.

It isn’t as if Rick doesn’t like to visit New Orleans in June (though the weather there can be less than hospitable at this time of year). In fact, he was in the Crescent City last week, attending the annual convention of IRE, the Investigative Reporters and Editors association.

Now, Rick didn’t spell out exactly why he broke his nearly 50-year streak of attending the annual RTDNA convention, but in his Sunday night dispatch, he pointed out the really uncomfortable stat–one that had nothing to do with his beloved Indiana Pacers losing a tough Game 7 and in turn, the NBA Championship to the Oklahoma City Thunder.

The attendance at the IRE Convention topped 1,650 people. The attendance at the RTDNA Convention was a mere 180 people.

We’ll quantify that differently: Nearly ten times as many people attended the convention for a specialized group of journalists as attended the once premier annual event in broadcast journalism. The one where Edward R. Murrow once gave a little speech that George Clooney turned into part of his Broadway play, which made more money in a single week of its run than any Broadway production ever has in a single week.

And so we’ll ask the uncomfortable question: “Wither the RTDNA?”

Let’s make our position clear: we are in no way supporting the demise of the association. We believe that the RTDNA plays a crucial role in the industry. But you would be forgiven if you had stated, as one RTDNA convention attendee did to us, that their visit to New Orleans left them “wondering about the future of the business.”

We’ve been around long enough to remember when the association was still known by a similar abbreviation as the RTNDA, which stood for the Radio Television News Directors Association. It hosted a well-attended and vibrant annual conference back when we first started going. We may have even landed a job or two there over the years. (Yes, we have attended for a few decades, but not as many as Gevers.) The RTNDA event was held each year in a different city, and it had solid attendance, not to mention a substantial agenda and perhaps a few memorable parties in its evenings. (Thanks for all those memories, CNN Newsource.)

When attendance started to waver, the RTDNA tried some different ideas to boost attendance at its annual convention. It was held on a couple of occasions with other journalism-focused groups such as the NABJ, NAHJ, and others. If memory serves us correctly, it was also once held adjacent to the annual NAB show in Las Vegas, the broadcast industry’s premiere (and best-attended) yearly event.

A couple of years ago, when the RTDNA convention came to our hometown of Minneapolis, attendance was small enough to be truly surprising to an informal group of us who had gathered for an annual dinner at each RTDNA for years. Part of the dinner conversation that evening at the legendary Murray’s Steak House was about the difficult, but obvious question:

“What’s going to happen to the RTDNA if nobody shows up to their convention?”

The question extends beyond the future of the event to perhaps that of the association itself. The annual convention is one of the primary sources of income for the organization. At least that is what we’re told by people familiar with the inner workings of the group. That was one reason why it moved away from holding its event with other organizations, even if the strength in numbers might be evident to anyone counting attendance.

Another question to consider is who was attending the annual RTDNA event–and what they were getting out of it. A cursory comparison of the agendas of last week’s RTDNA event and the IRE convention tells part of the story. Over the years, the IRE event has established a solid reputation as a premier training and networking opportunity for journalists in investigative positions across the country. On LinkedIn, we saw a few posts from folks attending Gray Media’s company day at the IRE convention in New Orleans. They had 140 journalists in attendance. While Gray has been investing heavily in investigative reporting across its entire group of stations, and deserve to be commended for their efforts in the space, the fact that there were more people from the group owner attending the IRE than the total number of people at the RTDNA event days earlier is pretty stunning to us.

Do we have the answers for what the RTDNA board of directors should do to address this issue? Hardly.

However, a question of relevance must be addressed in a concrete and meaningful manner — and there is some urgency about doing so. Yes, we are aware of all the points regarding the current state of the broadcast news business, not to mention broadcasting itself being in a state of decline. Yes, we know that news budgets are being slashed, much like scenes in a Wes Craven movie. And apparently, many news directors and their companies have decided that attending the annual RTDNA event is no longer a priority, especially when larger groups hold their own internal meetings for news department leadership.

All that notwithstanding, if something doesn’t fundamentally change for the RTDNA and quickly, we have to wonder what’s next for the organization? At this point, it may be worthwhile to ask the leadership of the IRE to consider merging the two organizations' events in 2026 or beyond.

At least then, maybe Rick Gevers would be able to start a new attendance streak.

We’re back with another edition of things you might want to read and watch this weekend.

Off the bat, in case you missed Tim Hanlon of TVREV taking broadcasters to the woodshed over plans to turn “NexGen TV” (also known as ATSC 3.0) into anything and seemingly everything but the new and improved version of HDTV that was originally promised, you should definitely check out this article.

In fact, TVREV.com is now on our “must subscribe” list for television news professionals as a regular read to keep up with the larger issues facing the entire business of television. As their masthead promises, they deliver on “The Future of Television. Dissected Daily.”

While we are mentioning free subscriptions, our accountant would insist that we should remind you that if you don’t subscribe to TVND.com, it would be great if you would take a moment and do so. It’s free, and we will deliver our dispatches right to your inbox as soon as we publish them. Just click the subscribe button at the top of this webpage. (If you’re reading this in your email, thanks for already supporting the cause. Share us with your friends.)

One of America’s most interesting companies has to be Tesla. Whatever you may think of founder Elon Musk’s political and personal lives, the fact that the company that made electric vehicles legitimate was worth more than Ford, Toyota and GM combined is no small accomplishment. Now the company faces a “brain drain” that is not all that dissimilar to what has been happening in the television news business. Patrick Brown chronicles the current crisis for The Atlantic magazine and his latest article is a fascinating read.

Speaking of Tesla, we want to introduce you to one Andrej Karpathy. He is the former senior director of Artificial Intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla. Before that, he was one of the founders of Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT. So yes, he is, as anyone from Boston might say “wicked smart." Just last week, we experienced Tesla’s AI-powered FSD or “Full Self Driving” mode for the first time. This was while driving on a three-hour trip across California. Candidly, we would describe the experience as impressive to the point of almost seeming magical. When the guy who was behind that, now wants to teach us how “software is changing…again”, we are definitely interested in what he has to say.

Karpathy’s recent keynote at at event called the “AI Startup School” is now available to watch on YouTube. We will warn you that it is a deep dive into a subject that maybe only true geeks might love. But it is a fascinating look into what the future of computer software in the age of artificial intelligence will probably look like, so maybe give it a few minutes to see if it is for you.

But if that is just too heavy a watch for your weekend, let us give you a different recommendation for something “completely different.” We loved the first three seasons of HBO Max’s comedy “Hacks” starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder. But the recently released fourth season is a brilliant behind-the-scenes look at the television business through the premise of launching a late-night TV talk show by a veteran stand-up comedian and her creative writing partner. It’s funny and even poignant at times, but also insightful on the forces at work in the process of producing television. Highly recommended.

Above all, we definitely recommend that you have a great and enjoyable weekend. See you back here next week.

Forgive us being away from the keyboard for a few days, we had the audacity to actually try to take a small vacation. As has seemingly been the case for the entirety of our working lives in broadcast news, there weren’t any big stories that happened in the world while we were away, right?

Well not unless you count the continuation of a nation sharply divided over ongoing immigration policies by the federal government, leading to clashes with protestors over raids in Southern California. Then, over the objections of State and Local leaders, national guard soldiers and active marines were ordered into the area increasing tensions. Over this past weekend, an alleged political assassin killed two and wounded two others in our home state of Minnesota, leading to a tense and massive manhunt before a suspect was captured without incident in a rural area in less than 48 hours. This past Saturday also saw the dichotomy of a sparsely attended military parade in the nation’s capital, on the same day millions of citizens turned out for peaceful protests across the country against the current administration. And while all that was going on here at home, a shooting war broke out in the Middle East between Israel and Iran–over the latter’s ongoing quest to produce a nuclear weapon.

Sure, just another week in the news business in 2025. Such as that business may be at the moment.

Yesterday brought the headline that for the first time, social media and video networks have now displaced television as the first choice for how Americans get their news. At least that is the one of the key findings in a new report from the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

With all that presently as backdrop, we are going to focus here on the future.

Specifically, the future for the business of buying and selling local television stations. Because from everything we are hearing, there is about to be a flood of activity in that space after a pretty long period of there just being an occasional trickle. (Yes, we know we are leaning into this whole water analogy pretty hard, but it is our first day back at the keyboard.)

The climate for such deal making seems to grow more favorable by the day. The Senate’s approval of the nomination of Olivia Trusty to the Federal Communications Commission will give the commission a republican majority. That would appear to clear the way for a wide slate of industry reforms that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has been wanting to move forward with. That slate is expected to include a loosening of ownership regulations that could permit the industry’s big group owners to become even bigger. Thus some long anticipated transactions should be announced pretty soon. Like any day now.

Two of them are worth a closer look as indicators being watched for the overall health of the business as seen through the lens of who is selling and who is buying.

The first deal everyone is waiting to hear about is the anticipated sale of Apollo Global Management’s interest in the television properties of Cox Media Group. Since acquiring a controlling interest in Cox’s television stations in 2019 (along with newspaper and radio interests Cox had in Dayton, Ohio) it has seemed that Apollo was hoping for something more lucrative than what it got from that original transaction. In 2022, Apollo would package and spin a chunk of Cox’s smaller market television properties, including WHBQ-TV in Memphis and the duopoly of KOKI-TV and KMYT in Tulsa, to an outfit called Imagicomm. Early this year, Imagicomm would exit the local television business, selling the Memphis and Tulsa stations, along with smaller properties in Spokane and Yakima, Washington; Pendleton, Oregon and Yuma, Arizona, to the newly formed Rincon Broadcasting Group. Rincon is headed up by Todd Parkin, who was most recently with Sinclair’s regional sports business that was known as Bally Sports Network.

But the big deal that Apollo wants to make is for the core group of Cox’s remaining ten television stations in major markets from Boston to Seattle, along with their powerful trio of ABC affiliates in the Southeast, including WSB-TV in Atlanta, WFTV in Orlando and WSOC-TV in Charlotte. That group of stations could be worth about $4 Billion and would be of interest to any number of potential owners, including industry “mega groups” like Nexstar, Sinclair and Gray, who would most likely have access to the major money needed to finance such an acquisition. Nexstar, in particular, has been mentioned frequently to us as a likely purchaser for the Cox stations, even though it would have to figure out what it would do in Charlotte, where it already owns a duopoly of Fox affiliate, WJZY and My Network affiliate WMYT, as well as in Dayton where it also has a duopoly of NBC affiliate WDTN and CW affiliate WBDT. Given the long standing strength of Cox’s WSOC and WHIO in those markets, the question would be what Nexstar would keep and what would it spin off to get FCC approval of acquiring the Cox station group.

Gray, based in Atlanta, would of course be interested in getting its hands on WSB-TV, which some observers have noted could fetch a billion dollar price tag just on its own. Gray too has some complications in realizing a deal for the Cox television stations, given that it currently owns WANF and WPCH in Atlanta. WANF, locally known as “Atlanta News First” was just in the news as it will soon be without a network affiliation. That is a result of CBS moving its network there to its owned and operated WVEU there in August. Gray also owns WBTV in Charlotte, NC, so that is also two markets to figure out what would be kept and what might be sold.

Of course, we’re assuming that even a reform-minded FCC would still keep a Nexstar or Gray from owning two “big four” network-affiliated stations in a major market such as Atlanta or Charlotte. That thinking could be outdated by the ever increasing drumbeat of lobbying that local television owners need far less restrictions to be able to compete and survive against the far less regulated digital media behemoths in the marketplace for eyeballs and advertising dollars. One thing that everyone expects to see is the consolidation of the many “sidecar” deals that have allowed groups to operate multiple stations in markets where they would be prevented from outright owning more than one television property.

On the other end of the spectrum for selling local television stations is the curious case of Allen Media Group. Byron Allen’s foray into local television ownership hasn’t likely panned out the way the successful TV producer had hoped for six years ago, when he borrowed nearly a billion dollars to assemble a portfolio of some 25 local TV stations–in smaller markets. Multiple industry observers have opined that the value of these stations has dropped significantly and that prospective buyers are finding that the financial situations at these properties is “challenging” especially in formulating any sort of offer to purchase the stations that Allen would consider to be worth accepting.

That’s not to say that there aren’t buyers out there for any and all local TV stations that are presently on the market for sale–or might be very soon. There may not be that many suitors able–or willing–to swallow an entire group like Allen or Cox in a single gulp. But there will be buyers, both established names and brand new ones, who are going through the process of doing their “due diligence” that is playing out behind the scenes even as we type these words. They are all looking to be ready to make offers on any local stations that may come onto the market in the months ahead.

In other words, as soon as we hear that one deal is being announced, don’t be surprised if that leads to a proverbial wave of dealmaking for stations–the likes of which we haven’t seen in the television business for quite some time.

The big questions to be answered? Who will be left standing on higher ground? And will anybody be left still watching those stations?

We’re almost afraid to take any more time off this summer.

Today was one of those days that put local TV newsrooms to the test. Aside from the expected coverage of protests across the country, there was an unexpected and horrific story emerging in the Twin Cities, where in the very early hours of this Saturday, a gunman, apparently dressed like a law enforcement officer, shot and killed State Representative Melissa Hortman, Speaker Emerita of the Minnesota House, along with her husband Mark, in their Brooklyn Park, MN home. The gunman also shot State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette multiple times in their nearby Champlin, MN home. The Hoffmans were both very seriously wounded, but are expected to survive.

All four local TV newsrooms were in continuing coverage for many hours today as neighborhoods were “sheltered in place,” a manhunt expanded to cover multiple states (it continues as I write this), and key details were agonizingly slow to emerge—as they often are in such situations.

As the first major local news event post my being in a newsroom for the past fifty years, as well as finding myself across the country on a trip visiting family, it was a bit odd to be on the proverbial “outside looking in.” But I quickly took comfort in seeing that many former colleagues and competitors were on the air, doing the vital work necessary to keep viewers informed of what was developing on the story in real time. From all the coverage I watched, I can tell you each station had its moments of strength, along with a few minor struggles along the way.

What I can also tell you is that as a critical viewer, I am grateful for the work done today by all the local journalists back home who worked on this particular Saturday in June. Yes, there will be more coverage to be done in the days and weeks to come. But I am confident they will continue to work all aspects of the story and keep the community informed.

-Kirk Varner

We had really wanted to see George Clooney’s performance as Edward R. Murrow in his production of “Good Night, and Good Luck” at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway this Spring. Life being what it is, one thing and another came up, and we didn’t get to make the trip to NYC to do so. So, this past Saturday night, we tuned in as CNN made a bit of history (as Anderson Cooper repeatedly told us) when it televised the play’s final performance to its worldwide television audience.

At least, whatever audience CNN still has these days, the drumbeat grows deafening that linear television has been relegated to near-extinct status.

We’ll admit here to being fans of Mr. Clooney as an actor, producer, and supporter of journalism for quite some time. He comes by that honestly, as the son of longtime local newsman Nick Clooney, whom we have competed against and met on several occasions. Son George grew up around his father, who worked in local television news in Cincinnati. As a result, his appreciation for the business, and in turn its legacy as established by Murrow’s work in the nascent years of the television medium, is strong.

The original movie version of “Good Night, and Good Luck” premiered some 20 years ago, in which Clooney played Fred Friendly, Murrow’s producing partner, and later, the President of CBS News. Friendly would quit that position in 1966 over the issue of corporate interference in his desire to have the network cover the US Senate hearings into the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War. For the Broadway production, he would play Murrow himself. (We have to admit now that we preferred him as Friendly, along with actor David Strathairn’s masterful portrayal of Murrow in the film version.)

But it was a fine production, even stirring, some might say. Especially to hear Murrow’s words given voice in this precarious moment of American history, which draws parallel to the troubling days known as “The Red Scare” in the 1950s. Yes, the nation was gripped by a brash politician who deftly used the media spotlight of the moment to conduct a thinly-veiled campaign of nationalism packaged in a questionable effort to “expose” communist infiltration of the United States government, if not the entirety of the nation itself.

Murrow and Friendly’s courage in doing so, and in pushing back on CBS Chairman Bill Paley’s effort to tone down the coverage to protect his business empire from the wrath of McCarthyism that had its champion and supporters in Washington, DC. While it is easy to understand “The Junior Senator from Wisconsin” as the key figure in the dark chapter of our nation’s history, the depth of how subversive the movement that also promoted an “America First” campaign was so much deeper than one man, chairing the hearings of “The Subcommittee of Investigations for the Committee on Government Operations.”

If your knowledge of this particular period of US History is lacking, as admittedly ours was (given that we were born after the events portrayed in “Good Night, and Good Luck), let us recommend the excellent two seasons of Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC podcast titled “ULTRA." It does a brilliant job of telling the story of the rise of the ultra-nationalist movement from before America entered into World War II through to after the war and the ultimate showdown over McCarthyism in the 1950s. The story is told through the effective use of period sound (including NBC Radio newscasts from the time) and interviews with historians who explain what would sound like an amazing novel about spies and counterintelligence—except that this all actually happened here.

Speaking of political novels, if you haven’t ever read 1935’s “It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis (or read it lately), you might want to get a copy or download it to your Kindle. Before somebody decides to ban it because it seems a bit too prescient in its premise.

Returning to the big night on Broadway, we hope you had the opportunity to see the telecast of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” as it is not planned to be made available for streaming viewing. We’d assume that is because the rights would be too complicated to allow for that delivery, and there is also the rumor that Clooney and company may take the production to the London stage at a future date. (Given the record-breaking box office in its limited Broadway run, it is easy to understand the motivation to do so.)

Following the play, CNN aired a live studio special, led by the network’s Anderson Cooper. It featured a panel of journalists, before an audience of journalism students and educators, to discuss the play’s message and its connection to current-day events and the state of journalism. The panel featured Walter Isaacson, author, journalist, and former President of CNN; Kara Swisher, noted tech journalist and podcaster; CNN Anchor Abby Phillip; groundbreaking network news anchor Connie Chung; Jorge Ramos, former longtime national anchor at Univision; and Bret Stephens, Opinion columnist for The New York Times.

There was the predictable analysis and opinion on why the play and its message matter greatly in the year 2025, as well as what it says about the challenges of practicing journalism at this time. There was discussion about whether there is a Murrow-like figure in this moment, and whether he (or she) would be allowed to do the work that aired on “See It Now” some 76 years ago. That question got further probed by a recorded interview segment that Cooper did with fellow CBS “60 Minutes” anchor Scott Pelley. This was presented against the backdrop of the not-so-subtle behind-the-scenes machinations between the broadcast and its corporate owner, Paramount Global, as the company attempts to effect a merger that is being stalled by both the White House and the FCC.

For extra emphasis, the CNN special concluded with another recorded interview, this one with the longtime journalist and author Marvin Kalb. Kalb has the distinction of being the last journalist hired by Murrow himself. Having spent much time with Murrow in his later years, Kalb reemphasized the questions and his beliefs on what Murrow would think of the state of journalism today, as well as its current ability to “speak truth to power.”

But it was a moment in the panel discussion that left the biggest impression on us. It came when NYT opinion writer Bret Stephens tried to delineate the difference between “Facts” and “Truth.” It was an illuminating moment in Stephens' premise that while facts are undeniable and verifiable, truth is often “in the eye of the beholder.” This drew immediate pushback from CNN’s Abby Phillip, who attempted to equate the two terms by asking whether all facts were indeed the truth. The nuance that Stephens attempted to convey was that while facts can be accepted by all who are aware of them, the concept of truth is shaped by each person’s worldview.

We so wished that Anderson Cooper had seized on this for further discussion because it is our view that this distinction is fundamentally at the heart of everything in question with the “business of journalism” today. Because the idea that “news” has been expanded into including “opinion” as a normal and acceptable part of whatever journalism is being practiced under the banner of news. For example, see the programming that is offered on any national “news” network, newspaper, or any other outlet—be it legacy or new media. “Talking heads” or news analysis is offered as being equivalent to the presentation of facts.

“Truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe.” That quote from Jack Holmes, a political editor at Esquire magazine, is sometimes wrongly attributed (in a shorter form) to Fox News Channel founder and CEO, the late Roger Ailes. It is also used in a similar form by the author Joseph Heller in the 1984 book “God Knows.”

But the idea actually dates back to the Greek playwright Sophocles, who wrote, “What people believe prevails over the truth.” And that is at the heart of journalism’s existential crisis that Murrow warned of, which the play “Good Night, and Good Luck” celebrates. While much of the “book” of the play focuses on the “See It Now” reporting on McCarthy and “The Red Scare,” the cautionary messages come at the play’s beginning and end. They are taken from Murrow’s 1958 speech before the Radio-Television News Directors Association convention.

Yes, it is the speech where Murrow uses his now-infamous line, calling television “this instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire.” He goes on to note that it can do so “only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box.”

In the midst of CNN’s “post-play” roundtable, anchor Anderson Cooper had to interrupt the program to introduce a live reporter in Los Angeles, where protests had broken out in multiple locations over immigration raids and detentions by the federal government. It was a moment of real-time news interrupting a group of “talking heads” analyzing a Broadway production about the news business to talk about the current state of that same business. The irony was not lost on us.

In his original RTNDA address, Murrow notes more than once that “Our history will be what we make it.” But on later reference, he adds what might be his more profound and prophetic words: “If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.”

Notably, he did not end that address with his famous sign-off (and future title of both a great Hollywood and Broadway production) of saying “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

Instead, he simply said, “Thank you for your patience.”

(Thank you for yours here, this went on a little longer than we planned for it to. Appreciate your reading all of it.)

From one of our favorite podcasts, “The Techmeme Ride Home,” we are borrowing the idea that on each Friday we’ll give our readers something they can enjoy reading over the upcoming weekend. Techmeme dubs them “weekend long reads” and that title seems good enough for us to adopt for our offering here.

For our inaugural “WLR” (yes—we have decided to abbreviate it because all cool things seem to have an abbreviated name, IYKYK) our first recommended read will be tech-centric. That is because this particular topic is too important for everyone’s lives.

Artificial Intelligence is one of those things that many people (including us) think they understand enough about. But truthfully they probably don’t. You may have used ChatGPT, or one of its cousins such as Co-Pilot from Microsoft, Claude from Anthropic, Grok from X, Gemini from Google, etc. We would certainly place ourselves in this category.

We know precious little, and that makes us both confident and dangerous at the same time.

AI is nothing short of a global arms race, posing a tech phenomenon. But fortunately there is someone who can help make us all smarter about it. Her name is Mary Meeker, and if you aren’t familiar with her work, she is a venture capitalist and former Wall Street analyst. For years, Meeker chronicled the meteoric rise of the internet with an annual “Internet Trends Report.” It was a must read for anyone for anyone trying to understand how the internet was changing everything about everything.

Last week, Meeker and the team at her VC firm Bond Capital, put out her first report since 2019, when she stopped publishing her previous “Internet Trends Report.” This new report, all 340 pages of it, focuses on the most disruptive technology since…well, the internet.

And that technology would be Artificial Intelligence.

But their “Trends In Artificial Intelligence” report can be a tough read for mere mortals, so we found an excellent summary analysis on Substack that does a really great job of making Meeker’s in-depth report understandable to those of us who haven’t taken all the AP classes along the way.

Our first WLR recommendation goes to “Nate’s Substack” and this particular article which we found interesting, surprising and essential to understand what the future with AI has in store for us. Click here to read it for yourself.

Fair warning, while far more approachable than the original report, this can still be a “heavy” read at times. If you might be in the mood for something a little more entertaining to digest over your weekend, allow us to also provide the inaugural “WLR-Alternative” recommendation.

And that would be our favorite acerbic columnist Drew Magary’s evisceration of CNN’s Jake Tapper in his article: “Jake Tapper is the reason American is doomed.”

Have a good weekend everybody, we’ll see you back here next week.

A reminder that if you haven’t subscribed to TVND.Com, you can do so by clicking the subscribe button at the top of this page. It’s free to do so and really helps our efforts. Our promise is not to ever spam you or use your email address for anything but “the never ending battle for truth, justice and the American way.” Just like Superman. Thanks for considering doing so and if you already did subscribe and are reading this from your email, please know that we really appreciate your readership and your support.

We spent some time in this week going through the local coverage from Denver’s local TV newsrooms of last Sunday’s breaking news around the horrific attack on a crowd of protestors in Boulder, Colorado. As we went through the recordings of each station’s on-air broadcast signal from that afternoon, we were struck by the lack of on-screen breaking news “crawls” (aka “tickers” in some corners) over each network’s sports programming.

That got us to wondering: Do on-air crawls for breaking news alerts still matter in 2025?

When we mentioned it in some conversations this past Monday, one colleague asked an even more provocative question that sent us further down the proverbial “rabbit hole.” In the “multi-platform” world we are in now, is it time to rethink the whole emphasis local TV newsrooms put on having “Breaking News” coverage on their broadcast signals?

Given the multitude of ways consumers can get news information delivered to them, do they really want or even need any interruptions into their coverage of the Women’s US Open Golf tournament? Or the PGA Tour’s stop at The Memorial tournament? Perhaps the NCAA Women’s World Series? How about the drag racing finals from New England? Or even the made-for-TV spectacle that is the United Football League as it aired across two different networks?

Do we just assume that they get everything they need from devices other than the television set? Has streaming breaking news coverage sufficiently replaced the broadcast channel as a way to deliver breaking news?

We ask all this, because in reviewing of the recordings of these stations on the afternoon of Sunday, June 1st, in market number 17, we didn’t see a lot of information presented to the viewers of those TV programs about what was happening in Boulder. At least not before those station’s regular newscasts started at 5pm, Mountain Time.

The first on-screen news crawl we saw about the Boulder story was on KCNC, known locally as “CBS News Colorado.” Their news crawl went up at approximately 3:14pm (all times mentioned are local) and stayed up for about 17 minutes. It had first word of police investigating an attack in Boulder with several blocks evacuated. The crawl also pushed viewers who wanted to watch coverage on their “Live 24 hour stream” though no details on how to access said stream were included on the crawl. An updated crawl appeared at 3:39pm which added some more detail, including a briefing from Boulder Police coming up at 4pm. This crawl promised live coverage on streaming and added information about where to find the CBS News Colorado live stream. It would air well past the start of the police briefing, staying on with the “scheduled to start at 4pm language" until 4:17pm. The @CBSColorado account on X.com shows a first post of “Colorado police responding to attack at Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall” at 3:35pm.

There would be no further on-air updates offered by KCNC until 4:30pm when CBS began its “CBS Weekend News with Jericka Duncan." That newscast led with the Boulder Attack story as a voiceover followed by a short sound bite from the Boulder Police Chief’s press conference. CBS News Colorado at 5pm followed with extensive coverage from Boulder, including three live reporters on the scene. They deserve a special mention for thinking of having one of those reporters, Michael Abyeta, at a nearby Synagogue where he detailed that people were gathering under heightened security from law enforcement. It was detail that no other station had in their coverage. The hour-long newscast was dominated by the Boulder story, going the entire first block for nearly 11 minutes and then being updated three more times in the second half-hour at 5:30pm.

KDVR, Fox31 in Denver, put up a crawl at 3:36pm over the UFL football game that Fox was carrying. The crawl read: “Boulder Police: Several blocks of Boulder’s Pearl Street under evacuation order. Several people injured.” That was all of the detail offered, followed by noting that “Fox31 News-Streaming Anytime on Fox31+” That crawl ran about 15 minutes with no update, until the station did its first breaking news special report at 3:50pm. That made Fox31 the first station to interrupt regular programming with an anchor in-studio and a live reporter in Boulder.

Following a very solid five minutes of breaking news from the Fox31 anchor (whose name was never mentioned or supered) and reporter Shaul Turner in Boulder, viewers were promised more live coverage when the Boulder Police Chief would hold a press conference in the next hour. Viewers were returned to the UFL game in progress with the exact same previous crawl. That ran until 4:04pm when the station did return with another special report as the Boulder Police Chief began to speak. On X.Com, the station’s @KDVR account posted the headline “Boulder police respond to Pearl Street for reported attack” at 3:18pm.

KUSA, Denver’s “9News” ran its first crawl at approximately 3:37pm with a bit more detail on the situation, including evacuations in part of downtown Boulder. Then at 4pm it ran a brief crawl alerting viewers to the upcoming Police briefing which would be covered live on sister station KTVD-20 and streaming on 9News+. The station then produced a solid half-hour special report covering the Boulder Police Chief’s remarks and featured live coverage around the scene of the attack from three of its reporters on the ground in Boulder. Oddly, the station didn’t run any further crawls over the Women’s US Open golf that was still airing on KUSA’s over the air signal, so if a viewer missed the initial crawl, they wouldn’t know of the news coverage going on over on the second station and the livestream. Looking back at their timeline on X, the first post from @9News there was at 3:17pm.

Then there was KMGH, “Denver7” which was airing ABC’s coverage of the Women’s College World Series on this Sunday afternoon. If you were watching the event, you received zero notification of the news happening in Boulder. No cut-ins, no crawls—at least not about the news. The X.Com account shows a first post from Denver7’s @DenverChannel account at 3:24pm, stating “BREAKING: The Boulder Police department said that officers were responding to the Pearl Street Mall after a report of an attack with several victims. KMGH was the most active station posting updates on X, along with reposting posts from its reporters and anchors into the evening.

Back over on its broadcast television signal, the station began running a severe weather crawl for thunderstorms moving through the metro at approximately 4:41pm, shortly before the game ended. (Tennessee defeated UCLA, 5-4 in case you missed it.) Then in a strange moment in the end commercial break following the game, KMGH’s meteorologist Stacey Donaldson went on the air with a severe weather cut-in that ran a couple of minutes, which then dumped back into ABC, which was now amid the lead story in the weekend edition of World News. The network’s lead story was the Breaking News on the attack in Boulder. The severe weather crawl would stay up until the station started it’s local 5pm newscast at the top of the hour, which began with a single live reporter in Boulder and would move on to severe weather coverage in less than four minutes. The half-hour newscast would end a little later than its scheduled running time at 5:40pm to join a program called “Real Talk with Denver 7 and CPR News.” Unfortunately, the program, which appeared to be pre-recorded, would feature Colorado’s Governor and other interviews all talking about the upcoming move of The Sundance Film Festival to…Boulder, Colorado.

Let us run a disclaimer here that while we carefully watched the off-air recordings of the four main Denver stations carefully during the hours of 2pm to 6pm local time, we certainly could have missed something during the period. We went back and reviewed each station’s timeline on X.Com as of Wednesday, June 4th, so it is possible that some posts there may no longer be visible. And finally, we don’t have details on any push alerts each station may have sent out via their own mobile apps.

Which brings us back to where we started with this hypothesis: Maybe in the present day, running on-air crawls or even doing special reports on breaking news via a station’s air signal isn’t that important? Certainly, any local TV meteorologist who has gone on the air with breaking coverage of severe weather warnings can detail the abuse they have likely received from viewers whose “absolutely favorite show ever” has been interrupted for some critical emergency information. More and more these days, viewers will even be upset about a severe weather crawl airing (especially if it happens to cover the scoreboard graphic of a sporting event.)

And yes, we do understand that this story broke on a Sunday afternoon, when any local station is probably minimally staffed. But what happens in these moments is where reputations for coverage can be made–or lost. It was clear that each station moved to deploy multiple people to cover the developing story of what had happened in Boulder.

We just wonder what happens when at least some portion of the audience decides to turn on their televisions to see if their local station is covering the nearby breaking news that they are getting those alerts on their devices about?

In case you missed the breaking industry news this afternoon, CBS has announced that come this August, it will be moving its affiliation from Gray’s WANF-TV to CBS-Owned WUPA. If you were counting old school UHF channel numbers, that is a drop from Channel 46 down to Channel 69, though WUPA was repacked to actually transmit on Channel 36 years ago when all those high numbered UHF channels became spectrum for cellular phone service.

If this sounds familar to long-time television followers, it has happened before. CBS moved from it’s long time home in Detroit of WJBK-TV, when New World Communications stunned the television industry in 1995 by moving all of its major market stations from CBS affiliations over to the upstart FOX network. In Detroit, CBS landed on Channel 62, formerly known as WGPR before adopting the legendary WWJ call letters (Those call letters had started on Channel 4 there and lasted until 1978, before that station became WDIV.) WWJ-TV is now better known as “CBS News Detroit” as it appears WUPA will adopt the owned-station branding of “CBS News Atlanta.” That also means that like in Detroit, CBS has to create a local news operation from scratch.

The New World stations exodus from CBS in ‘95 also forced the network to then seek a new home in Atlanta. That was because New World owned WAGA-TV there, and CBS had been on Channel 5 in Atlanta since it signed on the air in 1949. For those of us who grew up in the southeastern United States, CBS was synonymous with the Channel 5 position as the network was carried on that channel position in Atlanta, Nashville (on WLAC-TV, renamed WTVF), Raleigh NC (on WRAL-TV from 1985 to 2016), Mobile, AL (WKRG), and Charleston SC (WCSC-TV.) Much like CBS was on Channel 2 in the largest three markets (NYC, LA and Chicago), it was on the 5-spot on the dial across a good swath of the Southeast.

And then it wasn’t. In Atlanta, the move from WAGA-TV, a strong station in the market, then owned by Storer and competing hard with Cox’s WSB-TV for news ratings leadership. CBS was left scrambling for a new address on the TV dial. It would land on UHF Channel 46, then owned by Tribune Broadcasting and known as WGNX. It was the only network-affilated station that Tribune operated (the newspaper giant owned major market independent stations such as WPIX in New York, KTLA in Los Angeles and WGN-TV in Chicago, the company’s homebase where it owned the Chicago Tribune newspaper.) Tribune didn’t put a ton of money or effort into the station, especially in terms of local news.

The station would be rebranded in 2000, when Tribune unloaded the station to Meredith. WGNX became WGCL-TV, and the CBS station’s news product became known as “Clear News.” In an attempt to redefine what local news might be if it was focused on being “clear” what quickly became clear was that viewers weren’t moving from WSB-TV or WAGA to see this new-fangled version of local news.

In 2021, Meredith sold its TV stations to Atlanta-based Gray Media, which gave the growing operator of stations a network affiliate in it’s hometown. Gray has since pumped a lot of money and effort into the station, which it renamed “Atlanta News First” with the call letters WANF-TV in 2022. The station’s newscasts and ratings have gotten stronger, but as Gray has done in all of its markets, it moved to eliminate any station branding that included the CBS “Eye” logomark. As part of today’s announcements, Gray noted that it had signed a new corporate affiliation agreement that will keep the CBS network on its 52 other CBS stations across the country–and it will move WANF-TV to being a local-news centric independent station, joining the ranks of former network affiliates turned local news focused stations such as WHDH in Boston, WJXT in Jacksonville and soon WPLG in Miami. (We aren’t mentioning WSVN because of its current FOX affiliation and soon adding the new “ABC Miami” operation on its 7-dot-2 subchannel.)

All of today’s news does lead us to wondering whether the highly anticipated relaxing of ownership rules from the Federal Communications Commission, which is expected to jumpstart television station buying and selling, now might include more interest from the network-owned station groups to expand, along with the usual suspects of major group owners Nexstar, Sinclair, Gray, etc. Or was this just a one-off for CBS to move the network in a major market to a station it already owned. Is it worth noting that CBS also owns stations in Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL (WTOG) and Seattle, WA (KSTW) that don’t currently have the CBS network on their air?

We’re checking to see what other squares are open on our bingo card for the rest of 2025.

We fired up our trusty laptop yesterday around lunchtime to watch the TV NewsCheck webinar titled “The Multi-Platform Newsroom in 2025.” The online event featured five “industry experts” as Contributing Editor Glenn Dickson introduced them. From the outset, we applaud TV NewsCheck’s effort in bringing together these panels on a regular basis to discuss some of the industry’s most pressing topics. While we may have some criticism about what was said in this particular session, we think the discussion is always worthwhile.

If we had one specific criticism of this effort, it would be that it sometimes seems like a vendor or advertiser to the publication is always part of “the panel of experts.” And while Chris Kelly, Director of Technical Solutions for Production Workflow at Ross Video, participated in this webinar, there was no indication that Ross was a sponsor of the program. Therefore, our assumption is that Chris’s presence was to represent makers of newsroom and broadcast systems among the panelists.

The rest of the panel was made up of Rene Gonzalez, Technical Product Manager, Content Tech for NBCUniversal News Group; Ernie Ensign, AVP of News Technology & Operations for Sinclair; Ernesto Mourelo, VP of Digital News, Hearst Television; and Sean McLaughlin, VP of News for Graham Media Group, and now also the just named VP & General Manager for Graham’s KPRC-TV in Houston, TX.

A caution to readers, given the subject matter, we apologize if this article gets a little too “in the weeds” as we detail what was discussed. We’ll do our best to explain as we go through it.

The overarching theme from all of the participants was evident pretty early on. Sean McLaughlin wasted no time in spelling it out when answering the first question: “We can’t continue to do it this way,” he flatly stated, after noting that he sees the same challenges everyone is facing in all TV newsrooms. “The infrastructure is the same that has been used for some time, and we (the business) have to look at all of it to save money.” He continued by declaring that there is a need to “tear down the current system and have one system that controls the entire process.” Finally, he noted that “people are comfortable with iNEWS and ENPS.”

We took him to mean that people in the newsroom are too comfortable with either system they may be working on now. The one they are likely using to crank out somewhere between 35 and 70 odd hours of newscasts on TV. each week. Not to mention everything else they are producing for all those “other platforms.”

Moderator Dickson asked a follow-up question concerning the obvious fear about new technology adoption: “What about staffing levels?” McLaughlin responded with some generic language about “looking at workflow, while protecting the quality that people have come to expect.” That sounded encouraging before he would go on to add, “There are too many hands in the process, and that doesn’t work in 2025. It didn’t work in 2020 either, but the technology wasn’t ready.”

Much of the rest of the hour was spent discussing the specifics of what that technology will be, and when it will be deployed in working TV newsrooms. While each participant offered some broad insights into what their companies are working on, the key takeaways all seemed to revolve around the pursuit of an idea to have what was called “single pane of glass,” a type of a dashboard screen from which all news content can be managed across all platforms (whether broadcast, digital, social or whatever else comes along) as well as making all content available across all properties owned by the company, regardless of where they might be located.

Given the various tools currently in use in local newsrooms to produce the content churned out each day, this was an intriguing notion.

A big key to unlocking this plan centers around the use of cloud-based computing services. We couldn’t help but think back to the scene in the 2014 movie “Sex Tape” where Jason Segel is desperately trying to explain to Cameron Diaz how the video recording of their previous night’s activities has somehow ended up online. In a moment of frustration, Segel’s character shouts, “Nobody understands The Cloud! It’s a mystery!”

Maybe that was the technology that wasn’t ready in 2020?

Moving these new newsroom solutions “off-prem” (That’s IT speak for centralizing the hardware infrastructure in a single location and then delivering the services over the internet.) Rene Gonzalez of NBCUniversal pointed out a key example of this challenge in developing a “browser-based video editing platform integrated into the newsroom computer system.” (NRCS is the industry acronym for News Room Computer Systems such as Avid’s iNews and the AP’s ENPS, along with newer names such as Ross Inception, Dalet Galaxy, Octopus Newsroom, and Cuez.app to name a few.) Gonzalez said their system vendor (which he didn’t name) has been working for some time on this key idea of integrating a video editor into a web browser that could be used directly in their “single pane of glass” solution. He noted that this would be a streamlined video editor with needed features, but it wouldn’t replace more robust editing software (such as Adobe Premiere Pro for example.) That would still be used for more complex “craft editing.”

Another key concept discussed during the webinar was the goal of merging the NRCS currently used in the broadcast production workflow with the CMS (Content Management System) typically used in the production of digital content by each newsroom. This branched off from the discussion by a few speakers who espoused the need for a “storycentric” workflow as a radical transformation for newsrooms.

We’ll note here that the “storycentric workflow” concept isn’t really new. When the local news channel New York 1 launched in NYC in 1992, it produced each story individually. Each story was recorded onto a beta tape and then played back by a computer-based rundown that controlled a large robotic Betacart “jukebox.” New stories would be continuously produced and added to each hour’s rundown. This model would evolve onto video servers that were introduced a few years later, when owner Time Warner Cable built additional local news channels in over a dozen markets. Some years later, research showed that viewers preferred seeing the news in a more traditional linear presentation, and the local news channels would move to a more traditional newscast production model.

Sinclair’s Ernie Ensign spoke about his company’s “Content Center Transformation Initiative” and the desire to deliver a “familiar product to viewers” that will be “assembled differently.” One concept he noted was not needing a control room because reporters would feed their stories directly into “a cloud media pipeline.” Anchors would also submit intros and such into this same pipeline. Then this series of “bite-sized chunks” would not only be assembled automatically into a linear newscast, but would also be able to be used as independent elements for consumption on other platforms.

Hearst’s Ernesto Mourelo captured this philosophy a bit more succinctly earlier in the session, describing his company’s motto as “One Team, One Product, All Platforms.” He said, “Understanding that the audience is now on different platforms, the company’s newsrooms have to meet the audience by being a reliable news source on those platforms.” He stressed that the news on those platforms has to be “a different product, while remaining authentic.” He also discussed another key topic, Artificial Intelligence (also known as AI). Noting that Hearst had an “AI ML (Machine Language) Team” in place for some time, they see AI as being “a tool to discover efficiencies and discover new content.” Providing an example from the company’s WMUR-TV in Manchester, New Hampshire, he explained how AI tools were helping the station cover news across the entire state, leveraging the tools and technology to surface content from various sources and stay ahead of the competition.

Mourelo detailed another specific example of technology being deployed in Hearst’s newsrooms, specifically the digitizing of the news archives at each station. He pointed out how the company’s Oklahoma City station, KOCO-TV, recently completed the conversion of their archive and had used it to uncover a significant amount of material for their coverage of the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the federal building there. Documentaries for the station’s OTT platform were produced using material that hadn’t been seen since the event, thanks to the ability to search the archive in a detailed manner, utilizing the metadata created during the digitization process.

The topic of metadata was further explored by Sinclair’s Ernie Ensign, who noted that “metadata enrichment” is essential for the development of accelerated workflows. We understood that to mean that improving the creation of detailed notes about content, either at its creation or when it is later digitized into a searchable archive, can speed up the daily use of that material. He also noted that coalescing all of the metadata associated with the tens of thousands of hours of original content produced each week by Sinclair’s TV stations would lead to further opportunities to create and monetize additional new content.

Ensign also offered an insight into the challenge of acceptance in deploying these new technologies in newsrooms, highlighting the strong resistance to change, typically embodied in the response, “But we’ve always done it this way.” Panelists agreed that this was the most challenging part of the process. Chris Kelly of Ross Video equated the challenge to the one faced in the deployment of automated production control room systems (such as his company’s “OverDrive” product). He mentioned that he dealt with this in training television directors on the new software. The objective was to preserve the institutional knowledge while retraining staff on an entirely different way of doing their jobs.

Kelly did point out that the deployment of these automated systems had reduced staffing in the control room to just one or two people, now responsible for the job once done by a larger production crew. That reinforced Sean McLaughlin’s earlier observation that there were “too many hands in the process.” McLaughlin would go further, describing the need for “rethinking everything.” He laid out two metrics that will matter most going forward: “What is the percentage of newsroom staff who actually go out in the field to gather the news?” And then “How much of their time is actually gathering the news, rather than on production or distribution?” The future to be faced is that there will be more platforms that have to be serviced, and we also know there will be fewer staff to do that work, because budgets will be smaller.

That may have been the point at which we mentally checked out of the session.

Let’s try to summarize everything we heard during this session: First, there will be more work to be done in gathering more content, so more of the newsroom staff (however small that remains) will need to be out in the field gathering news each day. New technology (that isn’t here quite yet, but will be soon) will be relied upon to facilitate the additional work required to produce all the story-specific content for each platform. Additionally, the content must be created in a way that is more relevant to the viewers on each platform.

We’ll point out that none of the experts in this webinar suggested this “reinvention” might lead to stations doing fewer hours of TV newscasts in a given day. Or how producing news content for all the digital platforms might replace the revenue being lost in the traditional broadcast side of the business? Or even how this transformation might be accomplished while maintaining the primary revenue stream generated from local newscasts on each station? You know the joke about “trying to replace an aircraft’s engine while the plane is flying at 30,000 feet.”

There was some acknowledgement as the webinar came to a close that “the degree of difficulty for change management might have initially been underestimated.” To which we blurted out loud to no one but our laptop screen: “You think?!”

We might have then gone in search of what would be described as “an adult beverage.”

Once upon a time, the linotype machine was called “the eighth wonder of the world.” That technology made it possible for newspapers to be printed faster with fewer people. The story is detailed in a fascinating documentary that you can watch now on YouTube. For decades, these hulking mechanical beasts were essential to turning out newspapers from The New York Times to your hometown ones. Now they are mostly museum pieces. Each generation’s new technology is always succeeded by “the next big thing.”

There is a saying in business that goes “You can have good, fast, and cheap for anything, but you can only have two of those attributes.” From our perspective, we believe that new tools, which enable newsrooms to tackle the significant challenges they face each day, are fundamentally a good thing. (Apologies to Martha Stewart.) If the technology can expedite the process of getting the news to the viewer, even better. However, if that technology is merely an excuse to reduce the number of people involved in the process, we cannot help but believe that the end result will suffer in both quality and quantity.

George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” We promise to keep an open mind going forward.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve noticed that our LinkedIn Feed seems to be filled with two kinds of posts. The first is from all the newly graduated college and university students from journalism or mass communications schools proudly announcing their graduation. Many are also announcing that they are about to start their first job in television news. Let us add our congratulations to all of you on launching your careers, and we wish you each success and happiness in your new positions. For those of you still looking for that first job, don’t give up hope! Continue the process of applying for and interviewing for opportunities in your chosen field. We know it can be a grind out there right now. Be creative and consider expanding your job search to increase your chances of proving to a potential employer what you can bring to their newsroom. Best of luck in your search.

On the other hand, the second kind of post we’re seeing lately are dispatches from those folks who have seemingly escaped from the terrible time they had when they previously worked in television news. Much of their criticism of the business appears to have been triggered by the recent story of a pregnant anchor in Albany, New York, whose water broke before the morning newscast began. The fact that she stayed and anchored the show before going to the hospital and later gave birth to her first child has led to a fair amount of commentary. (We’ll add here the critical detail that both mother and her newborn son are reported to be doing well, so congratulations to them both.)

Now we aren’t sure why WRGB-TV decided it was necessary to make a viral moment out of their anchor’s decision to stay at work after her water broke. Or why her co-anchor documented this on social media in real time, rather than insisting she leave work and head to the hospital. Frankly, we aren’t sure of any of the circumstances in this situation, and we aren’t about to judge anyone’s actions in this matter.

Something about that whole idea of getting all the facts before writing the story about what happened and why.

However, the nature of the story led to it being widely reported (according to the TV station’s website), including getting a “shout-out” from CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert. Then it became fodder for those who would criticize the anchor’s decision to stay at work and the notion that the demands of her newsroom or the entire industry itself somehow compelled her to make a questionable decision.

At this point, we want to state that we have neither the medical knowledge nor the life experience to judge whether her decision to stay at work was the right thing to do. And we’d certainly be shocked if there was any manager who would suggest that she make her priority at that moment about staying in the anchor chair. We’ll add that if this were a newsroom we were in charge of, we would be respectful of a colleague’s desire to keep working — but would have insisted that she leave immediately for numerous reasons, the primary one being that it would be the right thing for everyone involved.

Heck, we would have offered to drive her to the hospital as we have done on a few occasions over the years.

As for the critics who suggest that this woman’s decision was somehow forced upon her by the overwhelming, unrelenting, and inhumane demands of working in the television news business, that rings a bit hollow. Yes, we understand that the work can sometimes be challenging, the pay isn’t always what it should be, and it often requires some personal sacrifice. To those points, we would ask, what job isn’t described that way? Other professions are undoubtedly subject to the same challenges or far worse. (Teaching in a public school comes immediately to mind as one prominent example.)

Every job is called work for a reason.

We acknowledge some potential bias in this view, given our experience working in a television newsroom for fifty years before stepping away a few months ago. Yes, along the way, we worked for and with some who might have suggested that the job was more important than anything else. Some people do think and manage that way, though we believe their number has dropped in recent decades as the idea of work-life balance has gained significantly more importance for both employees and employers.

Sacrifice along the way, in terms of missing important events with family or friends? Check. Working in situations that probably weren’t 100% safe and secure? Absolutely. A feeling of not being adequately appreciated or compensated for our effort? Of course. But feeling like we had no choice but to stay in the job when we knew we could do something or anything else? Never.

And before you retort with the obvious “what about those under a contract?”, let us point out that a contract specifies terms and conditions of employment. A contract cannot force a person to work, should they choose to leave or not to work. Forcing someone to work is considered involuntary servitude, which is prohibited by law. (Careful disclaimer, this is not to be regarded as legal advice. Contracts can specify damages for a breach of contract. Anyone considering action that could lead to breaking a contract should definitely seek legal counsel before doing so.)

Legal considerations notwithstanding, our point remains that everyone is entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That last part is mostly within our own control. We get that working in television news isn’t for everyone. Working in certain situations just may not be right for you. But there are always alternatives. The idea that the job demands are so unreasonable seems a bit hyperbolic. Especially when compared to those working in many other fields. Talk to those who work on the frontlines of healthcare, for example, and you’ll likely hear stories of things that happen on the job that will make being in a newsroom seem not nearly as bad as you might have thought.

If life for you is ultimately better by doing something else for a living, by all means, go and find what brings you more joy. We sincerely wish you nothing but success in the pursuit of happiness. But perhaps also recognize that others might find joy in the work you left behind. And no, they are not some delusional members of a cult that need to be rescued through some online course or life coaching. They might even enjoy what they do–hopefully at least most of the time.

They are happy to be called journalists. Maybe we should be more grateful that there are still individuals willing to undertake that vital work, even on TV.

As we start the Memorial Day weekend, let us take just a moment to deliver an important reminder about this holiday and how it is covered. Bob Dotson, the legendary correspondent for NBC’s Today Show, reminds us of what to do in his excellent 2015 book about “writing and packaging visual news.” And he summed it up in just three simple words:

Make It Memorable.

While Memorial Day is the unofficial start to Summer for many, it is also one of the most solemn holidays our nation celebrates. It is the day in which we mourn and honor our deceased service men and women. (Differing from Veteran’s Day which is celebrated each November and honors all those who have served the country.)

Memorial Day, originally known as Decoration Day, has a long history that goes all the way back to the Civil War. From its humble beginnings and evolution over the years, the last Monday in May is celebrated in many different ways across the nation. And because we cover these stories each year, there can sometimes be a utilitarian approach to how we produce such coverage.

But there is so much opportunity to take the storytelling beyond that on this holiday.

We’ve seen amazing stories over the years, ranging from profiles of those who made the ultimate sacrifice in World War II to those who fought and died in the wars since. In Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the other locations where those who served were stationed. Those who served in combat as well as those who served in the unseen–and mostly unknown roles, each supported an effort, which in turn supported a greater cause.

Their stories deserved to be told. And they deserve to be told in a way that they will be remembered.

We urge you to think a little differently about this Memorial Day and approach the stories of this holiday with a sense of curiosity and a willingness to put in some extra effort to make each one more memorable. It is a great opportunity to try something different, like perhaps a visual essay using only natural sound. Or a profile of one particular person’s legacy as honored by those who survived them.

By capturing the special moments of this Memorial Day, and in turn, crafting better words and video to present those stories, you can honor those who gave their lives in the service of their country.

Their memory certainly deserves it.

The announcement today that Wendy McMahon is stepping down from her post as President of CBS News and Stations was a surprise announcement that didn’t seem that much of a surprise, at least to anyone who has been paying attention to the palace intrigue at the place once called “the Tiffany Network.”

Back in those heady days, employed as a promotion producer for the network’s New York City flagship station in 1980, we produced a promo in which we had animated the legendary CBS logo “eye” to appear to quickly close and open. It aired once before triggering a call from a high-ranking executive in the network’s corporate headquarters (The building at 51 West 52nd is known as “Black Rock,” due to the black granite facade of the building designed by famed architect Eero Saarinen.) The executive commanded that the animation be removed from the air immediately. Why? The icy reply: “Because the CBS eye does not blink.”

That animation never aired again, at least on our watch.

Wendy McMahon’s career has been the type that many graduating from colleges and universities this month would hope for. In her first decade, she went from being a station promotion manager in local markets such as Savannah, Jacksonville, Austin, Minneapolis, and Boston to joining the Disney/ABC family at KABC-TV in Los Angeles in 2009. Less than a decade later, she would become the President of all the ABC Owned Stations. Though we don’t know her personally, it is safe to say that she knows the television business very well.

Her industry cred made her a stellar pick by CBS CEO George Cheeks to lead the CBS-owned stations in 2021. That year, The Los Angeles Times published a devastating investigation into the misdeeds of her predecessor as head of the CBS-owned stations, Peter Dunn. The exposé and the fallout led to Dunn’s termination along with the then-VP of News for the local stations, David Friend.

McMahon’s arrival at CBS was just part of a then-curious combination of the network’s long-storied news division and the owned stations to create a new CBS News and Stations division. McMahon would originally share leadership of this newly combined unit with former Hearst executive Neeraj Khemlani. This reorganization would come just a few years after another scandal had rocked the network’s news division. In 2017, The Washington Post published a story detailing decades of misconduct by morning anchor Charlie Rose. The subsequent mess from both missteps led to the unusual move to combine the news and stations groups, which have always been run as separate business units at the other major networks.

As a former CBS Stations employee, we were doubly puzzled by the combination of the two entities and the power-sharing arrangement. While one might think that the idea of formally combining the newsgathering resources of the network and its 28 local stations, located in 17 of the nation’s largest markets, could produce great “synergy.” However, combining the 5,000 or so employees in very disparate cultures and quite different businesses would be no simple task. And it would turn out to be anything but.

Khemlani returned to CBS, where he had once been a Producer for “60 Minutes,” after spending a dozen years at Hearst, working in varying leadership capacities. His knowledge of the news and editorial side of the business and McMahon’s strength in station leadership set up the pair to hopefully create a stronger approach to dealing with the shifting fundamentals of a business going through the digital transformation that has changed much of the nature of broadcasting in recent years.

But Khemlani’s reportedly “rude and bullying behavior” (detailed in stories from The New York Post) as he openly pursued significant cost-cutting goals, led to his leaving for a “first-look” producing deal with CBS’s parent, Paramount, after just two “tumultuous” years in his position. As half the duo left, Wendy McMahon dropped the “co-” from her title and took on the single role of leading the CBS News and Stations division.

Less than a year later, in July 2024, Paramount Global and Skydance Media announced intentions to merge their two companies in a deal in which Skydance, primarily a Hollywood entertainment company known for live-action and animated movies, would acquire National Amusements, the company controlled by Shari Redstone. National Amusements is Paramount’s largest shareholder. Subsequently, Skydance would do an all-stock deal to merge with Paramount Global and its media empire, including CBS.

The review process for the merger has been anything but simple, complicated further by the change in administrations in Washington, DC, last November. Then candidate Donald Trump would sue CBS News’s 60 Minutes broadcast, initially for $10 billion-later revised to $20 billion- over the editing of an interview with Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, which aired in the run-up to election day. The lawsuit, which Paramount called “baseless,” typically would be strongly fought by a news organization the stature of CBS. But now, it impedes getting the Paramount-Skydance merger across the finish line.

Now-President Trump has been vocal about his displeasure with subsequent strong reports from 60 Minutes on topics ranging from the situation in Gaza to executive orders being used to target some of the nation’s largest law firms. The unblinking reporting has reportedly also angered Paramount Chair Shari Redstone, who stands to make $2.4 billion–if and when the merger with Skydance is completed. 60 Minutes Executive Producer Bill Owens was clear in his resignation last month that his departure was in large part over corporate meddling in the coverage produced by the venerable newsmagazine that is typically among the most-watched programs on television.

The lawsuit isn’t the only thing slowing down the merger. Newly installed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has piled on with an inquiry by the commission into the 60 Minutes interview with Harris. This is unique because the FCC has no direct authority over CBS News, as the network and its news division are not licensed by the government. But the broadcast stations owned by CBS (and part of the CBS News and Stations division of CBS, and its parent Paramount) are licensed by the FCC. Before re-election, then-candidate Trump called for CBS to “lose its license.” The previous FCC Chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democratic appointee, denounced that position and stated that the Commission “does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”

Today’s departure by Wendy McMahon seemingly indicates that she is also leaving over the struggle for “editorial independence.” As reported by TheDesk.Net, McMahon wrote in her farewell email to the CBS staff: “The past few months have been challenging. It’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward.”

And just before we were going to push the “publish” button on this column, The Desk’s Matthew Keys scooped the story that 60 Minutes pulled a story from this past Sunday’s show that was set to air, examining the order to lay off thousands of “probationary employees” at the Internal Revenue Service. A Paramount spokesperson told The Desk that the story was rescheduled after producers learned that the IRS had reversed the layoffs and that the story will be broadcast “in the future.”

Apparently, in this same time frame, CNBC reports that CBS CEO George Cheeks was meeting with Wendy McMahon on Saturday and asked for her resignation. She apparently agreed, and the Paramount board was informed of the decision in a call held on Sunday.

As much as today’s announcement of her departure shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, don’t be further shocked if, in the coming days or weeks, there is an announcement of a settlement in Mr. Trump’s pending lawsuit against CBS. Just as ABC and its parent, Disney, settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump last year with a $15 million contribution to a future Trump Presidential library, we could see another contribution coming from Paramount.

As we typed that last paragraph, up pops an alert from The New Republic that ABC is back in the spotlight of criticism from the 47th President for its coverage of the proposed donation of a Boeing 747 jet from Qatar, purportedly to be used as a new “Air Force One” and then perhaps given to the not-yet-announced Trump Presidential Library.

In the current climate, settling lawsuits against news organizations that might have been vigorously fought in the past may just be “the cost of doing business.” Maybe it all just comes down to figuring out who will blink first.

And maybe after all this time, the CBS eye does blink.

We’ve got an interesting idea for something worth watching this weekend. The details, in our sister blog at tvnews.coach We also got a podcast series recommendation for you there.

Please check out the latest post on tvnews.coach when you have a chance by clicking this link.

One of the things we miss the most about our former position as a TV news director was having an office just off the newsroom. The general hum (and occasional outburst) in a newsroom became a comforting rhythm over the years, not unlike those “white noise” machines some people get to help them sleep. We often miss that newsroom hum–more than we thought we would. Another thing we miss was having a bank of televisions on the office wall, allowing our almost-ADHD-addled brain to watch four or more newscasts simultaneously. No matter how fast you are with a remote, you can’t really switch back and forth between a couple of newscasts at the same time on a single TV.

We enjoy watching multiple newscasts, if only to see which stories were given different levels of importance in the editorial process of each newsroom. Since installing numerous TV screens in the living room of our home-based world headquarters wasn’t possible, the problem of how to watch everything became tougher to solve.

Let us point out that one of our most significant recommendations to anyone working in the TV news business is watching your newscast. And by that, we mean to watch it at home, as your viewers do. In the newsroom, you will have a very different viewing experience. Being at home frames your work differently, which you need to understand. Of course, it’s also important to watch your competition as well. How did they treat the day’s news differently or the same as your station did?

So we have discovered a way that allows us to record all four local newscasts at any given time and watch each of them on our own schedule, without a ton of equipment. This way allows for better analysis of what each newscast is doing and allows us to skip around (and past commercials). It is a far less frenetic experience than trying to watch multiple TV screens, as if we are some sort of crazed stock day trader staring at too many screens.

Our process is made possible with a small device few people seem to know about. It is called TABLO, an over-the-air home television DVR. Our TABLO is a small, 5-inch round white plastic box connected to a small bowtie-shaped digital antenna, which sits in a window on the upper floor of our townhouse. Because we live about 10 miles from the towers that carry nearly all of the local digital television transmissions, we don’t need an outdoor antenna, but TABLO can also work with one of those. It connects to our home WiFi system by plugging a single Ethernet cable into our WiFi router (The connector looks like the wire that plugs into a wired telephone, but with a plug that is a little larger.) That’s it, just two connections, plus plugging in a power cord. The whole installation took us a whopping 15 minutes. TABLO has an app that walks you through the process.

We should explain that TABLO combines digital TV tuners, a streaming box, and a digital video recorder. That mouthful means that once you set up the TABLO, it can tune and record up to four different things from any over-the-air (OTA) television signal in the current digital (ATSC 1.0) standard. More on that in a second. It then streams any of these signals to any connected screen in your home. That includes connected television sets, meaning those with their own internal App Store, such as Samsung, Sony, LG, TCL, and the like. (Oddly, TABLO has some issues working with televisions made by Vizio, so be aware of that limitation.) TABLO can also be accessed by any television set with an external streaming device such as Roku, AppleTV, Chromecast, FireTV, and others.

Just as those late-night TV infomercials love to say, “But wait, there’s more!” There are TABLO apps available for almost every mobile device you might have. So iPhones, iPads, Android-based phones, and tablets can all access the TABLO to allow you to watch good old free TV–as long as they are connected to your WiFi network. One disappointing limitation is that the current generation of TABLO is not accessible on laptops or desktop computers. You also have to be connected to your home’s WiFi network to access your TABLO device’s signal. (Before you hardcore geeks come at us, sure you could likely VPN into your home network and make a remote connection work. We haven’t tried that yet, and we figure most non-tech-obsessed regular people won’t be looking to do that much work either.)

Aside from the 60 or so current over-the-air digital TV channels and subchannels we receive here in the Twin Cities, the TABLO device also receives over 100 FAST channels. So cord cutters rejoice, many viewing options are available on the TABLO programming “grid” that looks much like the old school TV schedules that used to be standard fare in the daily newspaper. From this grid, you can change channels, select shows to be recorded, and manage your TV viewing on TABLO. Regarding storage, the TABLO can save about 50 hours of programming internally. The device also has a standard USB-A port, allowing you to connect an external hard drive to easily increase your TABLO’s DVR storage capacity. We have a 2TB drive attached, which provides an additional 200-plus hours of storage on our TABLO.

And that brings us to the bottom line. Specifically, how much does TABLO cost? The base unit can be purchased for $140; you will need to add another $20 if you need the indoor digital TV antenna. (Again, if you have an antenna now, it will likely work fine with TABLO.) Should you not need to watch or record 4 channels simultaneously, you can get a TABLO that records only 2 channels simultaneously for about $20 less. You can purchase a TABLO unit from Amazon by clicking here. (A reminder that this is an affiliate link, so if you complete a purchase, we receive a small commission from Amazon on your purchase.)

Then, if you want/need the additional DVR storage for recording shows, add from $70 to $150 for an external hard drive to connect to the TABLO. And there is the monthly subscription fee, because everything has one. But not TABLO! That’s right, there are no monthly fees for it. Once you buy the initial hardware, that’s it. TABLO automatically downloads TV program schedules over the internet, and it just works without additional charges.

We need to return for a moment to the previously mentioned limitation that the current, 4th-generation TABLO unit is strictly a current digital TV device. When (and some might say “if”) all local television signals move over to the ATSC 3.0 format, also known as “NextGen TV,” the TABLO box will become a nice door stop. Currently, the National Association of Broadcasters is proposing a 2028 deadline for stations in the largest 55 markets to switch to broadcasting in ATSC 3.0; remaining stations would have until 2030 to do so. With just 10 million or so television sets in use that can even receive NextGen TV signals, we will be surprised if these proposed deadlines don’t slip even further. That said, a TABLO purchased today might only have three to five years of useful life, depending on where you live. Even if the transition to NextGen TV happens on time, it works out to be about $50 a year to watch and record four OTA television signals on your home’s TVs and mobile devices.

That’s a fairly decent bargain to do something that we believe is critical to your development as a journalist working in (or leading) a television newsroom. If you have a different process that works for you, so be it. The key here is not the technology, but making it easy to do this important exercise on a regular basis.

How do you expect the viewers to do it if you don’t do it yourself?

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We admit to never being big fans of the branding campaign that some stations adopted a few years back. It centered around the idea of “Getting Answers” (in a more extended version, it might have been “Asking Questions, Getting Results.) This promotion spun out of the “advocacy-based” positioning that news consulting firms added to their roster of big ideas. We don’t object to the idea that local television stations and, in turn, their news operations should be advocates for their communities and their viewers. Our experience is that this is more of a “price of admission” type of thing. By that, we mean that the idea of advocating for the viewer is what is meant by the FCC’s regulatory language, which states that “broadcasters shall operate in the public interest.”

Does that mean that having a reporter chase down a reluctant official, shouting questions at them, is “getting answers?” Or that making massive Freedom of Information Act requests for public records to unearth potential corruption is? Maybe just making a couple of Google searches to find out some information related to what might be open or not on any given holiday?

In other words, just what answers might your viewers be looking for your station to get for them?

Last week, a development in the online search industry emerged that may provide a clue to that answer. In case you missed it, Eddie Cue, the head of Apple’s services unit, was testifying in a federal courtroom, and he dropped what turned out to be a bombshell bit of news. Cue stated that in the last two months, the number of searches in Apple’s Safari web browser had decreased.

Let’s unpack that a bit. Since the inception of the modern World Wide Web, the web browser has been the primary means by which most people access what they need. How many times each day do you open a browser on your computer or smartphone and either type in a specific web address (such as Amazon.com) or a query along the lines of “How many smartphones are being used in the world?” (The answer is 7.21 billion, according to Google.) You perform this query in the Safari web browser if you are using an Apple device, and typically Chrome on Android, Windows, and other devices. Yes, we are aware that there are different web browsers, including Microsoft’s Edge, Firefox, and Opera, among others. But Safari and Chrome are Home Depot and Lowe’s of this industry. We also know that on many devices, specific applications (“apps”) are used to access online destinations directly, such as Amazon or your station’s website, but that’s a focus for another day.

For years, all such web queries, also known as searches, were mainly sent to Google for responses. The Chrome browser is a Google product, and Google has paid as much as Apple $20 billion a year to be the primary search engine that powers the Safari browser. In fact, that arrangement is exactly why Mr. Cue was testifying in a federal courtroom. The United States Department of Justice is suing Google, alleging that it has a monopoly in the online search business. So, when Cue said that searches in the Safari browser had declined over the past few months, that fact caused Google’s parent company, Alphabet, to drop by over 7%–a move that did not go unnoticed on Wall Street.

The reason this development matters is that for the first time in 22 years, searches that Google would usually answer went somewhere else. And that somewhere was the “new hotness” in all things digital: Artificial Intelligence, also known by its shorthand moniker, “AI.” More online questions are being asked to ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Claude, and their competitors on an ever-expanding list. Each of these AI products can be accessed in various ways. However, each has a “natural language interface to a large learning model,” also known as a “chatbot.” These chatbots enable users to input a simple question or a very detailed premise. The big difference between using an AI chatbot and a typical web search is that the AI response is likely to be a more complete answer to your question, rather than just a series of links to webpages that are probably related to the topic you are interested in. Depending on the detail in the query posed to the chatbot, you can get everything from a simple statistic to the beginnings of a fully formed business plan.

We’ve heard it described as going to the library and asking a question, where one librarian points you to the section of books on the topic you’re asking about, and another librarian simply provides the answer to your question. Which librarian would you go to the next time you had a question?

All of which means exactly what to those of us in the television news business? We suggest considering the implications of this shift in digital habits, where more people are adopting AI applications as their primary source for answers. It may mean that, given a choice, your viewers are looking for more detail than just an answer to a question. Earlier, when we asked about the number of smartphones in the world, the AI response was more than just a link to a source, such as the Global Systems Mobile Association. It was a couple of paragraphs about the specific number of smartphones, along with additional detail on the growth of that number over the past few years, the individual nations with the most significant percentage of smartphones, and so on. It was an explanation.

In the information age we currently live in, viewers can get answers to questions anytime they want, without waiting for your newscast to deliver them. What they couldn’t get from their digital devices before was more context in those answers. Explaining, and more importantly, demonstrating the potential impact of the answers, where television still holds an advantage. And yes, if the questions can’t be easily answered–then chasing those officials down the hallway may make the difference in understanding why someone doesn’t want you to know the answer to the question being asked.

We get it, a promotional slogan along the lines of “We Provide More Context For Your Questions” probably isn’t the next big marketing innovation for a television station. But demonstrating to viewers that your station can help make more sense of the ever-changing world they face every day? Now, that can be at the very heart of what a local newscast does to be more intrinsically valuable to the audience. The idea that help is delivered by actual human beings, who live in the same community, is a distinct advantage over any AI chatbot’s text-based response.

At least it is for now.

Have you subscribed to get The Topline delivered directly to your email? We are preparing an upcoming special report on the use of AI in the newsroom. It will be made available exclusively to our subscribers and will not be displayed on our website. Make sure you will receive this special report by hitting the Subscribe button at the top of our webpage at TVND.com. It’s free to subscribe, and we’re introducing additional subscriber-only benefits soon. If you have already done so, thanks for being a subscriber! We appreciate your support.

We’ve been writing here for a few months now on the various challenges, criticisms, and concerns we have about the TV news business. We recognize that some readers might get the impression that, after spending an entire working life in the craft, we might not believe in it as much these days. Maybe the challenges of the moment are too much to overcome, and we are witnessing the first turns of the death spiral that seems to befall any media at a certain point in its existence. The rise of technology that has led to the fall of those platforms that have gone before, now must certainly be coming for the likes of television. The internet has put the ability to broadcast in everyone’s hands, so the power of broadcasting must be diminishing.

Allow us to state it clearly. We still believe in the power of TV news, perhaps now more than ever.

We have an example of that power in just the past few hours. A 69-year-old man from Chicago walked out onto a balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square in Rome as the new and 267th Pope of the Catholic Church. And we saw it happen live on television. Across seemingly every station and channel, from the major networks of each nation to the smaller and less notable outlets that are dedicated to serving the faithful in their own way.

It was truly a moment, and seeing that moment on a screen in our home is the reason we believe.

Let us add that while we believe in the power of faith, we are not typical practitioners of it, at least in the organized sense. We are not Catholic, but we respect it and all religions as institutions that bind like-minded disciples together to practice the faith of their choice. Whatever your personal beliefs may be, we respect and admire your choices in striving to live a better life.

While we (and others) may not share your beliefs, surely we can all appreciate the gravity of the moment when a spiritual leader is selected for a worldwide congregation of over 1.4 billion people. The pomp and circumstance of it is one of those moments that captures the world’s attention.

And there it is. That’s what the news on television does well. It can capture the moment and allow anyone to experience it, almost as if they were there in person.

We can always quibble about the skill of the journalists charged with capturing and narrating the moment and the effectiveness of the tools they may use in the course of their work. Much like dissecting the athleticism in a post-game show, there can always be something to criticize. (Though we would argue that the drone cameras that provided the soaring aerial viewes of the moments when the bells rang out over the square are as cinematic as anything Hollywood has ever produced.)

But one of the truths learned in maturing is that moments truly matter. The enduring power of television is seeing those moments as they happen and being able to appreciate them for yourself. Whether you view it on a 65-inch screen in your home, a 14-inch screen in your lap in the airport, or a 6.7-inch screen in your hand while being almost anywhere near civilization, we believe that it is still fundamentally television.

The “Magic Lantern” was the name of the device invented in the 1600s that could project images onto a surface. Lanterna magica in Latin, came into being in the decade that saw another Pope Leo lead the Catholic Church. Alas, Pope Leo XI would only be the Pontiff for some 27 days in 1605, and likely never witnessed the remarkable effect of the Magic Lantern. His future successor to take the name of Leo for the 14th time in history, Pope Leo XIV, was likely seen delivering his first prayer by a global audience of billions today, thanks to the eventual successor of the Magic Lantern.

Television News is at its very best when it captures the crucial moments as they happen. From the globally watched moment introducing a new Pope, to the smaller, yet equally important local moment when a new Mayor is elected. Moments of joy to moments of tragedy, such as one when a man dies at the very hands of those sworn to “protect and serve” their community. And the moment when those who object to that action take to the streets to protest.

They are all moments that make up what has been accurately called “the first rough draft of history."

In the 1950s, during television’s infancy, CBS created a show that presented significant moments of history as they might have been covered as a television news event, long before the medium had been invented. The program, anchored by a young CBS News journalist named Walter Cronkite, was titled “You Are There.” (CBS apparently liked three-word program titles during that era, including “See It Now” and “Face The Nation.") Each episode began with Cronkite on camera, delivering a newscast-style introduction at an anchor desk. He would conclude with the words “Everything is, as it was, except…You Are There. A dramatic reenactment of the historical event would follow, ostensibly unfolding in front of television news reporters. Here’s an example of the program as it “covered” the signing of the Declaration of Independence

Our point here is that covering moments in time, both big and small, is what television news excels at. Aside from introducing a new Pope, the first from the United States, said to be a humble man from the South Side of Chicago who also happens to be a Cubs baseball fan. That story will be covered extensively by the local TV newscasts in the Windy City tonight. And there will be other moments covered by journalists working in local TV newsrooms, both across this country and in other countries worldwide.

To each of them, we say, take pride in your work and give it your best today and every day. This is what TV news can and should do well.

After the second game in last Sunday night’s NBA Finals doubleheader on TNT, just as the post-game show opened and the studio camera swooped in on the desk, anchor Ernie Johnson did something that we think every local TV newscast should do more of. He began the program by saying, “Welcome to the Inside the NBA postgame show. It’s 11:13 here on the East Coast from Studio J in Atlanta…” He would then introduce his desk mates, Shaquille O’Neal, Kenny Smith, and Charles Barkley. And they were off and running.

The fact is that TNT’s “Inside the NBA” studio show is one of the best sports television productions on the air (We’re willing to fight with anyone who disagrees.) Local TV newscasts might study the program to learn some key ingredients to making great television (more on that shortly). But we would like to point out that the simple gesture of announcing what the time was is more important now than ever.

Why the big deal about announcing the time? What did Ernie Johnson accomplish by glancing at his watch and telling us what time it was at the show’s beginning? Several things, actually. He acknowledged that it was a late hour and that the studio crew had been on the air for two complete games. For another, he communicated that this was happening live, right in the moment, without having to use the cliche of saying “we’re live (on television) right now.” And given the freewheeling reputation of this particular program, he subtly signalled the audience that anything might be said in the moments to come about the results of the game where the Golden State Warriors had defeated the Houston Rockets in a deciding game 7 of the first round of the playoffs.

In this day and age, too much television is prepackaged and predictable. Even local TV news suffers from this problem. The fact that some stations are now routinely “pre-recording” either portions of or an entire newscast is pretty inconceivable to us, especially after years of having to put the words “Live, Local, Latebreaking” into newscast copy. Perhaps you are fortunate enough to have a talk radio station nearby that produces its own programming (rather than just taking various national talking heads off a satellite feed). The chances are good that they remind you that they are “Live and local” regularly.

Along with telling you what time it is.

The act of telling someone what time it is means that you are sharing that particular moment in time in that specific location. Right here and right now.

“Time checks,” as broadcast slang labels them, don’t go along with pre-recorded content. It also doesn’t really work for national broadcasts, because four time zones are watching, and there is the “west coast feed,” which is recorded and delayed in playback at the right time. “The Today Show,” the progenitor of all morning newscasts on TV, got around this back in the black and white days by announcing how many minutes it might be “after the hour” while never announcing the hour.

Local Morning newscasts have gotten the message over the years that their audience may be listening more than watching, so delivering time and temperature information in each block has become standard fare. We’d argue that practice should spread to all other newscasts throughout the day.

Local TV news got away from this when we introduced the time and temperature displays to the screen back in the 1980s. Late newscasts, in some misguided effort to get people to stay up, often would drop the time from the on-screen “bug” as it was known. That fooled so many people. (Not really.) Then there was the backlash against what was criticized as “Happy talk news,” which led to some stations trying to do away with any interaction between the people seen during the newscasts.

We’re also fans here of the simple but powerful idea of stating the date at the top of newscasts. After all, the newscast is a living journal of what has (or will) happen on that particular date. Again, the Today show featured this idea in its earliest days. (However, the program also featured a chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs as part of the regular cast each morning, so not every idea the show had was necessarily great.)

But characters on a television program matter. One of the reasons why TNT’s “Inside The NBA” studio show with Ernie, Kenny, Charles, and Shaq is truly “Must See TV” is because all four members of the studio cast are characters. They know the game and can break it down for the audience. But the interactions between these grown men are informative and, dare we say it, entertaining.

If you are wondering why we would talk about being entertaining in local TV news, the answer is that, in addition to covering the news of the day, which is often not a buffet of happy or positive stories, there needs to be something that gives viewers something to smile about. One thing that can do that while simultaneously creating a unique identity for one newscast over another is having characters in the cast.

For nearly four decades, KNBC-TV in Los Angeles had a pair of characters in its evening newscasts with weatherman Fritz Coleman and sportscaster Fred Roggin. The interaction between the two during newscasts was genuinely entertaining, and the station would brilliantly promote the pair in a long-running series of funny station promotions featuring “Fritz and Fred.” The competition between the sports jock and the weather nerd was an extension of the pair’s on-air banter that would be similar to what you are likely to hear between the foursome in the studio for TNT’s basketball coverage.

Unfortunately, Warner Bros. Discovery-owned TNT will not have NBA games after this season, so the future of the “Inside The NBA” team is uncertain as we write this. It would be a shame if those four weren’t given a new home, aside from the studio work for the NCAA Tournament weekends, which Ernie, Kenny, and Charles have been a part of since 2011. We really hope that their time together isn’t over.

Do note that we are not suggesting that every local TV newscast become the equivalent of “open mike night” at the local comedy club. But there is real value in having the people who bring you the news each day be more than just “news readers” as European outlets have referred to their anchors over the years. Being genuine and yes, occasionally even human, isn’t something to banish from the studio. It should be as “organic” as possible, and certainly not overdone. News Directors must monitor this kind of on-air interaction carefully to ensure the goal of helping the newscast is met. The value of an outside talent coach can also benefit this effort.

All we are saying is that it might be time to examine the persona of your newscast and develop the personalities of the people who appear in it.

And from time to time, please have them tell us what time it is.

Last November, after we made it through our thirteenth presidential election night, we decided not to spend another long one eating pizza in a local TV newsroom. (For the record, we polled internally on what food to bring in on election night, and the result was overwhelmingly in favor of pizza. The tradition is strong.) We have both triumphant and traumatic memories of election nights past. And not to have to spend months planning for another one seemed like the final call to make on the late drive home.

Leave it to our neighbors in the North to make us think about election night planning again.

You are hopefully aware of the events that led to Canada showing former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau the door earlier this year, and then the new Prime Minister Mark Carney dissolving parliament and calling for “a snap election” in March. In just over a month, Canadians went to the polls this past Monday.

Watching the coverage from the national networks in Canada was eye-opening in some respects and so totally Canadian in others. We sampled coverage in the early hours of Tuesday morning from the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the nation’s public broadcaster, and its main rival, CTV, the nation’s largest privately owned broadcaster, a subsidiary of Bell Canada. We also sampled CityTV, the chain of stations owned by another telecom giant in Canada, Rogers Communications, and Global News. This Vancouver-based news operation is part of Corus Entertainment. All four of these news operations treated election night much as their southern counterparts here in the United States would, by dedicating the entire night to the “play-by-play” drama of the ballots being counted and democracy in action.

Like much of Canada’s daily broadcast news, the tone of the overall coverage we observed was very understated for the most part. There was little breathless urgency, even though the election was billed as perhaps one of the most important in the country’s history. The CBC and CTV featured large studios with casts of anchors and analysts who translated the unfolding story across the country’s six different time zones and nearly 10 million kilometers. (That’s just over 3.8 million miles for those of us who never adopted the metric system for measurements.) Global and City had smaller operations, but followed the same basic playbook.

We’d love to know if the name “Trump” was said more times during Canada’s election night coverage than it was last November here in the United States? Our estimate would be that it would be close, as the short but intense period of political campaigning in Canada became largely a referendum on whether Canadians had any interest in becoming the 51st state or take on navigating a massive economic shift resulting from the U.S. President’s moves to drastically alter trade relations with our long-time partner on our northern border.

Spoiler alert: Canadian voters surprised the Conservative Party, which at the beginning of this year seemed poised to end decades of Liberal Party governments. The Liberal Party and its leader, Mark Carney won the largest number of seats after adopting a “Canada Strong” campaign focused solely on resisting “The betrayal of our neighbors to the south.” But the story of election night in Canada for 2025 was the rise of two dominant parties and the weakening of others, in a nation that has long had multiple parties represented in Ottawa.

We focus here on what we saw from a television coverage standpoint throughout the evening. Every Canadian network had some version of the “Big Board,” made famous most recently by NBC’s Steve Kornacki. That is a large touch screen with very interactive and detailed map graphics. We’ll throw in an unsolicited and unpaid plug here for our long-time friends at Magis Media, who have made it possible and cost-effective for nearly any broadcaster to have their own local version of this kind of election presentation. Learn more about their offerings by clicking here.

The Canadian networks were not as aggressive in using virtual reality graphics and giant video walls as we saw in last summer’s elections in the United Kingdom and in other recent national election coverage across Europe. The CBC in particular did a great job with their coverage, led by their Chief Political Correspondent, Rosemary Barton–who was masterful in anchoring all of the unscripted elements of returns from “the ridings” (what Canadians call the districts for their member of parliament) along with live shots from reporters in the field and in-studio panels with political analysts.

That last element is something we’d like to zoom in on. Having in-studio panels of political analysts on an election night isn’t new, but here is one thing we took away from all of the Canadian networks we watched. There was far less reliance on in-studio interviews with other journalists about the election results, and more interactions with political insiders, be it former members of parliament or other party leaders. Those people were grouped in a single table of four, which was large enough to represent many points of view–without feeling like an overcrowded celebrity panel from an old episode of “Match Game.” (Check out the Game Show Network if that image doesn’t ring a bell for you.)

The Canadian election night unfolded much like recent American elections. While there was a relatively early call that the Liberal party would win the election, the drama that unfolded late into the night and well into the next day was whether the Liberals would capture the needed 172 seats in the House of Commons to become the majority party to form a government. Even for someone not familiar with the inner workings of the Canadian political process, the explanation and insight into just what was happening as the numbers moved back and forth into the early hours of Tuesday morning was fascinating. It made us remember when the legendary Tim Russert pulled out his low-tech whiteboard on NBC to declare “Florida, Florida, Florida” in the 2000 presidential election.

The bottom line we’d suggest remembering for your own election nights to come–you don’t need a studio cast of thousands, just enough people who understand the process and can talk about what it means in plain terms, without pushing any particular party rhetoric. Lock down those contributors early after testing them out in the months leading up to the election.

One final return in from Canada, the Liberal party fell short of winning the majority. Seems that their nation is pretty divided these days. Their political process will require negotiations and compromise to form an effective government Or, as one CBC analyst said with a wistful chuckle–“we could wind up right back here in a year to eighteen months to try this all over again.”

And we thought every four years seemed like an increasingly short interval for national election nights.

It’s been a long weekend, filled with watching various televised sports events, including the NBA and NHL Playoffs, the NFL Draft (which had to be on how many networks at the same time?), and a bit of the English Premier League, just to see Liverpool win a title.

And that led us to turn our attention today to some observations about the coverage of sports on the local TV level.

And why, you might wonder? Is sports on local television even relevant anymore? Let’s define the question a little more.

Because “sports on local television” is an increasingly hot topic in the television business these days. After nearly every professional sports team decamped decades ago from being carried on local broadcast channels–lured by big money deals from regional cable networks, some pro leagues are rediscovering local over-the-air signals to carry some games. They are finding broadcast partners willing to roll out the red carpet, matching up stations to serve team’s geographic markets, and in turn put their product before significantly larger potential audiences.

There are multiple factors for bringing professional sports games back to local TV stations. But our focus here is a different exploration of sports on local television. We’d like to offer some thoughts about how sports is being covered in local television newscasts (or isn’t being covered—as the case may be.)

Over the years, we have heard more than one local station owner, manager or consultant question the need for any sports coverage in local news, let alone having a few people dedicated to staffing a sports department. We know of a few stations in the top 50 markets who have gutted their sports departments, and at least one who currently has no full-time on-air sports talent on their staff.

Sports has been a part of the local tv news format since it was invented shortly after the birth of the medium. Some will point to everything changing with the rise of 24-hour sports networks, led by the birth of ESPN over 45 years ago in nascent years of cable networks. Then there was the rise of regional sports networks dedicated to covering teams closer to home. The internet arrived in the 90’s and then the ability to stream games, first on audio and then on video, which chnaged everthing yet again. 

Today there is no need to wait for scores in the late news, and now, not even for highlights. Plus there is no shortage of online places to discuss, dissect, and discard your favorite team’s latest performance, every hour of every day.

So let’s ask the question bluntly: Is sports coverage in local television newscasts even needed any more?

We’ll not make you wait for overtime for our answer. We say absolutely, just as long as some thought and focus goes into what that coverage is–and making sure it doesn’t feel like it’s the same kind of coverage that might have been on local television news fifty or more years ago.

First and foremost, local sports coverage should have a local focus. Sure, a major league sports team should be part of the menu if it’s in your market. But more prominently featured should be collegiate, high school and yes, even those “lifestyle” sports that regular people participate in.

It’s estimated that over 20 million people now play pickleball. (Don’t ask us, we don’t quite get it either.) But it is important to a growing audience. When was the last time you saw highlights of a local pickleball tournament in a local TV sportscast? Compare that to the last time you saw highlights of a baseball game, on any professional level from the Major Leagues down to the local single-A level. We’ll bet that the frequency is a bit different.

Speaking of betting, that opens a whole different can of worms. Wagering on sports is now legal in 39 states, plus the District of Columbia. Local television stations have gladly accepted ad dollars from the online sports books as they have arrived in each market. But you don’t see much about odds or parlay picks in local TV sportscasts either. Which is probably a good thing for many reasons. And after saturating the market as legal sports books launched in each state, there amount of ad dollars spent on sports gambling has diminished by half since 2021.)

All that said, we were heartened recently when Tegna’s KARE11 in Minneapolis/St. Paul took the time to point out that one of their photojournalists had recognized a newly minted sports superstar, some dozen years ago. KARE’s Gary Knox saw a 6th grade girl playing basketball in a local gym back in 2013 and tweeted for people to remember her name, because of how she impressed him with her hoops play.

The name of the 6th grader in a St. Louis Park, MN gym, was Paige Bueckers. In case you haven’t heard, Paige just wrapped up her college career leading the University of Connecticut’s women’s team to a national title and becoming the number one pick in the 2025 WNBA draft. She has been followed in local TV sportscasts in the Twin Cities, where high school basketball competes with high school hockey for daily sports headlines during the school year. Even the state tournaments, in both sports for both boy’s and girl’s teams, are televised each February and March. 

And in a place known as “The State of Hockey” that is no small comparison.

Our point here is that sports is news. It makes news every day, even for those who would be the very last to consider themselves sports “fans.” It is still the topic of endless conversations and interest (along with the wagering of no small amount of money) by a significant portion of your audience. Does that audience need to see three and a half minutes of pro sports highlights and headlines each weeknight in your newscasts? Probably not. But unique takes on those headlines, especially if there is local color to add, along with unique coverage of the local sports that many follow, is definitely still worthy of a place in local TV newscasts.

Particularly if it is creative, and dare we say…fun, on occasion?

And no, we don’t define fun as trying to out-cliche the national sports personalities that can be seen and heard on all the sports outlets available on every platform. Anyone trying to be the next Chris Berman, Doris Burke, Pat McAfee or Stephen A. Smith needs to stop and take a hard look in the mirror. Those men–and increasingly women as well, finally–are great at what they do, but they have put in the work over many years to build their careers. The audience doesn’t need or want endless copies of their style or catchphrases.

We believe that having fun in sports coverage in 2025 is recognizing that the words spoken by anchor Jim McKay in the iconic opening years ago in ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” still resonate: “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition.”

Perhaps focusing on covering sports in an area slightly smaller than the globe would be the one change to make those words to become a mantra for every local station’s sports department. “Wide World of Sports” was successful for so many years because it focused on telling stories more than final scores. Under the legendary Roone Arledge, it invented the genre of “up close and personal” sports journalism that nearly every sports broadcast that followed has deployed. That’s what sports segments in local TV newscasts need more of.

Because you never know when the 6th grader you are covering today will be the next superstar in her (or his) favorite sport. And they will be making headlines not just in the sports segment, but in the top of the newscast as well.

There is a viral story going around social media at the moment that actor Keanu Reeves engaged in a televised debate with tech billionaire Elon Musk about the future of Artificial Intelligence. In the debate, Reeves “destroyed” Musk in front of a wildly enthusiastic audience by arguing in different ways how humans should never want to be replaced by AI, but that they should embrace the technology as a fantastic tool to empower humans. The narrative of what happened in this debate is fascinating, and the story has gained a fair amount of traction because of the negative sentiment towards the founder of Tesla/SpaceX and special assistant to the Trump White House in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE.

And as much as we may love Keanu and know him to be “The One” (at least according to “The Matrix” trilogy of films), the sad part is that there is zero evidence that this televised debate ever took place. There are no video clips (except for apparent AI-generated voice and graphics mash-ups on YouTube), so that pretty much derails the idea that this was a televised appearance.

Color us disappointed, because the fictional argument that Neo…sorry, Keanu was alleged to have made would be the one we would like to make, not just to counter the explosive growth of AI--but also to the practitioners of television news.

Humanity still matters. And a human connection matters most of all.

We never cease to be surprised at the number of television newscasts, both on the network and local level, that seem to forget the core concept that “News is People.” That news is mostly about what people are doing each day. Mostly the bad and the ugly. But sometimes, and most memorably, just the simple act of being human.

As the 1980s began, television found a winning formula for shows that featured people being interesting, mostly by being themselves. On the network level, this format aired on ABC with “That’s Incredible,” and on NBC it was a series called “Real People.” They had been preceded a few years earlier by the debut of what was first called “The MTWTF Show” on Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KPIX-TV in San Francisco. Later changing the name to “Evening Magazine,” the half-hour show was an attempt to expand local programming in the hour between local news and primetime network programming, a time period which Westinghouse had championed for locally-produced programming following the FCC’s implementation of something called the “Prime Time Access Rule” or PTAR for short. That FCC rule prevented the expansion of network programming into the 7 pm (Eastern/Pacific) hour, requiring that local stations program the 7:30 pm time period themselves. While many stations would simply buy “strip” programming, such as game shows that were relatively cheaply made for the time slot, Westinghouse had championed the idea of using the time period for locally produced programming. The company would export the “Evening Magazine” show format and name to other stations in its portfolio, including Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.

Evening Magazine’s success generated interest from other stations outside of Westinghouse’s “Group W” television properties, and the company developed a syndicated version of the program called “PM Magazine” because of a conflict with an already existing “Evening Magazine” on the air in Seattle. “PM Magazine” would air across the country in markets large and small, using a combination of stories generated by local stations alongside stories generated by other stations airing “PM Magazine,” coordinated by a national production team formed to support the program.

Many of those stories would feature regular people doing interesting things or showcase people living in interesting places. The show arrived as local television stations were converting from shooting 16-millimeter film for local news and programming to shooting small-format videotape for the same purpose. Dubbed “Electronic News Gathering,” these days (somewhat) portable cameras and recorders allowed the stations to be able to afford to create this programming on a nightly basis, and it was successful for the next 15 years. When Evening/PM Magazine ended in the early 90’s, some stations brought the idea of doing regular feature stories back into their now-expanding schedule of local newscasts--which would fill those same time periods, if they weren’t lucky enough to have the eventual juggernauts of the 7 pm hour in most markets: the game shows “Jeopardy" and "Wheel of Fortune."

We tell you this bit of television history to revisit the idea that stories about “real people” have a long history of attracting an audience. CBS News has featured its iconic “On The Road” series, pioneered by legendary newsman Charles Kuralt back in 1967. The series continues today under the magnificent storytelling of CBS’s Steve Hartmann. On NBC, Bob Dotson reported his “American Stories” series for 40 years on “Today." Through his writing and teaching efforts, Bob continues to inspire journalists to a human-centric approach to storytelling. The latest edition of his book “Make It Memorable” is a must-read for any aspiring journalist.

There are also solid examples of this kind of reporting in many local TV markets. One such feature we have admired comes from Nexstar’s WSPA-TV in the Greenville/Spartanburg/Asheville market stretching across South and North Carolina. The station’s “First Responder Friday” feature from longtime morning anchor Fred Cunningham showcases not only the work of various local police, fire, and other emergency agencies--but also the individuals who work in them. Over the years it has aired, the stories have run the gamut from profiling small town departments to some of the largest teams in the region. Each story showcases the women and men working to serve and protect their communities.

These stories feature a human connection. They aren’t the typical stories where first responders appear in a newscast, usually when something bad has happened. Stories like these fall into the ill-defined category of “Good News” we often hear about in audience research, which the viewers say they would like to see more of.

There is an opportunity to deliver more of that by ensuring that we find more ways to bring some humanity back into newscasts--by featuring more than just the recitation of all the bad things that have happened each day.

As Morpheus tells Neo in The Matrix, “There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” 

In the third season of the television series “The West Wing,” there is an episode titled “Hartsfield’s Landing.” In this episode, the fictional President Bartlett engages in multiple simultaneous games of chess with staffers Toby Ziegler and Sam Seaborn. As with every episode of creator Aaron Sorkin’s political drama, the chess playing is one of multiple storylines taking place against the backdrop of waiting for the first votes to be cast in Bartlett’s re-election bid. As political junkies know, the honor of casting and counting the first ballots on each Election Day goes to a few tiny towns in New Hampshire, who conduct their Presidential balloting just after Midnight. Sorkin created the fictional town of “Hartsfield Landing” to stand in for the real life locations of Dixville Notch, Millsfield and Hart’s Location, which are allowed to vote first by a New Hampshire state law allowing any town with under 100 residents to conduct their election early and be the very first returns counted in the first hours of each Election Day.

Back to the chess-playing storyline in this episode. It provides a thread for Martin Sheen’s portrayal of President Josiah Bartlett to battle Ziegler, his White House Director of Communications, over an unfinished conversation about Bartlett’s complicated relationship with his late father, while schooling Deputy Director of Communications Sam Seaborn about an unfolding international standoff with China. While Sam struggles to play chess against his boss, a master at the game, the President urges him on more than one occasion to “See the whole board."

Anyone who has struggled to learn the game of chess and played against someone much more talented has likely heard the same thing. It is, as much of the game of chess can be, an interesting metaphor for much of life.

We tell you all this because this week, we have been struggling to "see the whole board” in real life.

As is often the case on a chessboard, many pieces are in play simultaneously. And it can be easy to be distracted in one part of the board by what the pawns and other pieces are in position to do, while your King is seemingly a few moves away from being checkmated, thus ending the game. 

And so the capturing of one noble knight was a move that we didn’t see coming. This past Tuesday afternoon, the news broke that Bill Owens, the vaunted Executive Producer of CBS News’s “60 Minutes” had just announced that he was resigning from his position and making it painfully clear that he had no choice but to do so because his “editorial independence” to run the broadcast as he saw fit had been curtailed—if not outright eliminated.

The real-life struggle against corporate meddling in the CBS News division would be playing out in the network’s broadcast center facility on West 57th Street on this Tuesday afternoon in April. That’s about a dozen blocks away from Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre, where George Clooney is nightly reprising Edward R. Murrow’s role in a similar battle for journalistic independence at CBS News against an influential political figure. The story in the play “Good Night and Good Luck” took place some seven decades earlier--when news icon Murrow and his producer Fred Friendly took on the actions of Wisconsin’s junior US Senator and anti-communism crusader, Joseph R. McCarthy.

Then, seemingly as now, the people who control the corporation that owns and operates CBS News face tremendous pressure from those in power in Washington to temper a television news program that some in political power see as a threat. Back in the 1950s, the pressure on CBS and its then-Chairman William S. Paley came from its advertisers. Today, the pressure is from an administration that appears willing to fight in the courts and via the governmental agencies that regulate the corporation that owns CBS, Paramount Global, and the latter’s future business plans.

In both cases, the politician's goal is the same: Chill a news organization's free speech by casting doubt on its practice of unblinking journalism and its motives in reporting what it does. This playbook hasn’t changed over the years. But now the gullibility of a significant part of the audience, bombarded by a never-ending cascade of misinformation from sources with clear agendas, seemingly has.

None of broadcast journalism’s network institutions is immune to all of this. They haven’t been since they became assets in major corporations with global businesses, which focus more on Wall Street than Madison Avenue. This has been true since GE took over NBC in 1986, followed by Westinghouse merging with CBS in 1994 and Disney taking over ABC in 1995. Disney was an entertainment-focused corporation, whereas GE and Westinghouse were industrial giants that made locomotives and nuclear reactors. Both had also made television sets, and each owned radio and TV properties, so the general belief was that they would easily incorporate television networks into their large company portfolios.

However, each discovered that running major news organizations doesn’t always align with a corporation’s business goals. Newsrooms and the professionals who populate them are notoriously independently minded. They take the whole “speaking truth to power” idea very seriously. And when the practice of journalism rubs against the business aspirations of billionaires who need the approval of government agencies to complete their transactions, something usually has to give.

To many, we seem to have reached that point in the proceedings. It is not the first time.

In 1930, William S. Paley, the head of the Columbia Broadcasting System, created the growing radio network's news division. Paley would champion a strong news presence, first on radio and later on television. The news division, first led by Paul White, would quickly build a legendary reputation. White would hire a young Ed Murrow, who would be one of the voices who informed the nation about the Second World War from the rooftops of London and the battlefields of Europe. Murrow would go on to lead CBS News himself and become the face of the television network’s news independence when his “See It Now” would take on Senator McCarthy in 1954. Murrow and his boss, Bill Paley, would clash over the reporting on McCarthy, which led to the loss of the program’s sponsor, The Aluminum Corporation of America, known as ALCOA. Paley’s ultimate decision was not to interfere with Murrow’s coverage, but ultimately, he would purportedly curtail the news program’s schedule due to low ratings. That is the story that is now being performed nightly on a Broadway stage.

The director in the control room for those “See It Now” telecasts was one Don Hewitt, who had arrived at the network in 1948. Some twenty years later in 1968, Hewitt would create a new weekly news “magazine” for CBS with the name “60 Minutes.” He would serve as the Executive Producer of the program until 2005. 

And while Bill Paley largely championed his network’s news independence over the decades he led CBS, on occasion he would make a decision that circumscribed CBS News coverage in certain situations, One such decision came in 1972, when Paley ordered the shortening of a series by the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite reporting on the emerging Watergate scandal. Paley’s decision followed complaints from Chuck Colson, a White House aide to then-President Richard Nixon. Colson would eventually be the first person from the Nixon administration to serve time in a Federal prison in connection with Watergate-related charges.

Bill Paley would step down as Chairman of CBS in 1983. In 1985, CNN founder Ted Turner made an audacious bid to buy CBS. The media “maverick” had been interested in the network since there had been talks about the upstart CNN being acquired by CBS as early as 1981. Turner’s bid would fail, and he would ultimately merge his company with Time Warner a decade later, then be pushed out when Time Warner merged with internet darling AOL in 2001.

Control of CBS has changed hands multiple times since Westinghouse acquired it in 1995. Eventually, CBS Corporation would merge with Viacom in 2019 (Ironically, Viacom began as part of CBS itself), and then ViacomCBS became part of Paramount Global in 2022. (More irony, Paramount once owned 49% of CBS in its early years.) In turn, Paramount Global today is controlled by National Amusements, a company led by Shari Redstone. She wants to merge Paramount Global with Skydance Media, which David Ellison, the son of Oracle Corporation founder Larry Ellison, leads. In doing so, she reportedly stands to make upwards of 2 billion dollars**.

However, the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media needs permission from the Federal Communications Commission due to the television broadcast licenses held by CBS. A hurdle to that FCC approval is a pending lawsuit filed in Texas for $20 billion** from then-candidate, and now President, Donald Trump. The lawsuit claims that CBS and 60 Minutes engaged in “unlawful and illegal behavior” centering around claims about the editing and airing of portions of an interview with Trump’s opponent in the 2024 Presidential election, then Vice President Kamala Harris. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr subsequently has opened an FCC inquiry into the same matter.

That brings us to today and the question of what happens now that Bill Owens, the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes, is stepping down from being just the third person to lead the program. Particularly if his charge that the editorial independence of the program is being compromised as part of some effort to appease the Trump administration to settle its lawsuit and allow the merger of Paramount and Skydance to proceed.

There is now much speculation about what will happen next, and little of it seems optimistic that there will be an outcome that does not involve some level of capitulation on the part of CBS.

In chess, capitulation refers to a player resigning (or surrendering) the game, thus acknowledging their loss before the game ends in checkmate. It is conceding defeat because the player’s position is untenable and there is no realistic chance of winning.

When we try to “see the whole board” at this precarious moment, imagining a different outcome for this particular match is difficult, at best.

(**Editors Note: This article has been updated from the original version to correct the amounts reported, both in the reference to what Ms. Redstone stands to make personally in the Paramount Global-Skydance Media transaction, as well as the amount in damages sought by Mr. Trump in his lawsuit against CBS, which was amended from $10 billion to $20 billion in a Feb. 2025 court filing.)

In her book “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live,” author Susan Morrison says that when she asked about the description of how the show starts as being known as “the cold open.”, Lorne Michaels said: “I made that up.” She also notes that the actual origin of the phrase is “a bit murky.” But as we’ve been recovering from a nasty sinus infection over the past few days, her book has been a great read about the man behind one of the cultural touchstones that television first brought us in the 1970s. We’d recommend it if you’re looking for something to read. You can pick it up from Amazon (while supporting this blog) by clicking our affiliate link here.

Whoever came up with the term “cold open” understood the idea that it is significantly better to start a program by getting right into it, from the proverbial cold start, rather than just sticking with the traditional format of beginning with: “Now it’s time for our show! Here are our regular hosts (naming each one) and our special guests, so now on with the show!” Given that is how most television programs began in the early days of the medium, it was probably inevitable that local television newscasts would follow suit–at least in their early days.

Then somebody thought of beginning a local newscast by getting right into the news stories of the day, with what you probably now know as either “Headlines” or a “Cold Open.” You probably know this so well, you don’t even think of it. It is just how the local newscast begins. Sometimes it might be a little different, perhaps with some extra urgency, if, possibly, there is a reporter live at the scene of breaking news or something different than the normal expectation due to a major event.

That was certainly the case yesterday, when the first word of the death of Pope Francis had come early in the morning. By the time the early evening newscasts rolled around, most began with the headline of the Pope’s death, probably adding in some reaction. Some stations (and networks) we saw made this their entire cold open, previewing a “special edition” of the newscast that was to follow would be (forgive us) “All Pope, all the Time.” Other outlets added in additional stories as they usually might, if only to round out the opening sequence, and then went on to start the newscast.

In other words, the first sixty seconds or so of the newscast went about as any regular viewer might expect on such a day, dominated by one major news story (especially for the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics who just lost their spiritual leader). And we are here to present the idea that this was a missed opportunity in most cases.

It is easy to understand how this happens. The “cold open” of the newscast is usually one of the last things to be done in the frantic crunch of putting the program together. The desire is to have the first thing in the program present the very latest information and be as up-to-date as possible. That is, even with the limitation that most newsrooms will pre-record this segment, to make it as perfect as possible and put as much production value as possible into it.

Even in the aforementioned book about Lorne Michaels, the process that unfolds each week in the creation of a new episode of “Saturday Night Live” is described in this passage from author Susan Morrison: “A high-energy cold open is important to him (Michaels), and he often has the writers start from scratch on Friday or even Saturday. The idea is, if you begin the show with a home run, then momentum will carry through the next ninety minutes."

So the same idea that has opened a network television institution for the past fifty years is also behind the start of every television newscast. OK, maybe without the signature shouting at the end of “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” But the concept of grabbing attention and getting things going strong is pretty much the same.

And for too many stations we watch, this single idea is an opportunity lost.

The legendary radio consultant Holland Cooke states it so economically and eloquently: “Hook Early, Hook Hard." The first sixty seconds are your first–and in most cases, your ONLY– chance to “reel in” the viewer to continue watching/listening past that first minute of air time. It is just too easy to switch to something else or, worse still, tune out altogether.

Too many newscasts start with recitations of this tired formula: “Coming up on this newscast, we’ll have news story #1, then news story #2, then maybe a longer story #3 and fun or feature story, and a promise of ‘all that and more’ in this newscast that starts…right now!” This is usually followed by what we label as “the fanfare” part of the opening: Typically a short punchy title animation with a big musical logo. Finally, we come to a shot of the anchor(s) who introduce themselves and get on with the newscast.

What’s missing from that formula is an actual hook. What would grab someone’s attention and make them think that they have to keep watching? Usually, there is very little because the cold open is often just that: cold. It’s often as unappealing as a tired server in a restaurant, less-than-enthusiastically reading off “today’s specials.” You want to hear the answer to the age-old question: “What would you recommend getting to eat here?” If the answer to that was ever “We have the best damn (insert a food dish here) in the state” then wouldn’t you would be far more likely to order that–rather than something off a list that was delivered as unappealingly as possible, right?

Let’s turn back to yesterday’s major news of the death of Pope Francis. What if your newscast opened with this promise: “Tonight, as the world mourns the passing of a Pope, hear how he changed the lives of people here in Anytown with one simple question.” Now that’s a hook–because it includes a promise to deliver more than just the expected details.

The opening to any newscast should include the promise to deliver more than what your viewers might expect. Most days, the news is a known commodity–especially in an age where nearly every breaking news story is delivered in real-time to the smartphone in their pockets. What can you offer beyond the expected? What will surprise and potentially impress your audience today? If your answer to that last question is nothing, you need to reevaluate what is going into the next twenty-nine or fifty-nine minutes that follow.

Is today a unique enough day for you to consider dramatically changing things up? Just because you always open the newscast the same way doesn’t mean you should miss the opportunity to signify an important occasion by ditching the normal formula and trying something completely different. Don’t be afraid to use a different hook to engage your audience. What might that be? Almost anything. Natural sound. A sound bite from an eyewitness. A reporter’s standup. Just about anything you can think of that might showcase the stories you are about to deliver, as if to say, “We have the best (insert food item) in the state for you today!”

Put more simply, don’t miss the opportunity to turn the cold open into a minute with real impact. Because the quote (attributed to both Oscar Wilde and Will Rogers) is true: “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”

At least until the next newscast.

Seriously, let’s stop using it. This word sounds so optimistic in its spin on what is happening in the television business these days. This label, seemingly extracted from some business school lecture, promises lofty, futuristic goals. As those who appreciate words and have used them for a decent living for some five decades, we fully understand why certain words become popular in a given moment. They can provide optimism and solace at the same time. Inspiration and consolation in equal doses.

But when a word becomes an overused canard to distract from what is really going on, the word loses its meaning in short order. Eventually, it becomes a blunt instrument to dull the senses and fill the void of fear with a grand-sounding promise.

As Shakespeare put it best in Macbeth (the Bard did have a unique way with words of all stripes), this one word would indeed be “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

We should probably stop our rant here briefly and point out that we are not referring to the other “T Word” of the moment–that being tariffs.

No, our complaint here is against the word we heard so many use at the recent NAB Show in Las Vegas. But as soon as it slipped from their lips, they most quickly apologized because they realized the word’s original meaning had been perverted by the dark underbelly of commerce.

It is only 14 letters long, but hearing it in the context of the promise of new technology that will radically shift a business means that a seemingly endless number of good and talented people will lose their jobs in the blink of an eye, with little warning and even less hope to follow.

And that word would be transformation.

Why are we so opposed to this one word? As we noted earlier, it is a word that suggests something more than what, in fact, is really happening. We hear it from leaders in all walks of business, but for us, it just rings hollow when we hear “The Television business is transforming.” Well, of course it is. The television business has been changing since it was created either at the hands of Philo T. Farnsworth or Vladimir Zworykin, or perhaps by the pioneering work of John Logie Baird or Kenjiro Takayanagi.

Even the story of how television came to be has changed over the years. That’s how much change the whole medium of television has seen in the past century since its invention.

And how much has television changed? From a mechanical-based version that used spinning discs to the electronic version that captured and displayed monochrome images using specialized vacuum tubes. From those tubes to transistors and on to semiconductors. From black and white to color. From those early, hulking, gigantic cameras requiring multiple people to move about to ones that can fit in your pocket. And the list goes on and on. As the lawyers would say, let’s stipulate that change is in the very nature of television, both in its execution–and its effect on our lives.

We can almost hear you asking, “Isn’t transformation just a fancier-sounding version of change?”

The dictionary defines transformation as “a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance.” To some degree, the question is an accurate summation. But in current day usage, we hear “The T word” as part of the same _lingua franca _ as the HR approved alternatives like “restructuring, downsizing, rightsizing” and the other current darling of the moment, “efficiency.”

Unfortunately, too many colleagues know firsthand that when the conversation turns to transforming any business, it really means how much money can be saved, typically by needing fewer people to do the necessary work to produce each aspect of a business. And television of all sorts, under the various acronyms of OTA, OTT, FAST, CTV, MVPD, ATSC, and ad infinitum, is still–first and foremost–a business.

Whatever the technology of the minute may be, it is far too evident from scanning countless LinkedIn posts that there is a continuing human cost to all of this transformation. We’d propose at least acknowledging that toll with a small bit of compassion by ditching the consultant-speak to properly acknowledge the proverbial elephant in the room: change.

And yes, the fact remains that “Change is Hard.” It always has been.

Television is in the midst of a fight for what its future will look like. There have been real-life casualties due to the continuing changes that some might see approaching a crisis. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and author from New Mexico, writes the best thing we have read about transformation: “True transformation is the process of letting go. The word ‘change’ normally refers to new beginnings. But transformation…more often happens not when something new begins–but when something old falls apart.”

Thus, our call to ditch “The T Word” and perhaps focus more on helping people cope with the latest in a business that has always been, not so ironically, about change. As Shakespeare put it earlier in the soliloquy mentioned above from Macbeth:

“There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”