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.

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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”

There are few things that test a local television newsroom more than covering breaking news. And to be clear, we mean an actual breaking news story, not just slapping that label on something that happened hours ago. In this edition of The Topline, we will focus on one such story that broke last Thursday in New York City when the first reports came in that a helicopter had crashed in the Hudson River.

Having worked in local news in the nation’s largest market, we know there is a lot in New York City that is different than other places. The pace is intense, even on a normal day, and the competition is fierce. As a reminder, five local TV stations produce news in English and 2 in Spanish, along with a pair of 24-hour local cable news operations and countless independent video journalists, all covering not only the five boroughs but the entire Tri-State area that has over 7.3 million television households.

So, did we mention the competition is just a bit more intense here? Yes, it is. And indeed, there are more people, more resources, and more news. However, some things are applicable from market number one to any in the country. Here is what we saw last Thursday in New York City:

The first reports of the helicopter crash began to come in after 3:17 p.m. local time. The first reports we saw from social media started appearing at 3:37 p.m. We haven’t been able to verify which station broke into regular programming first, but within minutes, all five local television stations that primarily broadcast in English were on the air shortly after 3:30 p.m. That would be WABC-TV, WCBS-TV, WNBC-TV, WNYW and WPIX. (Sorry, but we did not monitor other local TV news sources on this occasion.)

One thing became apparent early on: because of their newsroom’s new location at 7 Hudson Square (which they just moved into a few weeks ago), WABC-TV was physically best positioned to get video from their rooftop camera position in Lower Manhattan. From there, they could see the scene over towards the New Jersey side of the river. That was just a case of being in the closest position as the story started to unfold.

However, there are many reasons why WABC-TV has been "New York’s #1 News” for most of the past 50-plus years. In 1968, newly arrived News Director Al Primo installed his “Eyewitness News” format and philosophy into the newsroom there. One of the key reasons is how WABC-TV approaches covering a breaking news story. And that can be best summed up in a phrase used by the Commissioner of the NYPD in describing the order given to the department in a major incident such as a helicopter crash: DEPLOY ALL ASSETS.

WABC-TV knows what all local television newsrooms who excel in covering breaking news know. When you confirm that it is more than likely that a major news story may be unfolding, you mobilize everyone you can and start them moving on the story. We have had this conversation in multiple newsrooms across multiple markets, big and small. And the gist of it is, “When it might be one of those situations, you start moving people as soon as possible. You can always pull them back if you need to, but in the initial minutes, there needs to be less debate and more action.”

These stations also have and know their breaking news plan. That’s because they practice it, teach it to new people wo join the team, and are ready to execute it.

We’re not saying that other NYC stations don’t know this or that they don’t practice it. We are saying that on this Thursday afternoon in April, when the report of a helicopter crash came in, WABC-TV executed better than the competition.

All stations got on the air with their breaking news coverage in short order. All had basically the same shot of the scene from the West Side of Manhattan looking toward the New Jersey side of the river. One key concept to note right from the beginning is once you have a live picture from the scene of breaking news, it should never leave the screen. Double-box other elements if needed, but do not take the picture of what is happening off the screen—unless it is to show other angles from the scene. Or video that witnesses had shot on their phones. So many stations will cut back to anchors on the desk because they think there isn’t enough happening on camera.

From what we saw, WABC had the first crews live from New Jersey, where the story was really unfolding. Witnesses were describing to Eyewitness News reporter Lauren Glassberg what they had first heard as a loud noise, described as “a sound like an explosion.” Looking towards the sound, they saw the horrific sight of the helicopter’s blades falling out of the sky and the aircraft then spinning out of control towards the water. Some witnesses had video from their phones of the tragic final moments of what would turn out to be a sightseeing flight for a visiting family of five from Spain, along with the helicopter pilot. No one on board survived the crash.

It is worth pointing out that Lauren Glassberg is listed as WABC-TV’s features and lifestyles reporter on its website. But her command of the situation unfolding by the minute was impressive. She handled a barrage of live interviews with those who claimed to have witnessed the tragic events in real-time. She treated each person, from adults to younger ones, with courtesy and respect. She let them tell their story but would jump in with a question if they started to falter in telling what they saw. This was the work of an experienced reporter who embodied the entire philosophy of “Eyewitness News.” How? Because she let the viewers hear the story being told by those who were there when it happened.

This brings us to a key theme we would stress about the breaking news coverage we saw that day on WABC. Each Eyewitness News team member was in command of their situation and their part in the evolving coverage. They were focused on telling the story as it was unfolding. We can’t count the number of stations we have watched over the years when they are thrust into breaking news coverage, and the feeling you get is that there is uncertainty—not just about the story unfolding but also coming from the coverage of the story. Understand our meaning here; we are not suggesting that there aren’t a lot of unknowns in the first minutes or even hours of a story. But if we can make it as simple as possible, “tell us what you know, tell us what you don’t know, and tell us what you expect to happen next.” Some will think this is just a riff on the ever-popular "new, now, next” trope that permeates many newsrooms (and you know who you are.) We would counter that telling people what we don’t know at any point in a breaking news situation is being honest and transparent with the viewers. Struggling with this idea is where many people on the air begin to get twisted in knots and lose their “command” of the situation.

A few other notes here about executing breaking news coverage: Don’t feel compelled to have someone speak every single moment during the coverage. Take breaths and let the pictures and natural sound tell the story. Let the moment breathe as you are narrating it. We hear anchors feel the need not to allow any moments of “dead air.” We know that when people are being bombarded with information, especially in an emotional moment, they are not hearing everything being said. Take a page out of CBS's stellar coverage of the dramatic final hour of The Masters yesterday. It was a masterclass of letting the pictures tell the story, often without any narration.

Take the pause and reset the scene. This is the perfect opportunity to speak to viewers who may have just joined the coverage. Give them a time check (it helps reestablish that the coverage is actually live) and summarize the factual points that are confirmed at that moment. Treat this like radio, and imagine they can’t see your logo on the screen or the “Breaking News” banner. Tell viewers in simple terms what they are watching: “It’s now 4:30, and you are watching continuing Breaking News coverage from ABC 7 Eyewitness News of a crash of a passenger helicopter in the Hudson River.” From this simple reset, you can go anywhere with the coverage that you need to go to.

Another moment of praise for WABC-TV’s coverage last Thursday was that they didn’t just rely on the reporters in the field, but they also moved quickly to deploy one of their investigative reporters in the newsroom to begin going through all of the data sources that might apply to this story. Checking resources like FlightAware.Com to see if the helicopter's flight path was tracked prior to the crash (it was) and gathering as much data about the aircraft from the FAA records. The station also interviewed its airborne reporter, John Del Giorno, who would normally have been in the station’s own helicopter covering the story. He explained that the weather had deteriorated in the time since the crash, keeping News Copter 7 on the ground. He added good perspective from someone who has spent a lot of hours in a helicopter over these same waters that were now being searched for clues as to what went so terribly wrong.

We believe that in breaking news, everyone can contribute, so once again, we stress that phrase again: “DEPLOY ALL ASSETS” available in your newsroom. Have your digital team begin scrubbing social media for pictures and videos from the breaking news story. One of the first videos that showed the helicopter falling from the sky into the Hudson appeared to have come from social media.

Don’t stop with the obvious assignments of people and resources in the news department. If you need help answering the phones on the desk, ask for help from other departments in the station. Anyone can answer a phone and help direct calls to where they need to go—or politely ask the caller to call back another time if their matter isn’t urgent. 

One more thought in a major breaking news story--as this one quickly became. Begin compiling a list of questions to follow up on. This will become a great list to inspire follow-up stories. We’ve seen stations do this on an old-fashioned whiteboard, and others do it on an open file in the newsroom computer system. Don’t try to edit these on the fly. When a question arises, such as “How old are these helicopters that fly tourists around NYC?” that should go right on the list. The idea is just to capture all the topics that will be the stories to come in the hours, days, and weeks to follow. Dedicate someone to this task if possible.

We absolutely saw moments of strong coverage from other NYC stations last Thursday afternoon. But in the first hours after everyone went on air, WABC-TV was the station we felt executed more aspects of its breaking news coverage better—and it would have been the station we would likely turn to the next time there was a major breaking news story.

And that is the whole opportunity for every station in every breaking news story. 

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We’d wager that most people come to Las Vegas to have a good time, bringing some hope for a change in their fortune. It’s no secret that in recent years, the city has been moving towards being an even larger entertainment destination with the arrival of the NFL’s Raiders at Allegiant Stadium, soon to be joined by MLB’s Athletics and, of course, the curious landmark venue that doubles as a giant outdoor advertising screen, known as The Sphere, all would seem to signal that Vegas is more than a gambling destination in the desert..

However, with 30-plus billion dollars in revenue coming from gambling in 2024, make no mistake, betting is still what many come here to do.

We were thinking about this sitting in Harry Reid Airport on Wednesday, waiting for our flight home as we watched people getting in a few more spins at the slot machines amidst the gates of Terminal 3. Five short days ago, over 60,000 people were arriving for the 2025 edition of the NAB Show.

As a group, broadcasters arrived for the show with understandable concerns about the future of their core business. There are the ongoing challenges of dwindling audience shares, spurred by various challengers delivering audio and video using the internet instead of the airwaves. This seemingly infinite source of competition has also meant dwindling advertising revenues, more magnified in a year with no federal election cycle and far fewer political ad dollars. Adding to everyone’s worries was the uncertainty from the precipitous plunge on Wall Street following President Trump's announcement of his “Every Nation Gets A Tariff” trade policy on April 2nd.

So, all that shiny new technology to see in the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center, much of it made in other countries, would likely have higher price tags in the future. That was hoping anyone had money to buy anything in the first place. With that as the reality they left back home, many broadcaster's faces looked more grim than Nicholas Cage’s character in the 1995 movie, “Leaving Las Vegas."

But as anyone who has ever visited Las Vegas knows, reality can be forgotten while you are here. And so the NAB Show opened on Sunday. 

If there was optimism to be found in all the new technology on display, it was that much of it was described in terms of how it could allow for significant productivity gains. From advancements like multiple station's master control operations to live in the cloud to AI-powered newsroom tools allowing journalists to create more content in less time. When you hear a sales pitch from a vendor on how their product could save hours of work, it doesn’t take a business degree to translate that promise into a smaller number of full-time employees needed in a radio or television station. The latest innovations were not just for the legacy over-the-air (OTA) broadcasting business but also for the newer business streams like streaming, OTT, and FAST channels and the ever-elusive promises of the shiny new thing of NextGen television on the ATSC 3.0 standard that you have probably heard so much about.

Don’t worry if you haven’t heard much about it. The audience who will have to buy all those new-fangled NextGenTV sets hasn’t either.

Many presentations were made on how those new NexGenTV sets might save the day. One example is the plan to make advertisements “addressable,” meaning a different commercial could be delivered to each set, as streaming video can presently do. If that didn’t sound like the answer, then maybe the promise of providing high-speed internet data would be the big winner, as plans to use part of the NexGen TV signal for “data broadcasting” were detailed.

It all made for an interesting tableau on Monday and Tuesday when broadcasters were walking the show floor, using the NAB Show app on their devices to figure out where everything was located and when the next presentation was starting. That was when they likely saw the breaking news alerts that the stock market was dropping even further.

But as anyone who has gambled in Las Vegas knows, and as Don Henley’s 1989 song told us, “Everything can change in a New York minute.” (We had to use that reference because the Eagles wrapped up their shows at The Sphere on Saturday night. From those who were in attendance, we heard that they sounded great, even if the remaining founders of the band are now in their seventies.)

By Wednesday, when the NAB Show officially ended its short run, Wall Street was on a run of its own, now swinging in the upward direction. The reversal of fortunes was due to the President’s surprise announcement of a 90-day pause in implementing those just announced sweeping tariffs. Even as the ever-skeptical national news media tried to question the explanation that this was part of the plan all along, executives from all walks of business, including those from broadcasting, breathed a small sigh of relief as they boarded their flights to head home.

Now, they could return to wondering what the equally mercurial chairman of the Federal Communications Commission might come up with next to rattle the business. As one long-time industry watcher said: “Coming to Vegas reminds us all that life is just like a big game of craps. You’re just waiting to see what happens on the next roll of the dice."

For us, reality returned as the sound of the ever-spinning slot machines in the airport faded when we walked down the jetway and boarded the plane to take us home.

As we were planning to start Day Three of the NAB Show here in Las Vegas, our Smartwatch reported that we had walked nearly twenty miles in the first two days and we have the very sore feet to prove it. But we would not be deterred in our mission to see more of the show today, because even giving a cursory once over to many of the exhibitors spread across the three open halls of Las Vegas Convention Center, there was still much that we hadn’t gotten to see at all by Tuesday.

As we have previously reported here, there are exhibitors with everthing from systems to run every function in a television or radio station to those who are showing the latest accessories to turn your smartphone into a cinematic tool capable of shooting any kind of video programming imaginable. So the crowd of more than 60,000 attendees to the 2025 edition of the NAB Show is made up not only of braodcasters, but also those who create content for every platform from Cinema to YouTube. This is also a global crowd with attendees coming from over 160 different counties so you hear as many languages as you are likely to in the lobby of the Unitied Nations.

However, among the broadcasters we have seen here at the 2025 NAB Show here in Las Vegas, there are very few people with the title News Director on their badge. And in our opinion, that is a damn shame. Because we are now convinced that there is no other annual event that may be as important to the future of local television news as this show now is—and it likely will continue to be for the next five years, at least.

While stating that, we certainly understand that station budgets are tighter than ever, and many News Directors aren’t travelling much, if at all, in this year. That has been the situation for a few years now. Even if you look talk about attending a news-specific event like the annual RTDNA conference, set for this coming June in New Orleans. The small sample of working news directors we know were almost universal in saying they weren’t planning to go to the RTDNA, adding if they were doing any travel this year—it would likely be to either another journalist event such as the NABJ, NAHJ, AAJA or as an alternative to those, perhaps the IRE Conference, which bizarrely enough is set for less than a week after the RTDNA event and is also being held in New Orleans.

When asked why they would go to one of those events instead of the RTDNA, the answer heard most often was “because it is a better recruiting opportunity for hires to my newsroom than the RTDNA.” Which explains the shrinking crowd we noticed in the last few RTDNA conferences we attended since the event was cancelled due to Covid concerns in 2020.

It all leads us to propose it is time for the board of RTDNA to move its annual conference to be held adjacent to  the NAB Show in April of each year. This is not such a novel idea, the RTDNA held their conference adjacent to the NAB’s Show back in 2010. And we would argue that it is time to do so again.

Why do we suggest this? Because it is clear to us that there are too many technological advances on the near horizon that will directly impact the operation of every local broadcast newsroom, but especially the television ones. Those issues include the deployment of Artifical Intelligence as a tool in the newsroom (we’ll have a lot more to say about this in a special report in the coming days) not to mention the evolution of the newsroom computer system or NRCS into a whole different platform that will encompass story origination across both broadcast and digital platforms. On top of that, the advancements in all of the gear that journalists will be deploying in the coming years—from small format cameras and smartphones to bonded cellular transmitters that can fit in a back pocket rather than in a backpack.

Over the past three days we have seen all of these things and more. News Directors need to see them too.

Aside from the stuff on the show floor, there is also the fact that there were over 5,000 different educational opportunites as part of the NAB Show, with tracks on everything from Broadcast Management to Content Creation. If the RTDNA followed the example of the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) which holds its annual convention alongside the NAB Show and attracts over 1200 educators and students to Las Vegas, that would be another bonus in recruiting students and interacting with faculty.

If this all seems like a win-win situation, it unfortunately isn’t. Like many organizations, the RTDNA conference is a significant source of revenue for the organization,. We heard reports that when the association held its 2010 annual conference alongside the NAB Show, it was not profitable and thus one of the big reasons for separating the RTDNA event to being in held in various other cities each year. While that certainly seems plausible, we wonder if in 2026 or in subsequent years, the economic proposition should be reconsidered and balanced against the opportunity to be more relevant and more attractive for News Directors to attend both the RTDNA Conference and the NAB show together in some configuration.

So to restate our observation, there is too much being developed and shown now at the NAB Show that newsroom leaders need to see. And no, that’s not a reference to the nightlife available in Las Vegas.

We’ll attempt to detail more of that for you in our next dispatch from here in LV.

Remember when television stations use to tell you those words before delivering something of significance? These days, you are more likely to get dumped right into the midst of a special report, when the hub failed to make the switch to catch it from the beginning. But that rant is for another day. In today’s edition, we were planning to bring you day two coverage from the NAB Show here in Las Vegas. It is where we have walked and stood so much over the past 48 hours that our feet feel like two pounds of ground beef.

Personal ailments aside, we were in the audience on the main stage of the NAB Show this Monday morning, waiting for the opening session to start. That was when our phone buzzed with the breaking news report from our online publishing friends at TheDesk.Net. They had published a story about how Nexstar Media Group, owner of the nation’s largest group of local television stations, had required some of its stations to air a story in their local newscasts about the proposed deregulation of the broadcasting industry by Brendan Carr, the current chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. In addition, the news stories reportedly called for viewers to contact the FCC and support the deregulation effort. You can read the original story from TheDesk.Net using this link.

In timing that felt more like a movie plot than real life, we had just finished digesting the online story when the welcome session we were waiting for began. And out walks Nexstar CEO Perry Sook to welcome everyone to Las Vegas and the NAB Show. Sook is on for a few short moments and introduces the next speaker, Curtis LeGeyt, the President of the NAB. For the record, we should state here that we met Mr. Sook on the occasion of Nexstar acquiring the station we were working for at the time. We doubt he would remember our name or face if we ran into him today.

But we have ruminated a bit on this Nexstar story and, as you might imagine, we have a few thoughts. Though probably not the ones you might expect.

Having spent nearly every day of our professional careers in television newsrooms, we do find it a bit heavy-handed for Nexstar to have its own newsrooms run a story calling for viewers to contact the FCC and support deregulation that it would likely benefit from--without more context than we saw in some of the versions of the news story that aired. We’d sure like to believe if we were leading a Nexstar newsroom that received the mandate to air the story, we would have pushed for language that made it clear that this was government reform that our station’s ownership supported, given the FCC grants the license to our station that allows us to be in business in the first place.

The whole effort felt like an odd twist on one scene in Paddy Chayefsky’s script for the 1976 movie “Network.” In the film, network news anchorman Howard Beale goes on the air and in a fit of angry ranting, he calls for viewers to “flood the White House with telegrams” to stop a proposed merger that will hand ownership of his fictional UBS network over to a larger business conglomerate with financial ties to Saudi Arabia.

As you might guess, in the movie, the White House indeed ends up “knee-deep in telegrams.” The plot of the movie, which IMDB lists as a “dark comedy,” then takes a series of twists that we won’t spoil for you here. We will urge you to watch “Network" if you have never seen it. Or watch it again if you haven’t seen it in recent years. 

We don’t suggest that the movie’s fictional plea to viewers is equivalent to the current Nexstar situation. But art sometimes imitates life, even if it takes nearly five decades. How you ask? One of the deregulation moves under consideration by FCC Chairman Carr is a relaxation of restrictions against foreign interests owning American broadcast stations.

But here’s our plot twist that you may not expect: while we wouldn’t want to be forced to air a self-serving news story, especially with little or no transparency about the company’s interests being served, we do respect the company's right to call for the public to support a government agency in reviewing--and possibly repealing--regulation that impacts their business interests.

We believe the most significant error in all of this was in the execution of the idea. 

Because, like it or not, the people who own broadcast television stations have the right to determine what they want to put on the air. And instruct their employees to follow their instructions. (Of course, those employees have a decision they can make about doing so or finding new employment.) The only real restrictions on that right are primarily associated with the airing of obscene material or failing to meet the very broad standard of “operating in the public interest.” Perry Sook is the head of Nexstar and the company's largest individual owner of shares, holding just over 5%. He, or someone in his corporate leadership, certainly can tell all 160-odd stations to put a message on their air asking viewers to support the FCC chair’s oddly named “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative.

But was it, as a Nexstar spokesperson told TheDesk.Net, "a news story worth covering?" We’d call that a bit of positive PR messaging at best.

Especially without more transparency to the viewers of those local newscasts, perhaps along the lines of what is required in the political ads that air over those same Nexstar-owned stations. So maybe it wouldn't have to be Perry Sook appearing on camera, stating his name, and adding, “I approve this message.” But what if each local General Manager went on their stations and explained the value of local broadcasting to the community and the station’s business interests being served by less government regulation?

It may not end up as satisfying as the brilliant monologue by the late actor Ned Beatty as the corporate CEO in “Network.” Still, it certainly would be more honest with the viewers than trading on their trust placed in their local news anchor, whatever may be left of THAT these days.

In tomorrow’s edition, we’ll return to our continuing coverage of the NAB Show in Las Vegas.

We’re coming to you today from the place that almost no one calls “Sin City” anymore because Las Vegas isn’t the Vegas of old. Millions of people converge each year on this city that hosts so many conventions that its convention center seems perpetually under renovation and expansion. But each April, the Las Vegas Convention Center plays host to the National Association of Broadcasters show, which we’re told is one of the top three most significant events here in terms of attendees, coming in right behind the annual Consumer Electronics Show, also known by a three letter acronym, in their case CES.

Looking in the mirror, we note that we have been coming to the NAB show for decades. When we made our first pilgrimage in a year that we’ll go so far as to say that it began with a 19, the two most prominent booths on the convention floor belonged to RCA and Ampex, with an upstart SONY challenging for floor space. RCA and Ampex have long been out of business, and the two largest booths we saw today, entering the South Hall, belonged to Ross and Blackmagic Designs. (The Las Vegas Convention Center has four massive halls, North, South, West, and Central—though the latter is this year’s renovation project.)

For the uninitiated, the NAB show is to video and audio professionals what CES is to technology retailers and fans. Note that we said video and audio--rather than radio and TV professionals, which you might think of as “Broadcasters.” And while, yes, this is a trade show that caters to the folks who make the decisions on the equipment and technologies that are used in the nation’s broadcast stations, years ago, the NAB discovered the booming business of production and post-production professionals working in studios from Hollywood to Hong Kong.

In more recent times, there has been a new group of show attendees to add to the congestion in the walkways of the convention center’s campus (which is large enough to have its underground transportation system of connected tunnels constructed by Elon Musk’s “The Boring Company” and populated with an endless stream of Tesla models shuttling show attendees back and forth between the halls.) Those new attendees are from the exploding economic force of content creators. Yes, the NAB show has become the place to be for streamers, podcasters, and all the other “new media” folks who power a $250 Billion global business phenomenon, a figure that we are told multiple times in sessions here will double in the next five years.

So much for your local Radio or Television station getting a new transmitter or cameras here, though there are vendors here who do sell those as well.

But if there is one thing being sold everywhere at the NAB show in 2025, it is those two magic letters that seem to be impacting almost every facet of our existence: AI, as in Artificial Intelligence.

AI is so pervasive here that finding any software solution that doesn’t feature it is hard. And many items of hardware as well. We remember with fondness when the hot new buzzword at the NAB of years past was “Digital.” And that was when tubes and transistors were beginning to be replaced with semiconductor chips, not later when digital video tools would replace videotape. Now comes Artificial Intelligence, or perhaps more precisely “Generative AI,” the kind of Artificial Intelligence that can take input in the form of a ‘prompt” and create everything from an image that never existed and wouldn’t likely exist in real life to a precise clone of a particular person’s voice reading a commercial script. (You can get a sense of why the talent unions in Hollywood went on strike over, in part at least, the use of AI potentially replacing their members on the job.)

And that all brings us to why we are here on the ground in Las Vegas. We are at something of a crossroads in local television newsrooms when it comes to attitudes about the use of AI as a daily tool. Many newsrooms have been slow to adopt AI as much as the creative industries have done so, based on what we see here. Sure, AI can help make the visual effects in a Hollywood Post-Production house possible, but when it comes to deploying those AI tools to generate content in a newsroom? Well, as ESPN’s legendary college football analyst Lee Corso likes to exclaim, “No, so fast, my fine friend!"

We are here to listen to some of the early adopters on the leading edge of AI deployment, as well as the big and small vendors who are hawking their AI-powered tools to anyone who will stop at a booth for five minutes. One of the other large booths on the show floor (this time in the West Hall of the convention center) belongs to Amazon Web Services. They are showcasing the AWS-hosted software, which allows showgoers to design a race track for a mocked-up car race. Then, sit in a race car and virtually race on the track, which is designed using hefty AI tools. And for a kicker, they are producing the network-level sports television coverage of the race on the imagined track in a control room that is—you guessed it—running entirely on software solutions that are running on the AMS cloud platform.

On this first day, we attended a NAB Show presentation titled “Broadcasters Survival (or Reinvention) Plan: Local Content, Smart Tech, and Bold Innovation.” We felt like we had to. The session was sponsored by ArcXP, the Content Management System developed by The Washington Post newspaper, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. However, the ArcXP CMS has also been adopted and deployed across the seven Graham Media Group stations.  Formerly known as the Post-Newsweek Stations group, they were owned by The Washington Post until the Graham family sold the paper to Bexos. In today’s session, Michale Newman, who is the Director of Transformation at Graham Media Group, and Stephanie Slagle, who is Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer for Graham Media Group, were to spell out how they are leading the charge "to embrace change and build a sustainable media model for the future.” At least that what the show program promised.

Slagle and Newman talked about how local television stations have been operating two newsrooms, one for their legacy broadcast newscasts and another for their digital web and mobile news products. But in recent years, with the emergence of streaming channel demands, they were headed for actually having three newsrooms serving these different platforms, and that was just too many silos to manage or pay for. And so the plans began to transform the Graham stations from a “Platform First” to a “Story First” newsroom.

The two executives come from the digital side of the business rather than the broadcast side. That made us wonder for a moment why Graham’s VP of News, Sean McLaughlin, an outspoken champion of reinventing TV news, wasn’t part of this presentation. But the presentation detailed the disconnect between journalism and technology, with one memorable quote being “The workflow (in the newsroom) is pretty janky.” That was followed up by an equally succinct “Fragmentation isn’t scalable."

At one point in the presentation, a short video showcased something called “GMG Spark,” an AI-powered toolkit deployed across the Graham stations. We were told the video was created to get the company’s journalists excited about what GMG Spark could do for them. It showed broadcast copy being turned into digital copy at a single click. It also showed a headline generator that could create an SEO-optimized headline from a story to lead a story in its digital form. The latter function was created at the company’s San Antonio station by a user, as GMG Spark allows the creation of such tools with no code writing needed.

We’re told the journalists working at the Graham Media Group stations are very positive about their work with GMG Spark. The pull quote from Stephanie Slagle was, “It’s exciting to see people discover how AI can make their jobs easier.” And Michael Newman later said, “The most important thing is AI won’t replace jobs; it will make their existing jobs easier.” While we at TVND are all for that, we’re wondering if “making existing jobs easier” will be a justification for the cost of AI being deployed in local newsrooms.

We need to add here that we are not trying to sound too cynical about the experience shared in this session at the NAB show. In the early 1980s, Mel Martin, then news director at WJXT in Jacksonville (A Post-Newsweek owned station at the time, now one of Graham Media’s properties), was one of the first local station news leaders to vigorously champion the adoption of the then-nascent technology of newsroom computer systems to replace the typewriters that sat on desks across newsrooms. We’d bet that move probably faces the same pushback that GMG Spark and other AI-powered newsroom tools might receive in 2025.

The two GMG executives offered some advice to other stations and groups who might be considering following in their footsteps. Slagle with these points: “Involve the journalists as much as possible. Be honest about what is broken. No blaming, but full transparency is needed. And monitor the transformation after launch.” Newman added, “You can’t build on top of a broken workflow. You can’t have a modern newsroom if you still have workflows from 1995 in place."

That last remark hit home for us. We were building a brand new newsroom for a 24-hour local cable news startup in 1995. It was the first to deploy brand new video servers for round-the-clock playback rather than an automated videotape system that had been previously used. About two weeks before the channel was to launch, the video servers were not working as they were supposed to. The engineers on the project came up with a system of rolling videotapes on each hour of news production to be switched to as a “fail-over” in case the video servers might have a hiccup along the way. They did on occasion. Each time they did, the newsroom would react to the problem with every bit of the negativity you might expect from a room full of professional skeptics. Fast forward ahead to today, when video servers are the backbone of every television station.

If you are wondering if, thirty years from now, the same evolution will be valid for AI in local TV newsrooms, we’ll leave you with this point from today’s session here in Las Vegas: “If your content can be replaced by AI, it’s probably not valuable enough."

And on those sobering words, we’re going to look for an Elvis impersonator to have a drink with.

(Full disclosure: The AI-powered grammar and spelling checker software “Grammarly” was used in the creation of this column. We accepted some, but not all, of its suggested 47 changes to our first draft. Helpful, it was. However, it did not suggest where to find that Elvis impersonator.)

Our "monitoring posts" across the country tracked the severe weather coverage from local television stations from Arkansas to Ohio over the past couple of days. We watched the live streams of stations in various markets, large and small. After hours of viewing, we have some takeaways from what we saw and wanted to share them--in the hopes that it might benefit those of you who are on the front lines and working on such coverage (or may do so in the future.). At the very least, we hope to inspire some discussions about how to improve your station’s severe weather coverage, as we see that coverage as the most important opportunity to serve your audience and perhaps potentially grow it simultaneously.

Before continuing on this topic, let us clearly state that we have the utmost respect for the women and men who staff local television newsrooms and jump at a moment's notice to begin what is known as "wall-to-wall" coverage of severe weather. The meteorologists at these stations can and do help save lives by bringing viewers not only the live coverage of what the radar is showing (often their station's privately-owned Doppler radars with significant pricetags) as well as urging people to take the safety precautions that can be the difference in surviving a direct hit from a bad storm.

Let’s start with preparation. Many stations have adopted the “Weather Alert Day” model of highlighting days when weather is likely to impact viewers significantly. This idea has led to “First Alert Days,” “Weather Warn Days,” “Sky Aware Days,” and the questionably named Tegna variant of “Weather Impact Days.” For some stations, detailed playbooks have been developed for handling a weather alert day, both leading up to it and on the day itself. We’re fans of giving viewers as much advance notice of potential weather that may disrupt their daily routines.

But we have also heard some “nattering nabobs of negativity" (as former Vice President Spiro Agnew once labeled the press) complain that a weather alert is just repackaging of the convective outlooks issued by the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center. If you have never looked at these outlooks, they are the source of the “threat maps” that meteorologists often use. They indicate a scale of risk of severe weather from marginal to high. These frequently cover the part of the country's middle known as “tornado alley.” Let us quickly add that almost any place can be hit with severe enough weather to produce “tornadic activity."

Regardless of how they came into being, the one thing that calling a weather alert day should do for a station is initiate planning for coverage of a severe weather event. Things like making sure at least one meteorologist is on duty throughout the period. However, we increasingly see stations teaming up two mets for severe weather coverage because handling the wave of information that comes in can overwhelm one person working (and speaking) non-stop for long periods. But the orchestration of having two mets handing off back and forth to each other can be tricky.

Several stations we viewed executed the “weather tag team” well in our scanning coverage in several markets. One in particular we’d note was KAIT in Jonesboro, Arkansas, which fielded a team of three meteorologists, including chief meteorologist Ryan Vaughn. The K8 News Storm Team trio followed one of the key concepts we try to impress on stations. That is having one person lead the coverage, and other team members act in a supporting role, supporting the lead presenter and feeding them information throughout the wall-to-wall coverage. The lead meteorologist should be on camera for the majority of the coverage.

We also noted a couple of stations, including Nashville’s WTVF, that would leave the radar on screen for long periods, with no one on camera working the radar, just an off-camera voice narrating the radar image. Having a meteorologist on camera most of the time is to help the viewers understand what they are looking at. We get that a solo meteorologist may be forced into doing this when they have to be both on the air and “drive the radar” simultaneously. However, the viewers need to see their “weather expert" both to understand exactly what they are looking at and to connect to someone who can let them know what they should do.

Another note here, this one for news anchors. Anchors have an essential role in continuing severe weather coverage. They should be the conduits for supplemental information from official sources and handling viewer-generated content, such as photos and videos. One thing we saw happen at a few stations was switching to a camera to show the anchors at the news desk. We strongly advocate that the weather radar should never leave the screen during severe weather coverage. Anchor microphones can be opened to talk with the meteorologist on the air and provide a much-needed break from speaking for a few moments. Also please remember that if your weather warning crawl system includes a small radar “thumbnail” image, it is likely not shown on your live stream. And that live stream is where people who have lost power or are in a safe space are likely watching your signal. We heard many on-meteorologists remind viewers to stay with coverage on their smartphones while they were reviewing safety precautions. This reminded us of legendary meteorologist Gary England of Oklahoma City’s KWTV, who once told viewers in the path of a tornado to “turn the television up real loud” before you head to the basement."

Also, remember that a considerable segment of the audience will be listening more than watching. Consider it vital to provide "radio with pictures" and describe everything you show on the screen in detail. 

Orchestrating this kind of smooth production in an unscripted, “flying by the seat of your pants” manner takes people who respect and trust each other. Successful severe weather coverage is mastered by practicing the drill before you have to do it for real. We believe that producing this kind of coverage parallels a live sports event. Remember that people will constantly join the coverage in progress, just like watching a game. Having a "game reset" is crucial about every twenty minutes. This means when it's possible to take a moment to tell viewers what time it is and give them an overview of the "big picture.” Pull the radar view back to a market-wide image and briefly overview what is happening. Someone just tuning in may not live in the area, which is the hardest hit at that exact moment. Producers, you can help by cueing the meteorologist of the need to do the "reset" by keeping an eye on the clock to remind the meteorologist on the air.

We don't want to channel Alec Baldwin's performance in the movie "Glengarry Glen Ross" too much, but we've always tried to equally impress weather teams with the abbreviation "A-B-T," short for "Always Be Tracking." The most essential information viewers want is not just where the severe weather is at the present moment--but where it is headed and when it will arrive. Using the “storm track" feature of the radar software to show this is what the viewers want. Some meteorologists do this less frequently than they should. Again, this is where producers in the control room can help remind the meteorologist that showing a storm track regularly is what the viewers want to know. Including an updated storm track as part of the “reset” moments we previously mentioned is a good practice.

We also noticed some meteorologists calling up State Department of Transportation highway cameras during severe weather coverage. The extent of these state-owned camera networks varies depending on location, but they can be helpful. That said, we understand that there is a desire to show any video that might depict the weather conditions, but in the darkness of nighttime, these cameras typically drop into a low-light, black-and-white mode and may not show anything of value to the viewer. Shoutout to Nashville’s WSMV for always showing these cameras in a double box with their radar during the coverage we watched.

Speaking of live pictures in severe weather, we must talk about safety and having crews out in severe weather. There is no need to put anyone at risk to cover severe weather. Pre-positioning crews across a market before severe weather hits makes a ton of sense. If it's possible to have a camera pointed outside at the weather while sheltered, that’s great. But no one needs to think they are going to be a modern-day Dan Rather (for older folks) or Jim Cantore (for the younger ones reading this) out in a storm trying to describe how bad it is. There will be plenty to cover when the storm has passed and the damage left behind.

A final point we’d make (and yes, we know we have made many of them) is that the tone of coverage matters considerably. These are high-stress situations for the people working in the television station and for the viewers worried about what could threaten their safety. We would remind those working in local TV stations that this is a time for professionalism to shine. The tone of those on the air has to convey the importance of the moment, and the confidence that the information being delivered is clear, critical, and concise. In our viewing, we were impressed by the work of a few stations in this specific aspect: WTHR in Indianapolis, WKRC-TV in Cincinnati and WSMV in Nashville.

Newsroom leaders must monitor their severe weather coverage and provide real-time feedback to adjust coverage as may be needed throughout the event. Conducting a follow-up review not long after coverage ends is essential to reinforce what worked and fix what didn’t.

Of course, this one post won’t cover every aspect of severe weather coverage. We will discuss some other topics in a future installment here. In the meantime, as the wartime poster in London during the Second World War said it best: “Keep Calm and Carry On."

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We were flipping through our YouTube home page on Wednesday night when we noticed that Meteorologist Ryan Hall’s Live YouTube channel was being watched by over 250,000 people. We’ve seen Hall enough over the past couple of years to know that when he is live streaming, there is usually a significant severe weather event in progress. So, we clicked on the thumbnail to begin live streaming his coverage of a major storm system that was marching across Central Indiana and was basically on top of Indianapolis at the time.

Known as “Ryan Hall, Y’all” because of his native Kentucky accent and manner of speaking, Hall has become known by many YouTube fans as “The Internet’s Weather Man.” (He currently has 2.63 million subscribers on that platform, and over a million on TikTok.) His live streaming of severe weather events is basically an uninterrupted weather play-by-play, using radar imagery and state DOT cameras, punctuated by live pictures from various stormchasers with whom he communicates on cell phone-powered “walkie talkie” apps. Hall pulls marathon sessions as the ringmaster of all this information. On Wednesday, when we first checked in, he had been livestreaming for over seven hours.

But on this particular night, the storm system was extensive, extending from Indiana down to the border of Arkansas and Tennessee. It was instantly clear that Central Indiana was in the thick of it. That was our cue to try to check in on the local television broadcasters in Indianapolis and sample some of their coverage via online streaming.

Our first stop was Tegna-owned WTHR, the market’s NBC affiliate and longtime ratings leader. When we pulled up the station’s website on our iPhone, there was a severe weather banner near the top of the home page. Above that, on the title bar, was what appears to be the standard feature on all Tegna station websites, a small thumbnail next to the title of the station’s “plus” branded streaming offering. However, it took us too many precious moments to figure out just where to click to watch the station’s live coverage.

After a few minutes of viewing solid coverage of the severe weather in progress, we switched to watch some of the market’s FOX-CBS duopoly, the Nexstar-owned combo of WXIN (Fox 59) and WTTV (CBS 4). We opted to go to Fox59’s website first. We were pleased to find an easily located “Watch Now” button at the very top of the webpage. We crossed our fingers and clicked on the button, hoping we wouldn’t get a delayed replay of a previous newscast, which has been standard fare for Nexstar stations' streaming. We were pleased to land right in real-time coverage. We were less pleased to be subjected to a couple of pre-roll commercials before we got to the live weather coverage.

Not to get off on a rant here, as comedian Dennis Miller used to say in his monologues, but why is it necessary to have “pre-roll” commercials playing out during severe weather coverage? Yes, we understand that live streaming isn’t cheap to do. And it may not be technically simple to turn these off. But in these urgent situations where local stations will cut into regular programming without forcing TV viewers to sit through commercials, why would we think that would be acceptable for the online audience? Especially when you may have local viewers who have lost power and are trying to watch on cell phones or tablets. Unless they live next door to a cell site, the chances are high that they will sometimes lose the signal. Making them sit through a pre-roll commercial each time they try to bring up the live stream, _especially in a stressful situation, is frustrating at best. At worst, it could make viewers choose another station that doesn’t force them to sit through a commercial. It nearly did in our case.

We then checked in on locally owned WISH-TV8 of Circle City Broadcasting. The station is now a news-intensive CW affiliate, after losing the CBS affiliation in 2014. Again, we struggled to find out where to go to watch the station’s live coverage of the severe weather. After some searching, we found the “Watch Live” link at the very bottom of the website’s drop-down menu on the top right side. But for whatever reason, we could never get the livestream to load on WISHTV.com. Hopefully, that was just a bandwidth issue on our end.

And with apologies to WRTV, the Scripps-owned ABC affiliate in Indianapolis, by the time we thought about switching to them, the fast-moving storms were already crossing the state line to Ohio and leaving the market. By that point, we had moved on to checking in on stations in Cincinnati.

So why are we obsessing so much about finding how to watch live coverage from each of these Indianapolis stations?

Consider this scenario: severe weather arrives near your home or office. How do you receive the first notification of the threat? Unless you happen to be watching a local television station at the time, the reasonable answer is from your smartphone. If that warning prompts you to check on your favorite local television station, you will likely pull up either the station’s website or its dedicated mobile app. The ability to get to the live coverage as quickly and directly as possible might be a key factor in determining whether that viewer stays with the station they are trying to watch–or goes looking elsewhere for the vital information they need right now.

Even if they can find the live stream quickly, what impression do they have when they are presented with 30 seconds or even a full minute of commercials BEFORE they can tell if live coverage is in progress?

We have also noticed that most stations don’t include all the written information they show on television on their livestream. The weather “crawls,” or the information that typically appears at the top or bottom of the broadcast signal, doesn’t appear on the live stream. Given that many of these livestreams from local television stations also do not have closed captioning information included on them (it varies by station and how they caption their video signal and whether that gets passed on to the live stream) we would argue that including the weather crawl information would make it a better service, especially when meteorologists may not be focused on other parts of the market when they are tracking a specific area of the storm.

Another thing we want to point out is that many stations use an automated scheduling of replays of previous newscasts or other programming on their streaming channels. For heaven sakes, please have some way to override this schedule so that you don’t have this happen: During their continuing coverage on Wednesday night, WTHR+ treated viewers at 10:58pm to the beginning of a previously scheduled “Your Money” program for a solid minute or two before someone realized the problem and switched viewers of the livestream back to the live weather coverage that began the station’s 11pm newscast. We have seen this happen before, and sometimes, it isn’t corrected so quickly.

Television stations must treat their live streams in severe weather as just as important as their broadcast signal. During power outages, it is likely the only way viewers can access the vital coverage from their local TV stations. Ask the over 100 thousand homes without power during the storms in the Indianapolis market on Wednesday night where they were watching. Streaming issues aside, the work done by every meteorologist we watched on this particular evening was strong. We presume that because the National Severe Storms Laboratory had issued an outlook for conditions favorable for an outbreak of severe weather, the stations that we watched all seemed prepared for extended coverage with multiple meteorologists working and crews in the field both during primetime and well past their late newscast windows. This was true in Indianapolis, and as the storm system made its way east into Kentucky and Ohio, we watched similar continuing coverage from all of the stations in Cincinnati lasting well past 2:30am Eastern time.

We have some more observations about how the severe weather coverage we watched was executed, and we will be sharing those in a post tomorrow over on our “tvnews.coach” website.

Finally, let’s go back to Ryan Hall’s coverage on YouTube for a moment. With over 200,000 people still watching around 1:00 a.m., Hall had to acknowledge that he was facing a problem in that YouTube doesn’t allow live streams to go past twelve hours long. As he was closing in on that time limit, he told his audience that they were going to have to start a new live stream and that they were working to “redirect” current viewers over to it.

From that point forward, we couldn’t find the new live stream. Again, viewers looking for coverage, like us, went looking elsewhere to get what we needed at that time.

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In a previous edition of The Topline, we advocated for more training opportunities for those aspiring to be the leaders of local television newsrooms. Being a News Director (or any other title that might encompass that traditional role) has always been a challenging job, but perhaps never so much as it is in 2025. Getting help taking on or keeping the job is always a good thing, and we pointed out a couple of resources in the Carole Kneeland Project and the Poynter Institute that we are fans of.

Another resource we’d like to highlight today is the work of a true pioneer in the industry–and someone who actively continues to help leaders become “Great Bosses.” In fact, she wrote the book on it. (We’ve always wanted to be able to write that line and mean it!)

Jill Geisler is the Bill Plante Chair in Leadership and Media Integrity at Loyola University Chicago. She also has her own consultancy practice and was previously a faculty member of the aforementioned Poynter Institute. Before her career path led her to teach other news leaders, she was one herself as the VP of News for Milwaukee’s WITI-TV for 25 years. Suffice it to say that Jill knows her subject matter very well.

We would argue that one of the hardest “soft skills” to master is giving honest, meaningful coaching to those a leader is charged with leading. While this is an essential part of the coaching role that every leader aspires to, the sweet spot of analyzing a colleague’s work and then giving them feedback they can receive and then act upon is truly a skill that requires its own unique development.

Jill discusses much of this in her book, published a decade ago. It is still a must-read for anyone wanting to be a better boss, let alone a great one.

In her recent years with Loyola, she has developed her “Master Class for Media Managers." It is a week-long series of two-hour sessions held online. In the class, Jill leads a group of new and experienced leaders from media platforms through five sessions on these key topics:

1. “Leading with Emotional Intelligence”
2. “Feedback with Lasting Impact”
3. “Tough Conversations Made Easier”
4. “Coaching, Not Fixing”
5. “Inclusive Leadership”

From our years in the job, we know that every news director tackles these topics daily. While we didn’t have the opportunity to attend this particular masterclass with Jill, we have heard rave reviews from those who have. And we can tell you that we still use techniques and ideas we learned from her in our first meeting years ago. (And yes, that’s more years than we’d like to count up now.)

So, if you weren’t familiar with Jill and her work on helping grow news leaders, now you are. We recommend you get her book from Amazon (click here for the page to do so) and read it as soon as you can. Also, do consider signing up for her masterclass. We can assure you that it will be more than worth your time and expense to do so.

(This is an unsolicited and unpaid endorsement for Jill’s Loyola program and her book. But we want to disclose that the link above to Amazon is an affiliate link, so if you choose to order the book using it–we may receive a small commission that will just about cover the cost of one daily dose of caffeine necessary to keep writing these articles. Thanks for your support if you do.)

Our outpost in the New York City market asked a provocative question we have been pondering over the weekend. Why are some local television stations as consistent across each day and time period–as an order of fries at McDonald’s? (Great nearly 100% of the time, in our humble opinion.) While others are as schizophrenic as slot machines in Las Vegas?

The consistent performers in the nation’s largest market are pretty apparent. And then there are the inconsistent performers. Stations that deliver newscasts that can range from just “meh” to being surprisingly good when least expected. This kind of station isn’t just in market number one. You can find an example of a local TV station that may be a perennial underdog anywhere. Perhaps they were at the top once upon a time. Or maybe they never have been. But they can still produce the occasional newscast that can make you check the on-screen graphics just to make sure you know which station you are watching.

We see this often with weekend morning newscasts. Stations frequently have their up-and-coming on-air talent getting their reps at the anchor desk on Saturday and Sunday morning. These newscasts are usually less traditional in how they are produced. The pace is better matched to days when the audience isn’t trying to crash out the door to get to school or work. These morning shows often have more opportunities to develop interesting interviews and other segments you wouldn’t typically see during the week. In short, they are willing to take chances and try new things.

One example of achieving this is the KTLA Morning News, which has long been an example of a local morning newscast that delivers differently. Since its debut in 1991, KTLA’s mornings have featured a roster of top-flight camera talent matched with a style aligned with the station’s long-time branding of being “LA’s Very Own.” It smartly plugged into the fact that Los Angeles is, by and large, a “company town,” with the “company," in this case, being the entertainment business in all its various aspects.

KTLA isn’t alone in producing a morning show that matches its market’s sensibilities. In Chicago, WGN also has a local morning news outlet that resonates differently from other stations. We don’t believe it is a coincidence that these two stations started down an alternative path. When they first launched, KTLA and WGN did more traditional morning newscasts, and both stations struggled to find an audience. Both stations had experienced talent and producers, but that didn’t make any difference. They were doing a standard morning newscast. Neither station had recognized that their strength might be in the people creating the product.

Reportedly weeks away from cancellation and unemployment, the broadcast’s producers and talent figured they would try being themselves and having a little more fun while they could. It is important to note that each station never abandoned its basic mission of covering the news. But they began to realize that they were creating something genuinely different.

KTLA and WGN had management that let the morning news production teams develop this different kind of newscast. The look and feel of both stations in the morning differed from those seen in the evening and nighttime time periods. The morning talent played to their natural instincts as people who could genuinely talk with each other, and the audience began watching.

Every station must consider how it can make a different impact, remembering that while content is still king, emotion matters as well, and so do people. This is just essential human nature. Almost everyone likes to be around genuinely interesting people, whether in a social setting or on a television newscast.

Watch enough newscasts over time, and you’ll conclude that one of the most significant differences between stations is how the people who appear on camera relate to each other and the audience. Much has been studied, researched, and speculated about this aspect of television news. The so-called “likability factor” is a key aspect that the people who lead news operations spend a significant amount of time trying to decode and enhance wherever it may be possible to do so. At best, achieving it comes from being willing to experiment, along with some gut instinct and, if we are honest, a bit of luck.

Great coaches and leaders recognize this combination and aren’t afraid to change their lineups. Shaking things up is sometimes necessary to help move a would-be contender into the position to play for a title. Sometimes, that’s when players come off the bench and make it possible to win. (Cue that NCAA Tournament theme music here.)

Be aware of the ‘likability’ that occurs off-air in the newsroom and control room. Generally speaking, if the on-camera talent is comfortable and likable, so are the people who produce the newscast. In a station fighting for market position, just doing the same old thing probably needs to be replaced. And no, that doesn’t mean “innovating” by removing the anchors or hubbing local weather from someplace else. That’s just making budget cuts to prop up a sagging bottom line on a spreadsheet.

We suggest looking at times when something might be working and building on that. We bet there are people in your newsroom who can help if given the opportunity and encouragement to try something different.

Given the current state of the local television business, the game clock is ticking down faster than ever. There may be no better time to try something different.

Imagine this: Your television station runs a thirty-second promo teasing the stories ahead in the next newscast. Standard stuff, you’re probably thinking. But in this imaginary scenario, the promo is immediately followed by thirty seconds of airtime with anyone saying anything they wish about what was in the promo, with no filter or editing of any sort. In other words, every promo on your station would be followed by thirty seconds of “vox populi.” Seem a bit crazy to you?

That’s why we find it harder to justify why a local television station should be on social media these days. Read any post from a TV station’s newsroom–and then read the comments that follow. Spoiler alert: it is usually not an exercise for the easily offended.

There is no better example of how divisive speech in this country is right now than on social media. And while you will find no bigger supporters of free speech than us, we’ll remind you that social media is anything but free speech. It is speech “moderated” by computer algorithms specifically designed to hold your attention by feeding you contrarian content to enrage you or similar content to affirm your opinions, whatever they may be.

It’s called “optimizing engagement,” and the major social platforms have been chasing it ever since Mark Zuckerberg discovered that coding a webpage that allowed college students to vote on whose pictures were “Hot or Not” created a firestorm of traffic to his nascent website then known as “The Facebook.”

We’ve heard several broadcast journalists argue that they “have to be” on social, especially X/Twitter because that is where newsmakers post first. And that is true to some degree. We’ve seen the platform become the mechanism for everyone, from politicians to local law enforcement to send out messages before using any other way to communicate. Writing, editing, and sending out a press release takes some time. But it takes seconds to tap out a couple of sentences and hit the send button.

Lest there be any confusion, we are not suggesting that local television stations give up their online presence. A robust website and mobile app are critical distribution platforms for every news outlet. But rather than having a dashboard on a screen in the newsroom tracking who has posted the most on social media in the past 24 minutes or hours, why not channel all of that energy into first posting content on the platforms the station controls? It is probably worth also considering that those same station platforms might be making a dollar or two that will likely help pay your salary.

While we are on this point, we need to address the issue of local television journalists who believe they are also influencers on social media. If you want to be respected and taken seriously when you are on the air, please don’t post content like dance videos from the studio or get ready with me reels. And a post that pushes a product or service is just a commercial. We don’t know of any station that has news anchors doing commercials, so why would it be acceptable for you to do that on social? That also goes for putting a business on “blast” because you didn’t get the service you believe you deserved. If you wouldn’t go on the air and say, “XYZ business is bad to its customers,” then you shouldn’t say it on your publicly available social media.

The RTDNA held an online seminar today on “Protect Yourself: Online Harassment and Mitigation Response.” The mere fact that this session was necessary should give every working journalist pause about how much they want to be publicly available on social media platforms. If you want to be on social media to share with friends and family, you should seriously consider making your profile and content private and only available to those you know and trust. And you should consider having anything you might post professionally go on the station’s branded social media rather than one in your name.

We would urge every newsroom to seriously discuss how they want to be represented on each social media platform going forward. We’re unaware of any verified data suggesting that being on social media equals more viewers or a station growing its business in any meaningful way.

However, we believe that using social platforms without a very specific plan and discipline to that plan can hurt the credibility of both a station and, perhaps more importantly, the individuals who work for it.

A reminder: We also now have a newsletter targeted to broadcast journalists with practical advice on working in the field. It is called tvnews.coach and you can see it by clicking here.

Our long-time friend and industry observer Rick Gevers noted in the last edition of his excellent newsletter at rickgevers.com that there are some 45 local TV stations with openings for the position of news director. He notes that that might be a record in his memory, and it certainly seems like a high number to us.

That being said, we’re not surprised that at present, it might take some stations longer to find the right person to fill those positions. We’ve noticed a few trends lately that the broadcasting business might want to pay more attention to in seeking the next generation of news leadership. At the same time, we have seen folks applying for these positions have had to adjust their thinking about what being an “upwardly mobile” newsroom leader in 2025 is.

Let’s begin with Edward R. Murrow’s proviso, which perhaps started this kind of message best when he said: “This just might do nobody any good.” (Fortunately, George Clooney found a way to turn the great man’s words into a Broadway production.)

A person would be forgiven for not seeing the position of becoming a local television news director as the opportunity it once was. The business has been going through a fundamental transformation for years now. It has forced news directors to be “agents of change” almost constantly. The diminishing business metrics have forced every newsroom to be more efficient (the great corporate speak for “doing more with less of everything.") And running the business aspects of a news department means that news directors get far less time today to actually direct the news product.

That reality has made it more likely than not that a current news director will make decisions about life/work balance focused more on the quality of where they are and who they are working for (both individuals and corporations) than might have been the case in the past. Climbing the corporate or market-size ladder doesn’t have the automatic appeal that it did in years past, and often, such a move doesn’t come with the bump in compensation necessary to offset the higher cost of living that is the case in almost every city or market of significant size.

Another factor we’d point out when considering the position of News Director is that there is less creative fulfillment in the position these days. Larger broadcast groups have worked to create a McDonald ’s-like franchise model for local news operations across their enterprises, so the ability to affect meaningful change in many stations is limited. Chances are that as news director for a larger group, you will be following a “playbook” from the corporate office and thus it will be much harder to try anything truly different–at least in any meaningful way.

And, of course, in terms of actual compensation, news director salaries haven’t kept up with the pace of the rising cost of living any more than any other salary in a newsroom. We just had a conversation with a news director in a medium market who pointed out that they couldn’t make a move even if they wanted to because they are holding a 2% mortgage on their home and wouldn’t be able to afford a new position in a different city because they wouldn’t be able to buy a house with mortgage rates now just over 6.75%. So much for a salary increase in a new job equaling a better quality of life.

On the other hand, we see fewer opportunities for aspiring news directors to get the training and experience needed to be truly equipped to handle the broad responsibilities of the position. We will continue advocating for development programs like The Carole Kneeland Project for Responsible Journalism, which wrapped up its latest training conference in Austin last weekend. The Poynter Institute is another source of some great training opportunities for newsroom leaders. We have benefited from participating in both programs and highly recommend them.

We would like to see either the NAB or the RTDNA or perhaps both team up to create a version of the NAB’s Broadcast Leadership Training program for newsroom leaders. In case you aren’t familiar with it, the NAB’s “BLT” program is an Executive MBA-styled one-year program designed to equip individuals with the fundamentals of purchasing, owning, and running successful radio and television stations. This intensive course turns out many future general managers. Given that it is an expensive investment, including monthly travel to sessions in Washington, DC, perhaps the year-long training of a news-centric “BLT” type program could be done on a state or regional basis in conjunction with state broadcast associations.

Television urgently needs its next generation of qualified news department leaders. This is especially true given that shrinking newsroom staffs have curtailed on-the-job learning opportunities, preventing many in the current pool of experienced news directors from identifying and training their successors. If our industry wants to have a pipeline of qualified managers to lead the largest departments in almost every station (at least in terms of expense and employees), this kind of investment in training and development is needed. And it is needed now more than ever.

Or, to quote Murrow again–from later in that same famous 1958 speech: “If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.”

It’s a big day for us here at TVND.Com. Two weeks into our initial foray into online publishing with “The Topline,” we are launching a second online venture today, and we’re calling it “tvnews.coach.”

In “The Topline,” we have been writing about the local television news business from the proverbial thirty-thousand-foot level. Over on the new tvnews.coach, we intend to offer more practical observations and advice targeted explicitly toward working broadcast journalists looking to “up their game” just like any good coach would offer. (We’re sorry, but we are coming off four days of consuming a lot of college hoops, so the coaching reference is stuck in our heads.)

In all seriousness, one of the things that we enjoyed the most about leading TV newsrooms–and candidly, one of the things we got to spend much less time on than we wanted to–was coaching our colleagues. Being an effective coach is time-consuming at best, and it requires almost a singular full-time focus. Given all of the demands of being a news director these days, including managing budgeting, HR, legal, and being a firewall between the newsroom and the opinions from every corner of the building on how every facet of the news operation could be done better–well, time for coaching often gets swallowed up by the demands of the day.

So, we thought offering the same kind of coaching we would do (at least what we always wanted to do) when we were in a newsroom each day might be helpful. And so we are very proud to debut tvnews.coach and we hope you find it worthy of your time.

Some houskeeping–we will be publishing on an alternating schedule between The Topline and tvnews.coach. Analysis of breaking industry news will always appear on The Topline. One note to current email subscribers of The Topline, you will need to subscribe separately to have tvnews.coach posts sent directly to your email. That’s because each site has its own email list, so people can choose to subscribe to either site or both as they may prefer.

Finally, we intend for tvnews.coach to be more than just a digital offering. We’re developing plans to offer personalized coaching services to stations and individuals in the near future. If such services might be of interest to you or your station, please reach out, and let’s have a conversation. Drop us an email to kirk@tvnd.com.

Click here to visit tvnews.coach

We know the dust hasn’t settled from yesterday’s big announcement in Miami that the ABC network is going to leave its current and longtime home on WPLG-TV and move on August 4th to become “ABC Miami” on subchannel 7.2 of WSVN, the market’s FOX affiliate known as “South Florida’s News Station.” The intrigue over how this all came to be and what it means for the television landscape, both in South Florida and across the country, will take some time to unravel.

However, being the kind of project-oriented people we are here at TVND, we immediately began thinking about the size of the opportunity/challenge ahead for “Local 10” in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale market. After all, the station has a little over four months to pivot from being a network-affiliated station, which it has been for its entire history, to truly living up to that “Local 10” brand promise as a pure independent television station in the nation’s 18th largest market. It’s a market with several unique challenges, seemingly as all 210 markets will have in one form or another in 2025.

It isn’t a completely unchartered path. A few stations have moved from affiliate to independent over the years. One of the ones that stands out to us is in Phoenix, where KTVK lost its ABC affiliation in the great network shuffle of 1994. That’s when the upstart FOX network began building out its owned and operated group by buying cross-town rival–and then CBS affiliate–KSAZ (once charmingly named KOOL-TV) as part of the acquisition of the New World Communications Group. Even though KTVK was at the time one of the strongest ABC affiliates in the country, the ensuing network shuffle would leave it without a network when ABC found a new home on Scripps-owned KNXV in the market.

The similarities between the situations at KTVK and WPLG are more than just being left by ABC. In both cases, they were single stations rather than being part of a larger television group. Groups have more power and influence with the networks, as witnessed by Scripps bringing pressure to bear on ABC to move to its Phoenix station. Doing a “one-off” affiliation move is far easier than dealing with multiple stations in various markets. Both KTVK and WPLG were/are strong local news operations at the time of losing their affiliations–though it would be essential to note that thirty years ago, KTVK’s strength was far more significant because of the strength of broadcast television stations in the media marketplace back then.

Another way these two stations are alike is that both decided to double down on their local programming, which largely focused on ramping up their news operation. In KTVK’s case, the station had already made a sizable investment in local news nearly a decade earlier. In 1984, the family interests that owned the station had poached a dozen employees, including the team of Bill Miller and Phil Alvidrez from rival KTSP-TV (later renamed KSAZ.) Miller and Alvidrez had led the news department at KTSP and would move to KTVK and build a news juggernaut at the station. With Miller as Station Manager and Alvidrez as news director, the duo rebranded KTVK as “NewsChannel 3” and built a news operation that, by the time of the ABC move in 1995, was the dominant local television news operation in Phoenix.

The station would continue its strength as an independent, as the owners would spend millions on syndicated programming, news expansion, and a new studio facility to keep the “NewsChannel 3” juggernaut going. It would do so until 1999 when the family owners of KTVK sold the successful independent to another family-run company, Dallas-based Belo Corporation. In 2014, the station changed hands again from Belo to Meredith Corporation, merging the operations of KTVK and CBS affiliate KPHO-TV. Then, in 2021, Meredith Corporation was acquired by Atlanta-based television group owner Gray Media, who now owns and operates the duopoly of KTVK and KPHO.

KTVK still operates as a news-heavy independent branded as “3TV” locally. The station airs over 13 hours of local news each weekday from a shared newsroom with KPHO under the banner of “Arizona’s Family.” KTVK also airs a schedule of Phoenix Suns basketball games, giving it a local sports audience in primetime leading into its late newscasts. When not airing basketball, KTVK airs local news from 8pm to 11pm in primetime.

Turning our focus back to Miami, what the leadership of WPLG is now busy figuring out is how much of the KTVK blueprint it might choose to follow. And unlike Phoenix in 1995, there is already a station in Miami producing a daily schedule packed with local newscasts, that being the market’s FOX affiliate (and soon also the home of the new “ABC Miami”) WSVN. It is no overstatement to say that WSVN’s history of losing its NBC affiliation and success in pivoting to being an independent, uber-aggressive local news operation forever changed the way newscasts would be presented on television.

Under the leadership of then VP of News Joel Cheatwood and later Alice Jacobs in that role, WSVN’s newscasts feature a heavy emphasis on breaking and celebrity news, wrapped in bold graphics and music to match, all presented by a staff working in an on-camera newsroom called “the newsplex” that features a dazzling display of video screens that looks like something a viewer might see in NYC’s Times Square. The format was ridiculed by critics and dubbed as “tabloid” when it debuted. Still, with aggressive marketing and a willingness to “smother a big story,” the station’s “7 News” grew a younger audience quickly enough. Before long, every news director in Miami and those in the business nationwide began paying attention and working to make their newscasts more like what was airing daily on “South Florida’s News Station.”

That included WPLG, which had always been a more contemporary local news station in the Miami market before WSVN’s transformation. In 1976, Channel 10 was the first station in the market to feature a co-anchor team, in which anchor Ann Bishop would be the first female to anchor weeknight newscasts in a major market. She would be later paired with Dwight Lauderdale, the market’s first Black anchor, in 1986. Bishop propelled WPLG’s “Eyewitness News” to be the most watched in the market for almost two decades. WPLG would also innovate with the market’s first helicopter and a heavy emphasis on weather coverage.

So, against that backdrop, WPLG now has about twenty weeks to implement its plan to compete as a station without a network to fill a good portion of its daily program schedule. The station has already stated that it will expand its news operation, but how it goes about doing so will be watched closely by many. As we have previously noted, the station doesn’t have a group of other stations to draw upon, as it is the lone station to be owned by Berkshire-Hathaway, the highly successful and followed investment company led by Warren Buffett. Expanding news hours on the program schedule will come at a cost. WPLG’s General Manager E.R. Bert Medina said yesterday, “Instead of sending our money to New York, we will keep it in our community and use that money to finance a massive expansion in local news and other local programming."

Just how “massive” that expansion will be and what the price tag might be isn’t known yet. For comparison, when KTVK went to being an independent station in the mid-1990s, it spent a reported 100 million dollars in the effort, adding dozens of new hires in the news department and buying syndicated programming such as the still popular “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune” to air in primetime.

Another example of a station making the transition from network affiliate to independent can be found by going from Miami Beach up the Florida coast to Jacksonville Beach, where WPLG’s one-time sister station WJXT made the same move back in 2002 when CBS moved its affiliation to another station in the market. That came after WJXT balked at moving from the business model where the network paid local stations to carry their network’s programming to the station paying the network for that same programming. That idea, known as “reverse compensation,” came about when local stations began making significant revenue from the payments they received from cable and satellite companies for “retransmission consent.”

“The Local Station,” as WJXT is known, went all in on that idea, moving its airing of the then-popular “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to primetime and boosting its local news production to nearly 60 hours a week. However, that is still less than WSVN’s current total of 63.5 hours of news produced each week. By comparison, WPLG currently produces 54.5 hours of news weekly on its own station. It has also been producing an additional six hours of news each week, with a 10pm newscast on Miami’s CW affiliate, WSFL-TV, since 2021.

Another question is, how will WPLG transition over the next few months? When KTVK made the transition to independent in late 1994, it chose to shed the ABC programming in stages rather than all at once. First, it dumped ABC’s “Good Morning America” to expand its own “Good Morning Arizona” out to four hours, staying local when other stations were airing their network morning shows. However, rival WSVN already airs its local morning news, “Today in Florida” (a name dating back to its days as an NBC affiliate), for a whopping six hours each weekday, from 5 to 11am each weekday.

No doubt, there are a lot of factors to consider in making the move from affiliate to independent. And we’re sure that the team at WPLG is already deep in the project. As the old adage reminds us, “When you’re up to your neck in alligators, it’s easy to forget that your initial objective was to drain the swamp.” Given the proximity of that large swamp known as the Everglades, it is a reminder that the challenges that “Local 10” may be facing are not insignificant.

Our initial report on the “Seismic” news out of Miami (that description first used by our friend, Rick Gevers) has more on how the news unfolded on Thursday. Click here to read it.

So much for a Thursday on which most people would have been focused on the first day of the Madness known as the NCAA College Basketball Tournament. Except maybe for people working in the television business.

Thursday afternoon, just as the second round of games was tipping off, the surprise announcement out of South Florida that a local television station was dropping, or losing–depending on whose account you believe–its network affiliation. It’s been over a decade since the last major market affiliation switch. 2014 was when CBS announced it was moving from its longtime home in Indianapolis at WISH-TV, which was being sold by LIN Media to Media General, over to Tribune Broadcasting’s WTTV, effective January 1st, 2015.

More than a decade later, the breaking news from Miami was that the ABC network would be leaving WPLG, its home for nearly 70 years, dating back to when Channel 10 in Miami signed on the air as WPST. But this August, ABC’s new home in South Florida would be…cross-town rival WSVN. The Sunbeam-owned Fox affiliate on Channel 7? Well, not exactly. The new “ABC Miami” as it will be called, will be operated by Sunbeam, but seen on channel 7.2. That is a digital “sub-channel” of the primary Channel 7 signal (which is actually on the frequency of what is technically Channel 9, but don’t get us started on the weirdness of stations broadcasting with their legacy branding but on what are different channels.)

The news of ABC moving was labeled as “seismic” in some quarters. And in this industry, that wasn’t hyperbole. It’s just because affiliation moves are pretty rare, especially in a major market like Miami. Though to be fair, over the years, the market has seen its share of station and network moves. More unusual for the current day was that a “big four” network would willingly move from being on one station’s main (or .1) signal–to another’s “subchannels” that were made possible by the 2009 transition to digital television. On the current DTV standard, local broadcasters use digital encoding technology to “multiplex” their feeds onto a single signal, which allows for multiple channels to be broadcast by a single transmitter for each station. Most local TV stations now carry so-called “digi-nets” on these subchannels. Smaller networks such as MeTV, Living Well, H&I, CourtTV, and a long list of others. Today, WSVN carries the Black audience targeted “365BLK” network on its 7.2 subchannel.

Typically, a television station with a primary ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC affiliation on its main channel typically doesn’t have another of the three remaining major networks on a digital subchannel. In the larger, major markets, each network affiliate would be carried a stand-alone, full-power station.

That was before Thursday.

The expected press releases were issued from both WPLG and WSVN. WPLG pointed the blame at ABC and its parent company, Disney. The station’s General Manager, E.R. Bert Medina, put it this way: “Our job is to serve this community with news and local programming, that’s why we have an FCC license. If we agreed to the ABC terms, that mission would have suffered." Medina went on to say that a big reason that WPLG couldn’t reach a deal was because the exclusivity of ABC programming is disappearing. Meaning more of the network’s shows also now appear on streaming services like Hulu and Disney+, thus impacting the value of what the station has been paying to be the exclusive home to. Medina spellied it out in no uncertain terms: “We no longer feel we are getting what we pay for.”

But within an hour after WPLG’s release that it was going to no longer be an ABC affiliate come August 4th, the proverbial second shoe dropped when Sunbeam’s WSVN announced that it had landed the new “ABC Miami” and it would be on digital channel 7.2. WSVN has been a very successful Fox affiliate, but perhaps an even more successful local news operation in Miami, which would undoubtedly be supporting, at least in some fashion, the new local newscasts on ABC Miami.

The questions about how all this came to be would spin up faster than a late-season hurricane threatening South Florida.

Our friends at TheDesk.Net reported that WPLG’s network contract had expired at the end of 2024, but both sides had continued negotiating towards securing a new agreement. That’s reasonable to assume, given that these negotiations sometimes go into “extra innings.” However, Disney/ABC was clearly working on alternatives in the event that it couldn’t reach a deal. Those options could have included moving ABC’s affiliation to another Miami-based station. That might have been either current UniMas-owned WAMI or CW affiliate WSFL-TV. The latter might have proven a friendly home, as that station is owned by Scripps, which currently owns ABC affiliates in several other major markets–including WFTS in nearby Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Florida.

But we’ve heard a few industry observers wonder aloud if there might have been another factor at play here. Was ABC rebuffed in a possible effort to actually acquire WPLG from Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway? The idea isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t own any other television stations, it acquired WPLG in 2014 from the former Post-Newsweek company controlled by the Graham family, after they sold _The Washington Post_to Jeff Bezos. The family then formed Graham Holdings, spinning off WPLG to Berkshire, which had been a major investor in Post-Newsweek. Both CBS and NBC own their stations in Miami-Fort Lauderdale, and it would be reasonable to assume that ABC would like to own its outlet in the nation’s 18th largest market. Is it possible that Bob Iger and company were given the cold shoulder to that idea, so, in turn, proffered a network contract with less-than-favorable terms to WPLG, who wouldn’t budge in these extended negotiations?

Nobody is saying that is what happened, but it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility. However, another thing to consider is what happened the day before the news broke in Miami, some 1,787 miles north in the decidedly cooler environment of St. Paul, Minnesota. There, inside the Warren Burger US Courthouse, the United States 8th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on whether or not the Federal Communications Commission in 2023 acted appropriately in maintaining its rules on broadcast station ownership. Broadcasters, represented by their trade organization, the National Association of Broadcasters, argued that the FCC’s rules, including the ones that prevent mergers between the top four stations in a given market (typically the ones affiliated with the “big four” networks of ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC) are threatening the very future of broadcasting business in this country.

While the court case is important and is being closely watched, the reality is that the current FCC Chairman, Republican Brendan Carr, opposes the ownership rules and is likely to dismantle them. That would give broadcasters freedom from the government restrictions on how many stations one company can own, both in a single local market, as well as across the entire nation. Broadcasters argue that they need this freedom to survive in a digital world where the internet and its giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft can–and do compete for viewers and advertising dollars in every corner of the country.

Should the deregulation that the Trump administration has championed in its blitz to reshape all aspects of the federal government arrive at the FCC, it is entirely plausible that the moves in Miami that were announced on this Thursday could play out in many ways and the results could be “coming soon” to a television set near you.

Hope your bracket isn’t busted already.

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