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.)