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.