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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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