NEW YORK — The gravitational pull of the 6 p.m. newscast is fading, replaced by a chaotic, fragmented landscape where the audience dictates the schedule and “breaking news” is a continuous state of being rather than a special report. At TVNewsCheck’s NewsTechForum on Tuesday, during the “News Everywhere: Maximizing Audience in a Multiplatform World” panel, digital leaders from NBCUniversal Local, Fox Television Stations, Hearst Television, CBC and TVU Networks dissected the operational and cultural overhauls required to meet this moment.
The ‘Concentric Circles’ Of Audience
When asked how audiences are distributed across linear, streaming and social, the panelists rejected the premise of static buckets.
“I’m going to blow up your question,” said Jeff Zellmer, executive vice president of digital operations at Fox Television Stations. “We don’t think about an audience when we talk about that because social overlaps so much of linear and streaming as well.” While Zellmer noted that time spent watching still leans about two-thirds linear, the growth engine is undeniably elsewhere.
Andrew Fitzgerald, SVP of streaming video services at Hearst Television, framed the modern audience as “concentric circles.” The outermost ring consists of social and web viewers sampling content. “As you get closer in for linear and streaming, you have a more loyal audience,” Fitzgerald said. “And then the division there is about as high as a fifth of those viewers are on streaming … and we see time spent with the news product [there] is incredibly high.”
Redefining ‘Breaking’ For A Non-Stop World
The transition to streaming has fundamentally altered the threshold for what constitutes breaking news. On linear, breaking in requires pre-empting programming — a high bar. On FAST, the real estate is infinite.
“The threshold for breaking within the streaming space is different,” Zellmer said, referencing Fox’s LiveNOW service. “It’s always breaking because we’re watching immediately as it’s happening … . It means that we’re changing how people think in the newsroom. You got to get live faster and you have to be able to go longer.”
Angie Grande, VP of streaming news channels at NBCUniversal Local, emphasized the strategic advantage of this “owned” territory. During the Los Angeles fires, its FAST channels provided a utility that linear schedules couldn’t match. “It’s our full real estate where we can go up and we can stay up as long as we want,” Grande said. “We don’t have to adhere to any other rules.”
However, Socrates Lozano, VP of solutions, Americas at TVU Networks, warned against the operational drag of this expansion. The industry needs systems where a single action triggers multi-point distribution. “Can they still hit that same button? And then now, instead of just going live on linear, they’re going to 16 different FAST channel streams,” Lozano said. “The more that you can have the content creators focused on the content … the better experience they’re going to have of cross-platform.”
Killing The Rundown Culture
Perhaps the most significant hurdle isn’t technological, but cultural: shifting journalists away from daypart-centric thinking.
“When I think about a rundown, I think about the gravitational pull in our organization towards the end-of-day newscast,” said Michael Gruzuk, head of CBC News Studios. He described the internal struggle to move resources away from flagship evening shows like The National to meet digital audiences who want news immediately. “It’s a shift internally to publish and produce earlier and not wait for end of day because the audience isn’t waiting for end of day,” he said.
Fitzgerald agreed, noting that many journalists still define their professional identity by the show they produce. “You have journalists who define themselves by the day part that they produce into,” Fitzgerald said. “What we are beginning to see is that is not the primary way that people engage with the news that you created.”
The Authenticity Of The ‘Watch-With’ Format
As platforms shift, so does the voice of the talent. The traditionally authoritative anchor style is giving way to a more transparent, “watch-with” approach that resonates with younger demographics.
Guzuk said CBC’s About That, an explainer program that originated on FAST and found a large audience on YouTube, was emblematic of that dynamic.
“We ceased to call it a show because that was even a convention that existed inside the organization,” Gruzuk said of the Andrew Chang-hosted About That. The success of the format on YouTube proved that audiences crave “crispness” and explainers over traditional polish.
Zellmer echoed this, describing the unscripted nature of Fox’s LiveNOW. “We don’t have a rundown at all. There’s no scripts at all. It relies on somebody just knowing what they’re seeing, knowing enough to talk and help guide the viewers through it.”
The ‘3 Ds’ And The Vendor Challenge
Looking ahead, the panelists identified discovery, distribution and data as the critical pillars for survival. But they are hamstrung by fragmented tools and walled gardens.
Grande pointed to the critical nature of maintaining relationships with OEMs to ensure discoverability during major events, citing how quickly they could flip tiles and push alerts for the Dodgers’ World Series win. “That’s something before that used to take a week to make happen, and we got it done in an hour,” she said.
But gaps remain. Grande’s “dream” request for vendors is seamless integration between breaking news and the Electronic Program Guide (EPG). “When news is breaking, you can instantly type it in, and then it appears on the guide when people are scrolling,” she said.
Fitzgerald offered a blunt assessment of the current vendor landscape. “We’re entering a phase in which we need vendors to be more nimble and more agile than they’ve ever been before,” he said. “Our world is changing incredibly rapidly, and the more cruft you’ve got in your system, the harder it’s going to be.”
About Jon Accarrino