Program

The pace of TV newsroom life no longer allows for periods to regroup between major stories. Journalists are grappling with burnout, a barrage of threats both virtual and in person, an erosion of their collective mental health and job insecurity. TV stations must harden their physical infrastructure against devastating weather events and better train their staffs to be safer in the field. How can the industry evolve fast enough fast enough to sustain the incessant red line of pressure on which it now operates daily?

Never has the direct relationship between a free press and healthy democracy been so keenly felt and precarious as it does now. As we head into a crucial U.S. election year when mistrust, misinformation and disinformation are circulating with furious velocity, video journalists face a crucible. A look at how the industry must meet that moment, where emerging technologies will come to bear and what’s at stake in the work they do over the next year.

The news industry is already several years into a broad embrace of streaming as a necessary distribution channel for its content. What has it learned about what consumers want to see there? How are organizations continuing to develop and iterate original content for streaming? How are data and technology facilitating decision making? How deep are audiences’ appetites for experimentation on news streaming? And how are organizations programming FAST and channels for maximum impact?

Media companies are beginning to use technology to tag, index and search for video to enhance storytelling, create new shows and, eventually, find new revenue by licensing content. How are the newest in AI making these tasks significantly easier? Will AI offer a path to circumventing metatagging altogether? And how can media companies authenticate their deep trove of archival content and determine rights ownership?

News organizations are increasingly undertaking ambitious, wide-ranging and often daily collaborations across their groups. How are they organizing their newsrooms to best foster these collaborations, identify topics of maximum national impact and connect colleagues across vastly different markets? What technologies are surfacing to best enable these projects, facilitate cross-group communication and make promising local content visible to all?

Major technology changes to studio design and field production have transformed hoe newscasts can be produced and how they feel to audiences. Technologists and journalists take an in-depth look at how news studio advances in video walls, augmented and extended reality are changing the fabric of newscasts themselves. And they examine how dramatic leaps in field production technology are forever changing workflows and the shape and speed in which content can be generated.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the way organizations produce news. On the positive side, operational functions like speech-to-text transcription, translation, editing, quality control monitoring and metatagging have eased workflow burdens. But generative AI presents far thornier challenges for newsrooms, complicating journalistic rules and even posing an existential threat to the profession. A candid look at how news organizations are continuously reassessing their guidelines around AI usage and grappling with the step change it presents to the industry.