Way back in the year 1973, your editor first worked part-time as a disc jockey for the top-rated local radio station in his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. For six hours, from 6 p.m. to midnight, every Saturday and Sunday night, he played records, delivered the time and weather between them, and occasionally tried to land a funny joke or double entendre.
Aside from those responsibilities, the position required keeping a written log of everything that was played on the air, as well as taking readings from a pair of large transmitters that broadcast the station’s AM signal and its sister station on the FM dial. That second station delivered bland, orchestra-centric music that was not so charitably described as “The soundtrack of dentist offices all across the Lowcountry.” Also required during the work shift was routinely changing the large reels of magnetic tape on the primitive, analog automation system that delivered that music that could only be listened to by people over the age of 40.
Among all of this work was the need for the occasional “call of nature,” as one might politely put it. Given that the “Top 40” music being played on the AM station featured songs that ran an average of about three minutes each, and that each vinyl record had to be started manually, the timing of such trips down the hall to the restroom required no small amount of precision—and the occasional longer record to be played. (The expansive seven minutes and eleven seconds of The Beatles playing “Hey Jude” was a lifesaver in these situations.)
It was a busy six hours, with a lot to keep up with, along with the primary performance of being energetic and upbeat in front of the microphone. The shift flew by each night, and to this day, it is still the one job your editor enjoyed most in a long career in broadcasting.
This memory came flooding back to us when we saw a recent YouTube video from KRIV Houston anchor Caroline Collins. In it, she asks the provocative question: “Is this the future of Local News?” (Click the title to view the video.)
The video features Ms. Collins taking us “behind the scenes,” as it were, of her new role, where she is not only anchoring the station’s live stream but also (in her words) “playing director.” She then shows us the vast array of buttons, keyboards, and screens that are laid out before her. She explains that she uses all of these tools to show us various cameras, news stories, and commercials, of course—because something has to pay for all of this technology, and one might suppose her salary as well.
So let’s attempt to answer her question.
Is this role of having the people you see on camera presenting the local news now also responsible for operating all the technology that puts the images and sounds on the screen, the future of the news business? Are we now in the era of what we will label here, borrowing from our radio history, “the news jockey”?
Well, Caroline, to put it succinctly, yes. And the fact is that we have been for some time now.
As television news evolved through its early years and into “middle age” during, say, the 1980s, and as 24-hour news operations emerged, the technology used to put the news on television developed rapidly. By the next decade, digital video that could be acquired, edited, and played back from computers—rather than videotape machines—accelerated that development and reduced the number of people needed to create each newscast.
By the time we were all getting past our fears of Y2K calamities that never came to pass, early automation systems arrived that let fewer people operate a television control room and create a newscast. Technology has continued to accelerate, and in recent years someone (likely in management) asked the obvious question: “Why can’t those people who are on camera—just reading the news—also be punching the buttons to put themselves on the air?”
To be clear, KRIV’s Caroline Collins is not the first person to take on this role. We’ve been watching with interest as local stations across the country created newsroom workstations where one person can be a “news jockey” and put on their own show.
In watching this trend develop, we believe we first saw it at Nexstar’s WFLA-TV in Tampa, years ago. The station’s J.B. Biunno was a true pioneer in the space, creating live streaming content that he both anchored and directed in real time. He went on to create a “stream center” of his own design, where the station now produces daily interactive shows and extended live event coverage of all kinds. Its “Tracking the Tropics” coverage during hurricane season is “must-see TV” when a major storm is threatening landfall on the Gulf Coast.
Not long after Nexstar began rolling out the idea of installing “Stream Centers” across its local stations, fellow group broadcaster Gray Television began implementing its own version of in-newsroom setups that let a single person produce, direct, and anchor live news coverage or different programs on a range of topics. This same setup became the center of Gray’s “Local News Live” streaming channel, which originally featured live coverage and stories from across the 117 local markets where the group has television stations.
Lest one think this evolution occurred organically in the industry, the economics of these changes proved irresistible to companies looking to improve the bottom line and pay off the money borrowed to build these ever-growing groups of local television stations. Needing fewer people to run a newsroom lowers what’s typically one of the largest single expense lines in a local TV station’s operating budget.
So the more accurate answer to Ms. Collins’s question about whether this is the future of local news may be that it isn’t the future—it is already the present state of the art, and it is continuing to grow. Her station now uses its live streaming desk to originate two hours of its over-the-air programming each midday.
Much like our own early experience in radio, the work requires some key things from those who take it on. Preparation and organization are essential. You don’t just sit down at the controls and try to “drive” this kind of setup any more than you would sit down at the control panel of a nuclear power plant and ask, “I wonder what this button does,” as you push it.
In watching her video, we note that the setup at the Fox-owned station appears to be a relatively elaborate and expensive one from equipment maker Vizrt. We’ve seen simpler ones that seemed easier to operate for someone also appearing on camera at the same time. We can only guess this is being deployed across local Fox stations as they try to roll out a suite of technology that can accommodate as complex a production as they may need.
Also notable in the video is the lack of a tool many TV news anchors would expect to have whenever they appear on camera: a teleprompter. The lack of one in such a setup suggests the expectation is that the anchor will have to “ad-lib” their on-camera parts while orchestrating all the other elements that will go into the program.
This may be the proverbial silver lining of these “streaming desks.”
Without a word-for-word script, this new class of “news jockeys” will have to know the news of the day well enough to talk about it coherently, all the while “playing director,” as Ms. Collins put it. Those who attempt this position, which requires juggling so many tasks at once, will do so knowing the camera will immediately expose any lack of understanding of the story being covered in the moment.
We’ve seen examples across the spectrum of successfully operating as a news jockey in this “hot seat” of controlling so many things at the same time. We expect a whole new generation of talented people to take this seat in the future and succeed.
After all, if a 16-year-old kid could keep two radio stations on the air for six hours a night as the only person in the building, being a modern news jockey should be completely doable.
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A small epilogue, if you’ll allow: That 16-year-old kid only got the chance to do that job because one very generous man recognized his early passion. After hearing about the opportunity, he pushed him to apply and vouched for the kid with the radio station when he did. The career that followed likely wouldn’t have happened without that support, which he gave as the executive director of the local Junior Achievement program. Many thanks, Al Veeck, for doing all that you did for so many young people.