This One Took Us A Year To Write

We’re back after taking a long break for the weekend, and also to process what happened at the White House Correspondents Dinner last Saturday night (which was controversial even before a gunman tried to sprint past security and down into the ballroom of the Washington Hilton). We’re sure you have read volumes about the shooting and what has followed since.

For now, we’re going to continue here with our reporting on our trip to Las Vegas, the weekend before last, on what we saw at the NAB Show.

Because if there was one main theme that was in everything, it was those two letters that seemingly appear in almost every conversation about the future of every business these days. Those being, of course, the letter “A” and the letter “I”.

(If you read that in the voice of a Sesame Street Muppet, then thank the Children’s Television Workshop for teaching so many of us the alphabet.)

AI, or in its full name, Artificial Intelligence, was being promoted in so many different products shown on the multiple floors of the NAB Show, that we stopped trying to count them all. Our primary reason for attending the NAB Show was to examine how AI is being offered and used as a tool in television newsrooms. And for the whole story on that, we have to rewind the clock a little bit. In fact, we have to go back twelve full months to April of 2025.

We made the same pilgrimage to Las Vegas and the NAB Show last year, with pretty much the same editorial objective. We talked to a lot of people, saw a lot of demonstrations, and after we got back home, started to write this article no less than half a dozen times. That was all before we reached a bit of an epiphany:

It was too early in the development and deployment cycle to know exactly what true trends were emerging. So we never wrote this story.

Don’t get us wrong, there was quite a bit going on with AI in newsrooms a year ago. But it seemed, to us at least, much like the early days of television outlets first having websites. Some wanted to be first and plant their proverbial stake in the ground, and then everyone else who was, as our car-selling father used to say, doing a lot of tire kicking—without taking out their checkbooks.

Fast forward to this April, and everything was decidedly much further along.

When it comes to talking about the current “state of the art” in newsroom systems, artificial intelligence is now far more embedded in the tools and in a much more elegant fashion. And as far as we could see, to calm any fears, the option to use those AI tools was present, but not predetermined. Every vendor seems to realize that every newsroom needs some local controls on how and when it brings AI into the editorial process.

Of course, the two lead vendors in the newsroom computer system (NRCS) space have been the AP’s ENPS and AVID’s iNEWS. For decades now, almost every local TV newsroom in the US has been powered by one of these two systems. And that’s still true to some degree today. But new and nimble competitors are gaining, both in terms of their offerings, their customer base, and in the size of their booths on the show floor.

We start in the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center with AVID, if only because they had one of the largest amounts of booth space on the show floor. Much of that space is devoted to the wide number of products the company offers, focused around their pair of major tools in the post-production world: the video editor Media Composer and the audio mixing and editing platform, ProTools. In a corner of the AVID booth was a demo station for not one, but three different software products that are the successors to the venerable iNEWS platform.

The first is AVID’s MediaCentral, which is the rundown-centric platform that is where stories are created and ultimately moved to airing. Like every NRCS we saw at the NAB Show, MediaCentral allows journalists to use AI to perform the typical tasks of transcribing sound, identifying different speakers, summarizing larger amounts of data, and helping assemble all of the data that pours into the newsgathering process. A second software product, called Wolftech News, which AVID first demonstrated last April, operates in concert with MediaCentral to provide “story-centric” tools for planning, resource management, and “AI-powered fact-checking and content verification.” We know that WolfTech News was championed by the Sinclair group’s newsrooms, who were almost all on the iNews platform. Finally, AVID’s Content Core is the cloud-based media asset platform that newsrooms can use to handle their video and audio needs from ingesting to editing to playback. Here again, AI is an offered feature set to facilitate media searching and archiving,

In terms of product catalog, AVID has not just these three main offerings for the newsroom, but countless others, which explains why we could never seem to get close enough to their demo stations to get more than a distant look at how all of these services work together to improve the crucial workflow of a newsroom. But what we did see was an impressive suite of offerings.

In the realm of the large video systems vendor space, Ross Video competes with AVID in offering a large number of product lines, from switchers to graphics and just about everything else you might find in a broadcast studio. It also has its own NRCS product suite, now known under the one name of Indigo. Indigo-Editorial is apparently what used to be known as Inception, but is now part of the larger Indigo “media workflow” platform. This may explain why we could never find anyone demonstrating Inception in the busy Ross Video booth, and why we moved on.

Over in the West Hall (which requires a quick hop on “The Loop” the system of Tesla vehicles zipping through underground tunnels that Elon Musk’s “Boring Company” has drilled between the Convention Center and a growing number of other nearby destinations) we made our way to the booth of the Associated Press and its “Workflow Solutions” unit, which handles the other heavyweight in the NRCS space, ENPS. The Electronic News Production System, which “keeps 65,000 broadcast professionals on air every day,” according to the AP’s website. (AP actually says “professions” on its website. We think they mean professionals, as 65K of different broadcast professions seems like a few too many to us.)

ENPS is still the rundown-centric platform that powers the editorial workflow of writing, editing, and organizing in show rundowns for the news broadcast. ENPS was where the first protocol to connect the various production hardware and systems was deployed, the ubiquitous “MOS” protocol, which earned the AP the first of its two EMMY awards for ENPS. In recent years, ENPS migrated from being a dedicated application on the computer desktop to being browser-based, which all modern NRCS platforms are now. It has also been integrated with over 130 different vendors’ products to control nearly all of the workflow systems found in news production facilities (at least by the AP’s count), but the AP also has multiple software offerings for newsrooms, showing its AP Storytelling platform as a perfect companion to ENPS.

Much like AVID’s Wolftech News offering, AP Storytelling is their story-centric tool to manage story ideas, resource planning, and publishing to various platforms. Again, here, the Artificial Intelligence tools are available to assist journalists in multiple aspects of doing their job each day. The AP likes to stress that this is the toolset that they needed inside their own global newsgathering operation, and so it has been developed, tested, and proven to “keep a story on track from first idea to final output.”

If AVID and the AP have solid, well-established platforms and they are trying harder to hold on to their market share, it is because they are being pushed by the newer players in this space, who have been making inroads by offering newer, and arguably more integrated solutions to be the “single platform” that newsrooms can utilize to handle more of their daily functional needs. The two vendors in this space required a trip back to the North Hall of the LVCC, and some time in the Octopus and CUEZ booths.

First to Octopus, which has been pushing into North American newsrooms with a product that anyone who has spent some time in the last couple of decades working on either iNEWS or ENPS can use. While featuring a style that is more reminiscent of Windows 10, as compared to the Windows 11 look that iNEWS and ENPS seemingly have arrived at. That is by design, as the company touts its ability to easily transition newsrooms from whatever existing platform they may be using over to Octopus. The platform, which is in its 12th iteration, promotes the fact that it can support either a “rundown-centric” or a “story-centric” approach to newsroom workflow. It also offers AI tools integrated into the workflow, but allows the system managers to select which AI models can be accessed by the journalists working in Octopus.

A unique aspect of the Octopus offerings is the integration with the company’s iReporter platform. iReporter is a user-generated content (UGC) platform to manage the gathering, verification, and use of UGC via a dedicated mobile app and web portal. Given the role that UGC has come to play in newsgathering, especially in breaking news situations, the iReporter platform, combined with Octopus, is a strong and unique offering as a newsroom tool. Octopus has landed deals to be used by the Griffin stations in Oklahoma, as well as some of the Standard Media stations. One reason for its appeal in smaller newsrooms may be the fact that Octopus is offered on either a subscription or one-off licensing plan, which would allow budgeting flexibility for what is typically a major expense.

And on the topic of expenses, we come to the other player in the newsroom workflow systems space, the Belgian-based company called CUEZ. We first saw CUEZ last year, with a small booth tucked away in the corner of the show floor. Their name had just come to our attention as the software that was powering a project by TEGNA at some of their stations, which would allow Producers to “run their own newscasts on the air.” In essence, eliminating the need for a director or “technical content producer” as the sole remaining control room position has been titled by some groups. That project was so new and apparently sensitive enough that the person who showed us CUEZ in 2025 would not even name TEGNA as the US broadcaster who was deploying it.

Fast forward to 2026, where a member of the CUEZ team, who was happily demonstrating the expanded features of the platform, acknowledged TEGNA’s rollout at some of its stations in the US. (That and the fact that we observed a small crowd of folks with TEGNA’s name on their convention badges, huddled in the CUEZ booth.) But what was apparent is that the year and the work with TEGNA (and other broadcast newsrooms) has significantly advanced the platform. CUEZ is a fully cloud-based suite of tools, including a rundown manager, an automator tool to control production systems in the control room, and a story desk to manage story creation, resource management, and publishing to online and social media platforms. (By now, this should be apparent as the framework that all of these platforms are attempting to fill.)

What became apparent to us in our days of pounding the show floor is that CUEZ may be the upstart that many are taking the hardest look at. The software feels more tightly integrated than its competitors and seems to have spent more time adapting to the real-world workflow of live television production. That may be due to its roots as an automation program not just for news but also for other live television programs and events such as sports, entertainment, and even worship services. (Don’t sleep on the burgeoning business of live television production within houses of worship. We have seen churches with better television facilities than some stations.)

And as much as we aren’t big fans of the idea, CUEZ has evolved to the point that it promotes the idea that its platform can power a small market television newsroom to the point that those on camera at the anchor desk can run the entire production of the newscast. And that’s not just a theory, but they have a real-world example running at Gray Media’s KNOP in North Platte, Nebraska. (Full disclosure: we have watched some of KNOP’s news product, and it is executed quite well, certainly on par with and superior to other small market newscasts we have reviewed.) Of everyone we looked at on the NAB Show floor, we came away thinking that CUEZ will be the player that we will be following the most until next April, when 58,000 or so broadcasters, production types, and creators stream back into the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Let’s say your station isn’t ready to give up its existing news production infrastructure? We know of at least one alternative to the news platforms we have showcased here so far, and that would be the offering from Magid, called Collaborator-Publisher. Yes, that Magid, the same folks who are known for Research and Consulting to many television newsrooms over the past seven decades. Magid wasn’t on the show floor, but what they have developed is (in their words) “a high-performing, brand-aligned workflow” platform that is powered by agentic AI. Both a story creation and editing tool, Collaborator is a combination of an AI-powered researcher, editor, and publisher. Magid says that Collaborator has been developed by working with over 60 media organizations, along with the writing program at the University of Iowa.

Unlike the previous platforms we have looked at, Collaborator is a stand-alone platform that lives outside of the typical NRCS, but works alongside them to provide “a solution for the specific friction points that journalists face every day,” according to Magid. While that can seem a little clunkier than the built-in AI tools, we know of several broadcast newsrooms that are currently using Collaborator and have been pleased with what the product has brought to their operations in terms of editorial consistency, publishing for alternate platforms, and the security of knowing they are in a “closed system,” so their data isn’t used to train publicly available large language models (LLMs). One key point about Collaborator is that it is not a market-exclusive offering, unlike their research and consulting services, which are typically in just one station in each market.

A disclaimer for you to consider before we wrap this up: We haven’t used any of these tools extensively and certainly don’t profess that one is better than another. We have given you our impressions from the demos we saw, some conversations with company reps, and reviewing their online websites (which we have conveniently linked to throughout this article).

Our biggest concern with any of these tools is how well they can function in the frantic crush of covering live breaking news. It is one thing to “automate” functions in a scheduled, planned-out newscast. What happens when there is no schedule, no plan, except for the one that you create as you go along? That is where we want to see these tools in action.

We still have concerns about being too reliant on “the cloud,” but we have had local systems fail, even with redundant servers, backup power sources, etc. As always, “your mileage may vary,” as the car commercials used to say (when mileage estimates first became a thing).

Perhaps worth even more consideration is this: The speed of innovation, which is now being “supercharged” by AI. One of the best quotes we heard at the NAB Show was that “programmers using AI now accomplish in two weeks what used to take a year.” The ability to create specific solutions for customers has never been easier. What we saw in April of 2026 will be improved by an unknown multiple in the next year, versus what we saw a year ago. Heck, what we have written here, ten days after the NAB Show opened, could already be out of date.

One parting shot: About that idea that AI in the newsroom will lead to fewer humans being employed in the newsroom? Let’s get on the record that we are absolutely not fans of that idea. We think AI, along with all of the other current tools available, should help newsrooms do more and better journalism, with the same headcount.

The objective has to be not just to survive, but actually thrive.

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