NewsTECHForum 2025 Reveals How Newsrooms Are Actually Deploying AI And What’s Still Broken
Across nine sessions at the New York Hilton Midtown on Dec. 16, technology leaders and broadcast executives dissected the realities of implementing AI, from workflow automation to content authentication. Organizations embedding AI into daily operations while maintaining editorial standards are measurably pulling ahead.
Despite years of vendor promises, true storycentric workflows remain frustratingly out of reach for most newsrooms.
“We’re not going to do anything that potentially could put our rundown-centric news in jeopardy,” said David Gwinn, director of software solutions at Disney/ABC News. “We need a single pane of glass. We need to stop having tool spread.”
Jenna Kreindel, manager of product editorial solutions at ABC News, identified the core issue: “It’s definitely not the technology. It’s really about a mindset. It’s a change in the way that you’re thinking.”
Brian Hopman, VP of workflow solutions at the Associated Press, acknowledged slower-than-expected adoption. “The agent-centric piece comes in to help us unlock those time savings, and not just the time savings, but to address the challenges we have about evangelizing around newsrooms, cutting down on that tool fatigue,” Hopman said.
At Sinclair, Ernie Ensign, AVP of news technology and operations, described piloting camera-to-cloud workflows across five markets. “It’s really about changing the mindset of how we operate across 65 content-producing stations,” Ensign said. “AI is only as good as its instructions and context.”
At Reuters, Jonathan Leff, global editor of newsroom AI and financial news strategy, described measurable efficiency gains: “We’ve rebuilt the internal platform our packaging team uses with AI at the core and taken what was a three to four minute package task down to under one minute per package.”
For Gray Media, the focus has been on practical tools that reduce busy work. Dana Neves, senior managing VP, explained how their AskGrAI platform addresses multi-platform demands: “When I first started, we just did the 6 p.m. news. Now it’s social and TikTok, and they all have to be different versions. Our AI tools help get time back in the day so our team can focus on creating better content.”
At Scripps, Kerry Oslund, VP of AI strategy and business development, described aggressive agent deployment: “We set a goal of having three agents in 2025. We have over 300 agents now as we enter 2026. The problem isn’t having enough agents, the problem is agent sprawl.” Oslund emphasized that first ROI came from eliminating third-party costs: “We’ve eliminated all third-party voice actors and used synthetic voice and our own anchor talents. That’s automatic tick a box, save a lot of money.”
Dana Ucciferri, head of video and design at Bloomberg Television, noted AI-powered search is transforming archive access: “What we’re getting back is a sequence of video clips. We’re getting content we might not have found because our archive may not have all that metadata.”
The panel “Remote Production & the Non-Stop News Cycle” panel confirmed that distributed newsgathering is now the default model for 24/7 multi-platform news.
Joe Addalia, VP of broadcast technology at Hearst Television, described a tiered connectivity strategy: “The pack for ENG is king right now. But when you really, really want to be live, we still support satellite trucks. We see them as a competitive edge. We’ll still take them out into moose country or out to Lake Tahoe.”
Erik Smith, VP of news operations at Fox Television Stations, revealed Fox is piloting private 5G in Philadelphia. “We’re going to stand up a private 5G network for ultra-low latency video transmission within the building, but then being able to extend that out to our field crews as well.”
Spectrum Networks has made remote production its entire business model. Sam Singal, group VP of editorial and content, described launching into eight new markets in 18 months without building traditional stations: “We have at least half a dozen producers, reporters, executive producers that set up shop remotely, sometimes in coffee shops, sometimes in conference rooms.”
Michael Gruzuk, head of CBC News Studios, described a fundamental shift away from end-of-day flagship programming. “People are seeking the news much earlier in the day. All of our growth is happening connected to story, regardless of what time of day or time of week.”
Jeff Zellmer, SVP of digital operations at Fox Television Stations, explained how LiveNow abandoned traditional structure entirely: “We’ve blown up the format. There’s no scripts at all. It relies on somebody just knowing what they’re seeing. In order to be live at the right time, we have to be live all the time.”
Angie Grande, VP of streaming news channels at NBCUniversal Local, emphasized that audiences now prioritize speed: “People want information on the spot when it’s happening. They want the freshest content. I do feel like they’re more forgiving in terms of they’re open to seeing things in a new way.”
Andrew Fitzgerald, SVP of streaming video services at Hearst Television, noted an unexpected finding: “Fast channels, despite their digital architecture, from a viewer perspective, were not all that different from linear channels. We actually found if we reinforce the same structure in our FAST channel, we saw deeper viewer engagement.”
AI’s practical value extends beyond efficiency gains. Lindsay Stewart, CEO of Stringr, detailed how AI-powered video generation creates new revenue streams: “We have one partner who started with Stringr VidGen about four months ago. They were creating like a dozen videos a day. Now they’re creating about 150. They are generating $29 in new revenue per video per day.”
Stewart emphasized the dual benefit: “There’s a productivity workflow ROI, and then there’s also the new revenue stream ROI. One person can create about a video every seven minutes with a human in the loop.”
Perhaps the highest-stakes discussion centered on AI-generated misinformation and content authentication.
Major broadcasters are racing to implement C2PA standards for content provenance. “If content authenticity and provenance aren’t in your dictionary or isn’t part of your roadmap, you should look it up and put it on the list,” said Hearst’s Addalia. “This is our future.”
At CNN, Ryan Struyk, director of AI innovation, emphasized the accuracy imperative: “Our audience trust, our journalistic integrity is everything to us. Complete accuracy is really the bottom line, and that is the problem that you have to try to solve when you’re thinking about scaling and human review.”
Sinclair is close to proving out full chain of custody through C2PA. “We’re very close to proofing out a full chain from camera ingestion all the way through production,” Ensign said. “We have to be able to confirm the identity of a piece of content, knowing that it wasn’t tampered with.”
Gray’s Neves emphasized the human verification imperative that remains constant: “I don’t have a line that we wouldn’t use AI. My line is, did you have a human in the loop? I will die on that mountain.”
Marcy Lefkovitz, SVP of product innovation at Dalet, called for unified industry action: “This is one of these areas where it’s incumbent upon the broadcasters and the vendor community to work together. If a vendor wants to serve the news community, they have to get on board with this.”
At The New York Times, Rubina Madan Fillion, associate editorial director of AIiInitiatives, outlined its approach: “We have a philosophy: experiment freely and ship cautiously. We will not put prototypes into production unless they’re really ready for prime time.”
Dan Krauth, investigative reporter at WABC, emphasized his verification process: “I use AI as a rough blueprint to know which government agency to go to, but I need that document emailed to me from someone who’s in charge of producing the document.”
At NBC Connecticut, Andrew Rowan, MMJ, emphasized showing the reporting process itself builds credibility: “I try to include the journey of the story and that whole process. If we asked an organization for a statement with three specific questions, and they sent back a paragraph that doesn’t answer two of them, we say, ‘We specifically asked for these.’ People in the comments will ask, ‘What about X?’ We asked about that.”
Paul Cramer, managing director of media and broadcast at Veritone, presented a compelling case for treating dormant archives as active revenue generators.
Veritone funds AI enrichment costs upfront, recovering through clip licensing and AI training data deals before revenue-sharing begins. “We have a $40 million pipeline just for AI model training data,” Cramer said. “They’re looking for niche content. We’ll get requests like, we need 2,000 clips of people walking through double-hung doors.”
CBS owned-and-operated stations have centralized archives through Veritone’s platform. “It doesn’t make sense for every local station to go set up their own archive and storefront,” Cramer said. “What we actually hear is a lot of these local stations say, we get requests all the time, but we just tell them we can’t help because it’s just not worth our time to go find the clip.”
NewsTECHForum 2025 focused squarely on execution. Organizations succeeding have stopped treating AI as experimental: Scripps’ Oslund built more than 300 agents, Sinclair proved camera-to-cloud workflows, Fox tested private 5G, Reuters collapsed packaging time from 3-5 minutes to 35 seconds.
As AP’s Hopman concluded: “The technology is moving so fast, you’ve got to be moving really fast to try to keep up.”
You can find more insights from NewsTECHForum here.
Disclosure: Gray Media is a client of the media technology and AI strategy firm, Ordo Digital.
The post NewsTECHForum 2025 Reveals How Newsrooms Are Actually Deploying AI And What’s Still Broken appeared first on TV News Check.
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