By rssfeeds-admin “We’ve got to be doing it now,” said Mike Dello Stritto, VP and news director of KCBS-KCAL Los Angeles. “And if we’re even starting now, it’s already a little late.”
That admission, delivered with little equivocation, established the frame for a wide-ranging look at how news organizations across local, national and public broadcasting are experimenting with data journalism, on-air transparency, investigative reach, modular storytelling and AI-assisted production workflows. The innovations on display were not theoretical. Most were already in market, producing measurable results and, in some cases, producing genuine audience loyalty.
The Fragmentation Reality
Lee Zurik, SVP of strategy and innovation at Gray Media, was direct about the structural shift driving every decision his organization makes. “The viewership is changing. Fragmentation is the word,” he said. “YouTube, our linear stations, our CTV platforms, our websites, social media — people are getting information everywhere, in the format they want. Some still want to watch a newscast. Some want to only look at their social feeds and doom scroll. Some love podcasts. We need to be everywhere serving them with our important information.”
Barbara Maushard, SVP and chief content officer for news at Hearst Television, echoed that framing but pushed it further. “If we’re not already doing it, we’re probably a little bit behind,” she said. “If we can continue to find new ways to reach the audience — because that’s what they demand — that’s how we’re all going to be successful and, frankly, save journalism.”
For Marc Lefebvre, senior director of operations at CBC News, technology and culture are inseparable concerns. The more urgent problem, he argued, is not the tools available but the mindset inside newsrooms still built around appointment viewing. “We have people who are still focused on end-of-day programming,” he said, “and audiences under the age of 46 just don’t do that. The thing we really have to drive, in addition to the workflows, is making sure that the mindset is aligned — that when our teams are creating content, they’re thinking of modern audiences.”
Data As Daily Discipline
Hearst has moved aggressively to embed data journalism not just in investigative projects but in the daily turn of local news. Maushard described a team of five data and visualization specialists — based in New York and Washington — who work both on major enterprise series and on rapid-turnaround localizations of national stories. The team built an interactive infrastructure story that allowed viewers to search their ZIP codes for the condition of nearby bridges, tunnels and waterways. They also created a video game around road conditions to drive audience engagement.
“We had to find ways to localize on quick turns,” Maushard said. ‘We can identify great data sets, tell multiple stories, make it interactive on our sites and apps, put it across social media, put it on our linear platforms. It’s truly multi-platform, and it’s really good journalism.”
One recent example: A Louisville station used the group’s data resources to build a highly specific road closure and event guide for the Thunder Over Louisville Air Show — useful, hyperlocal and produced quickly.
Transparency As News Product
KCBS Los Angeles took a different route to audience connection. Three years ago, Dello Stritto moved the station’s assignment desk into the studio and put assignment editors on camera across virtually every newscast. The thinking began with a simple observation: The desk was producing some of the most authoritative, real-time journalism in the building, and no one outside the building knew it.
“I started to hear some booming voices of assignment editors talking about stories with confidence,” Dello Stritto said, “and I said, I could put those guys on TV.”
Research validated the pilot, but what surprised the team was the specific reason viewers responded. They appreciated the transparency of seeing how the news was being gathered in real time — a behind-the-scenes quality that felt, in a fragmented media environment, like something to trust.
“With breaking news, it’s objectively stronger when you have assignment editors who have the institutional knowledge,” Dello Stritto said. “People were letting us know: I knew when to evacuate because of your coverage.”
Investigative Journalism At Scale
Gray Media’s Investigate TV, now five years into its run, has transformed how Gray’s 113 TV stations approach enterprise reporting. The program takes locally originated investigations and distributes them nationally, amplifying both the reach and the ROI of labor-intensive reporting.
Zurik described a story reported out of Atlanta about a scheme targeting airline passengers. A viewer in the Northeast saw it on Investigate TV, recognized the scam when it happened to him at an airport, captured video of it and contacted the original reporter. That chain of events, Zurik noted, only happens because of reach.
“We try to teach our people — when we’re framing our stories — why is this relevant not only to someone watching here, but all across the country? he said. Beyond distribution, the program has reshaped investigative culture within the company. Gray now brings between 150 and 200 people to an internal investigative reporting conference each year.
AI has also sharpened the group’s investigative capacity, Zurik said. “You put a huge data set in there — used to have to review that thing, and it could take hours,” he said. “You put it in AI, and it can give you a good roadmap and what to look at within five or 10 seconds.”
Modular, Story-Centric, Live
CBC News has undertaken a more sweeping structural reorganization, hiring more than 60 journalists deployed across 33 communities — most without physical stations — to build a genuinely local digital presence. The production model that supports them prioritizes story-centric, modular content designed for audiences rather than platforms, paired with lightweight live-streaming tools built in partnership with Grass Valley.
“We are embracing something that is live when you need us and on demand when you want us,” Lefebvre said. “Creating story-specific live streams can capture that viewer interest, and those can appear on our website, on YouTube, on FAST channels, on television and on radio.”
The live production tool CBC built on top of Grass Valley’s GVM platform strips out the production overhead that would otherwise make live coverage impractical for small communities. It was developed through cross-functional teams that embedded journalists alongside engineers throughout the design process — a methodology that rewrote the tool entirely after early user testing.
“It brought about a huge rethink about the software design,” Lefebvre said, “that was at first really technology driven and is now completely user driven, with the content creator at the heart of it.”
Regis Andre, VP of software engineering and innovation at Grass Valley, underscored how radically AI has compressed that development cycle. Much of what CBC demoed during the session did not exist three months ago. “With the advancement of AI, we can be much more reactive and being able to do prototyping,” he said. “We can try more things, get more feedback and continue to improve.”
Ron Stitt, president and GM of Stringr, showed a broadcast-quality news clip produced in roughly two hours using Stringr’s field video network combined with the production tools of sister company Jenna’s production suite. The workflow, he argued, can allow newsrooms to scale video output at a fraction of traditional costs. We’re providing the tool sets that the people in this room can use to start to scale massively their video output,” Stitt said.
Culture Remains The Constraint
Throughout the session, a consistent caveat surfaced: The technology is advancing faster than the organizations deploying it. Maushard was pointed about the dynamic. “It’s cultural as well as it is with the tools, she said. “AI is allowing us to do a lot of things that we weren’t able to do as quickly. We use it as a tool, not a content generator — it’s a tool to help support us and make it easier for our journalists to do what they’re doing.”
Zurik put an even finer point on it, describing AI as a multiplier for reporters willing to engage with it. Lefebvre framed the challenge as one of incentive structures as much as skill. And Dello Stritto offered another measure of whether any of it is working: not just ratings, but the moment an assignment editor gets recognized on the street by a viewer who evacuated in time because of real-time coverage.
That, he suggested, is what it looks like when news organizations are actually putting the new back in news.
The post News Leaders: Innovation Is Urgent Concern appeared first on TV News Check.
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