ARLINGTON, Va.—PBS News Hour will rebrand as PBS News across its digital and social platforms, while retaining the PBS News Hour name for its Monday through Friday nightly broadcast.

The move coincides with the opening of its new studios in Arlington on on Monday, June 10. WETA, the flagship public media station in the nation’s capital, recently completed a $58 million expansion project of its Arlington headquarters, including the creation of new studios and editorial offices for PBS News. 

The rebrand is a continuation of efforts first launched in 2023 when the Saturday and Sunday broadcast moved production from WNET in New York to News Hour Productions (NHP), a WETA subsidiary, and rebranded as PBS News Weekend, now anchored by John Yang.

Senior executive producer of PBS News Hour and WETA senior vice president Sara Just said that the digital and social rebrand will occur on Monday, June 17. 

“The PBS News Hour, our nightly broadcast co-anchored by Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett, remains the flagship of our newsroom as we approach nearly 50 years on the air,” said Just. “Today, all of us consume news across multiple platforms. Audiences encounter our journalism on social media feeds, in news feeds, in live streaming, in primetime specials and breaking news events. Our adjustments to our branding makes it clear that you can rely on PBS News journalism for reliable, trustworthy insight into the events and stories that shape our world and our lives, wherever they encounter it.”

PBS News Hour continues to reach more people and expand its offerings across a variety of platforms. The rebrand is designed to better position the legacy media organization for audiences outside of the traditional one hour broadcast and to create greater visual alignment across broadcast, digital, and social, the news operation said. 

The brand’s owned and operated digital and social platforms will implement new PBS News branding starting June 17 with additional updates to social handles and URLs in the coming weeks. Since 2019, average website users are up 44%, at nearly 7.5 million, while average monthly YouTube video views are up 27% at 33 million.

Since its inception in 1975 (then as The Robert MacNeil Report), PBS News Hour has been produced out of a large studio in WETA’s aging production center, located a few blocks away from its Arlington headquarters. The new studio, designed by Eric Siegel and George Allison with lighting design by Dennis Size, will also be used by PBS News Weekend and Washington Week with The Atlantic, and will allow for PBS News special programming to be more easily incorporated into the same space. 

The graphic redesign was led by PBS News creative director for broadcast Kojo Boateng including the logo redesign in partnership with Lippincott and the broadcast opening titles designed in partnership with Adolescent, Inc.

ARLINGTON, Va.—Anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff has announced her intent to step aside from the PBS NewsHour anchor desk on Friday, December 30, 2022 and to begin work on a two year project to understand better how the American people see their country and whether today’s deep political divisions can be healed. 

Woodruff will devote 2023 and 2024 to this national reporting project, “Judy Woodruff Presents: America at a Crossroads”.

“I have loved anchoring this extraordinary program, initially with my dear friend Gwen Ifill,” Woodruff said in announcing her decision. “To follow in the footsteps of Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil has been the honor of a lifetime. Now, I am thrilled to be embarking on this new project to try to understand the most divided time in American politics since I started reporting. I want to listen to the American people themselves, in cities, small towns and rural areas, from one end of the country to the other, to ask them about their hopes and fears, how they see their role as citizens, and to have long conversations with people who’ve given these questions careful thought.”

The effort will explore how America arrived at this fractured political state and what solutions people envision, through travel and conversations with voters and local and national politicians, as well as discussions with writers, historians, religious and community leaders, and policy experts. As a senior correspondent, she will report regularly for this series on the NewsHour with possible primetime specials for PBS.

Woodruff’s successor at the NewsHour anchor desk will be named in late 2022.

PBS NewsHour’s average nightly audience in Q3 2022 (July – September 2022) totaled nearly 2 million persons. NewsHour’s average monthly digital audience for the same period topped 25M persons, while video views totaled 45.9 million and social reach surpassed 13 million.

The 2021 Erdos & Morgan Opinion Leaders survey ranked NewsHour as the #1 most Objective, Credible, and Current media organization, while for the 19th year in a row, Americans rank PBS the most-trusted institution.

Woodruff’s distinguished career spans five decades in journalism, including 25 years as part of public broadcasting. She has solo-anchored the NewsHour since 2016 and served as a rotating anchor for the broadcast from 2009 – 2013. 

In 2013, she and the late Gwen Ifill were named co-anchors and managing editors of the PBS NewsHour, the first time a U.S. network broadcast had a female co-anchor team. Woodruff, the recipient of countless top journalism awards including the Peabody Award for Journalistic Integrity and the Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award, first joined what was then known as the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, as chief Washington correspondent in 1983, serving until 1993 in that capacity. She has previously reported at NBC News and CNN.

Accolades for Woodruff poured in from a variety of sources and people. 

In a statement Patrick Butler, president and chief executive officer of America’s Public Television Stations (APTS), said “America’s Public Television Stations join her legion of fans and admirers in thanking Judy Woodruff for her decades of exemplary journalism, her outstanding service to public television and her inspiring standard of personal integrity that has made Judy such a widely trusted figure through so many years of national turmoil and division.”

“Her leadership of the PBS NewsHour, first in partnership with Gwen Ifill and for the past several years as sole anchor, has protected and enhanced public television’s reputation for accuracy, responsibility and civility in covering news and public affairs,” he added. “It has been my personal privilege to know Judy for more than 40 years, and there is no one I admire more.”

“Judy Woodruff is a legend and an icon,” said Sara Just, PBS NewsHour’s senior executive producer and a WETA senior vice president. “She continues to inspire with her commitment to fair, thorough journalism and her next project will bring all of her experience and skills to the most important story in our country – What is happening in America and can democracy survive?”

“A consummate professional and cherished colleague, Judy is the embodiment of journalism’s highest ideals,” Sharon Percy Rockefeller, WETA president and CEO and president of NewsHour Productions, noted. “We are extraordinarily grateful that she will continue to report with precision and insight on those issues that help us better understand our country and our world. We look forward to this next chapter in her vital work on behalf of the public.”

PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger said: “Judy is an exceptional journalist, whose impartial reporting and integrity continue to set the standard for excellence. Judy is a trusted voice when trust is so very important, and we are thrilled that she will continue to serve audiences on PBS.”

Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, said: “Throughout her long and extraordinary career, Judy Woodruff has earned the public’s trust with her even-handed interviews and commitment to the facts. Her journalistic excellence has been recognized many times, most recently in September, when she received the Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement in television news. Her commitment to civil discussion set the tone for the PBS NewsHour and for all public media journalists. I wish her well in her new role.”

LOS ANGELES—The off-air content staff members of NewsHour Productions, who produce the nightly news program PBS NewsHour, have been officially recognized as a bargaining unit of SAG-AFTRA. More than 70% of the program’s workers signed on to a petition to unionize.

“We are proud to welcome the talented professionals behind NewsHour,” said SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher. “The work they do to inform the people of our nation is vital to our democracy. As president of SAG-AFTRA, I am pleased that they are unionizing because I personally enjoy their refreshingly unbiased presentation of the news as a viewer. We believe that they — and every worker — should have a seat at the table when it comes to their working conditions.”

On-air NewsHour employees are already members of the union. They are now joined by the 69 reporters, producers, editors, production assistants and others who not only report and produce the show, but also create NewsHour’s expanding digital footprint and one-hour primetime documentaries.

“As the workers behind one of the most trusted news institutions in the country, our goal is to strengthen this pillar of American television news by creating a better, healthier and more transparent workplace,” the NewsHour content staff said in a statement. “We love our jobs and are truly driven by the NewsHour’s mission. We are glad that management chose to recognize our union and focus on the collective bargaining process that will ensure our voices are heard.”

SAG-AFTRA staff has been working with the NewsHour employees since March 2021. 

SAG-AFTRA already represents NPR and member stations KPBS in San Diego, KCRW in Santa Monica, KPCC/LAist (SCPR) in Pasadena, Marketplace, KQED in San Francisco, KUOW in Seattle, MPR News, YourClassical MPR, The Current, WBEZ (CPM) in Chicago, NHPR in Concord, WBUR in Boston, WNYC and Gothamist (NYPR) in New York City, WBGO in Newark, WHYY in Philadelphia, WBGO in Newark, WETA in Arlington, and WAMU & DCist in Washington, D.C., among others.

Much like everything else that has transpired in 2020, election-night coverage promises to test news organizations as they have never been tested before. 

“I’ve been part of election teams since the 1980s,” said David Bohrman, executive producer of CBS News’s 2020 election-night coverage. “I’ve run election coverage at CNN and NBC, and now here at CBS, and this is the most complicated election I’ve ever been part of.” 

Marc Burstein, senior executive producer of ABC News Special Events, agreed, citing the difficulties of producing a major election-night special in the middle of a major pandemic: “We are having to prepare for anything and everything. It could be the longest night or it may not be. No one knows and we have to prepare for every possible contingency.” (NBC News, the other Big Three broadcast network news arm, did not provide executives to be interviewed.)

Or, as "PBS NewsHour" executive producer Sara Just observed: “It’s like trying to tie your shoes while riding a bicycle. We are confident we have a good plan for keeping everyone safe, but it is challenging. This is going to be a night like none other.”

Much of this reflects a 2020 news cycle that has produced a slew of once-in-a-lifetime stories and tragedies. “I’ve been at CNN for almost 30 years and this is the most intense news environment I’ve ever seen,” Sam Feist, senior VP and Washington bureau chief at CNN, said during B+C’s News Technology Summit. “We are covering an election, maybe the most anticipated election in our lifetime, along with a pandemic and a national reckoning over race.”

“When we look back on 2020 we will think, ‘Wow, that was the most extraordinary news year ever,’ and we did it with an arm and a half tied behind our back,” Feist added.

These national calamities and controversies have also spiked viewer interest in the results and significantly raised the competitive stakes for news organizations. 

“There are more eyes on this election than we’ve had in our lifetimes,” Cherie Grzech, VP of politics and the Washington bureau at Fox News, said. 

THE MOST UNUSUAL ELECTION NIGHT

The heightened scrutiny comes as news organizations are grappling with what might on Nov. 3 be the most unusual election night in television history.  

Unlike other presidential elections, where networks covered voters casting ballots and reported the results the same day, early voting this year is hitting record levels. Mail-in voting is also expected to hit record levels, and many votes might not be counted until after Nov. 3. That, in turn, could delay results and make the process of reporting and calling races a much more complex and uncertain process. 

Technology and production plans have also been upended by a pandemic that has killed more than 220,000 people. In addition to having many people work from home, networks are using more studios and control rooms to spread out employees and are revising coverage plans by recruiting additional legal experts to explain potential voting irregularities and rethinking how to deploy journalists. Many typical election-night gatherings are likely to be canceled and travel restrictions will make it more difficult to get boots on the ground. 

One thing that hasn’t changed is election night’s importance. All the major commercial TV news organizations are investing millions of dollars in new sets and technology to stand out from the competition and attract new viewers.

“Election night, for us and for all the news networks, is our Super Bowl,” Fox News senior VP of news and politics Alan Komissaroff said. “It is our biggest night and we are determined to put our best foot forward. There isn’t a nook and cranny of the building that we are not using. We’ll be using every piece of technology we have been using in the past and a few new ones as well.”

As in earlier years, many networks will broadcast their coverage from new sets, studios or facilities that feature the glitziest graphics and massive, high-resolution, floor-to-ceiling walls and screens for data and results. 

Coverage will include big touch screens where correspondents and anchors take deep dives into results and augmented reality systems. Some networks, such as Fox News, will even be debuting virtual reality systems. 

The challenges facing news organizations this year may also improve the quality of coverage. For example, COVID-19 restrictions limiting in-studio guests will result in using a much wider array of sources and voices from remote locations, network executives said. “This has been kind of a breakthrough moment this year in terms of adding more people to the conversation,” Fox News’s Grzech said. 

Another positive development is the rapid expansion of streaming services. Their growing availability means viewers will be able to easily access a much wider array of stories and coverage, both on digital media and on broadcast networks, where TV anchors can draw on the expertise of digital teams.

The difficulties of election coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic have also forced news organizations to integrate their operations more tightly with local stations, digital outlets and even radio organizations rather than fly reporters into key battleground states. This reporting from seasoned local journalists could provide national audiences with a better understanding of the results in those locales. 

CBS, for one, will add extensive coverage to CBSN by streaming 10 local feeds, while Newsy will draw on coverage from parent company Scripps’s 60 TV stations. 

“We have a team of four or five people who will be monitoring the local stations and we’ll be able to carry their feeds at key times,” said Matt Simon, supervising producer for PM content at Newsy, who is also overseeing election-night initiatives.

"PBS NewsHour" will also be drawing on the expertise of local reporters. “One of the great advantages of public broadcasting is that there are over 350 stations across the country that we work with,” Just said. “They know their communities best, and throughout our programming we will be turning to a lot of those reporters for their expertise.”

BUILT FOR PRIMETIME

The complexity of predicting races and explaining voting trends is likely to make networks even more cautious and thoughtful when providing context or caveats in their reporting. 

“Transparency is the watchword for us,” ABC’s Burstein said. He said coverage will explain what is known as well as what isn’t known, so viewers understand why certain information or vote totals aren’t available. “The decision desk [which calls races] is always careful and conservative, but this year we will be more conservative than ever.” 

For its election-night coverage, ABC News will use a renovated studio that has been expanded to 5,500 square feet. It features 28 new video screens with about 35 million pixels, including a high-resolution video floor. 

A variety of features that enables moving video walls and screens will provide more flexibility to tell the story from different angles. Enhanced capabilities for augmented reality and other graphics are also part of the mix. 

“We will have tools to tell the story in ways we’ve never had before,” Zach Toback, VP of news and nonfiction production and studio operations at ABC News, said. “There is video everywhere, there is video on the ceilings, all across the walls, that creates a very immersive space. It is the largest renovation that we’ve done in any facility since the early 1980s.”

"PBS NewsHour" will be upping its production values with new LED walls that allow anchors and reporters to better display graphics and analyze results, VP of operations Matt Speiser said.

Univision will show off a new set that improves its graphics capabilities and helps it follow COVID-19 restrictions. “We are trying to simulate as much as possible the expansiveness of the coverage we’ve had in the past and do an even better job this year,” said Lourdes Torres, senior VP of political coverage and special projects for the Spanish-language broadcaster. “We have a huge newsroom and the idea is to expand the set into the newsroom and basically have all the elements—video walls, touch screens—embedded in the newsroom.” 

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, many Univision staffers have been working from home, with only about 25% of the typical newsroom staff on-site. For election night, though, Univision will be bringing more people into the building to supplement the remote workers. 

To keep staff safe, Univision will place staff in additional control rooms and spaces to maintain social distancing, a strategy many other networks and news organizations are adopting. “We will have training, special cleaning teams, security to remind people about masks to keep people safe,” Torres said. “It is really a pretty elaborate plan.”

SAFETY MUST COME FIRST

Since the start of the pandemic, the Associated Press has decentralized video production operations and set up systems for people to work at home, AP deputy managing editor for visual and digital journalism Derl McCrudden said. But for the final days of election coverage, AP will be bringing a small video production crew back into the New York and London hubs. 

That will allow AP to provide live election coverage for customers with the curated AP Direct channel and four other live channels that provide outlets with HD-quality video. “Many broadcasters air these feeds live around the world,” McCrudden said. 

ABC will be spreading out staff over four control rooms and three studios. “We are being very careful with our COVID protocols,” Katie den Daas, executive producer at the streaming service ABC News Live, said. “We will have more control rooms than we’ve ever had, so we can be socially distant. We have added HEPA filters to our control rooms. Everyone wears a mask and some people in the control rooms will be getting the N95 masks of the sort used by medical professionals,” she said.

Said CBS’s Bohrman: “Everyone involved is being tested every day, everyone in the studio, everyone in the control room.” Network coverage will originate in a new high tech set at the ViacomCBS headquarters in Times Square, a first for the news division on election night. “The studio is zoned off to separate people and to make sure there is not any movement between the zones,” Bohrman said. “This is the biggest team effort in broadcast news, but we are finding ways to do it in a COVID-safe way.”

All of these efforts, executives said, will help to keep staff members safe as they report on the most unusual election of our lifetimes. Bohrman stressed the importance of overcoming obstacles and getting the story right—both for the networks and for the country. 

“We and all the broadcast networks know that we need to help restore the faith in the electoral system,” he said. “It has been put under a lot of doubt by a lot of people and we need to be open and above board and clear as to the numbers to provide viewers with information they can trust.”

“This is our night,” den Daas at ABC News Live said. “That night might drag on for a while, but that’s OK, because this is what we do. This is why we got into journalism: To make sure we are here when Americans need someone to bring them the big story.” 

NEW YORK—PBS NewsHour’s digital operations are now running with the help of Grabyo Studio and Producer platforms, according to a new press release.

The NewsHour digital team is now using Grabyo Studio to clip, edit and share videos across its online platform in real-time. Grabyo Producer, meanwhile will deliver live streams across digital channels.

PBS NewsHour has also begun using the Grabyo cloud video platform, which enables NewsHour producers to produce digital and social video from anywhere with a laptop and internet connection.

“Partnering with Grabyo has allowed us to deliver our trusted news programming to more people across the world,” said James Y. Williams, PBS NewsHour’s executive director of digital. “We aim to reach as broad an audience as possible and want our channels to be a go-to source for reliable news coverage. That means increasing access to content and speeding up publishing workflows without jeopardizing our reporting standards. Grabyo’s platform helps us do just that.”

For more information, visit www.grabyo.com.  

PHOENIX—Students seeking a degree in journalism will likely apply to one of the top schools in the discipline, and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University is one such school. The Cronkite School is the largest media outlet operated by a journalism school in the world, and its more than 2,000 students regularly lead the country in national competitions.

On Oct. 14, 2019, PBS NewsHour West, the new bureau of the “PBS NewsHour,” produced its first broadcast from the Cronkite School. In addition to producing news stories based in the western U.S., the Phoenix-based team updates “PBS NewsHour’s” 6 p.m. ET broadcast for West Coast audiences.

“We are excited to be partnering with the Cronkite School,” said Richard Coolidge, senior producer of PBS NewsHour West. “We currently share the studio and cameras with ‘Arizona Horizon,’ the daily Arizona PBS news program.”

During the past year, students in Cronkite News, the student-staffed, faculty-led news division of Arizona PBS, have produced in-depth packages for broadcast on the “PBS NewsHour.”

A LOT OF COMPETITION

Walter Cronkite once said, “I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.” As the associate dean of the Cronkite School, Mark Lodato leads undergraduate recruitment and retention efforts and supervises the school’s broadcast and sports curriculum. There is also a lot of competition among journalism schools to attract the best and brightest students.

“The relationship with ‘PBS NewsHour’ adds a new level of credibility in the marketplace that I think resonates with prospective students and their families,” Lodato said. “It’s important in today’s climate to have a visual representation of dedication to journalism and the core values of journalism, and that speaks directly to what ‘PBS NewsHour’ is and what we want to do at our school. It’s a nice fit for us, and one that helps us in multiple directions with different stakeholders.”

An environment and curriculum like the Cronkite School attracts the attention of professional broadcast executives looking to recruit students. Lodato is also the associate general manager for innovation and design of Arizona PBS, which has been broadcasting from the Cronkite School for more than 10 years.

In 2010, Arizona PBS launched “Cronkite News” daily, giving it the biggest reach of any university-based newscast in the world.

“Recently, we had a high-level NBC News network executive visiting, talking about new opportunities,” Lodato said. “Networks like ESPN and Fox News are regular visitors, as well as CNN.”

Recruiters from national media companies owning several local TV stations are also lining up to hire students as they graduate. “Companies like Tegna and Scripps and Sinclair and Nexstar, they all come through the Cronkite School at a regular clip,” Lodato said.

“What I love is that we’ve grown our curriculum over time so that students, under tremendous faculty supervision and interacting with professionals, are able to engage at a very high level in these various productions,” he added.

PROFESSIONALLY EQUIPPED

Lodato’s role includes the design and implementation of the broadcast studios used on the curricular side. “My goal is to help look for opportunities to bring these different pieces of our worlds together in a way that advances both the student experience and the end-user experience,” he said.

The Cronkite School has three professional control rooms and four fully equipped studios. “We have a lot of resources both for professional as well as student production and training,” Lodato said. “When we moved into this space in 2008 [we wanted] to ensure that we were thinking toward the future and wanted to be able to jump on opportunities for new partnerships like this one with PBS NewsHour, and equipment is a key piece of that.”

As part of the “news teaching hospital” design at the Cronkite School, students have a hands-on opportunity to work with broadcast equipment on daily newscasts, special events, and in key roles for the PBS NewsHour West production.

“After going through classes that provide training and academic credits, they can move on to paid positions as part of the Arizona PBS studio and control room crews,” said Ian MacSpadden, CTO, Arizona PBS, director of broadcast engineering and operations at the Cronkite School.

Cronkite students learn the broadcast business on the latest studio, control room, and newsroom systems available, making the transition from school to the real world a seamless transition, and also benefiting employers. All Cronkite and Arizona PBS control rooms have the same equipment compliment.

“The control rooms are centered on Sony MVS 8000-G production switchers, and supported by Sony BRAVIA 4K multiviewer monitors, ChyronHego Mosaic character generators, and EVS XT3 video playback systems,” MacSpadden said. “All are top-of-the-line systems you will find in many OB trucks and network control rooms.”

The studios have two sets of cameras. For training, Sony 1500 cameras with Fujinon 22x box lenses are used. The larger studios are outfitted with Sony’s new 4K/UHD 2/3-inch HDC-4300 cameras with Canon 27x box lenses, which ride upon Vinten Quattro studio pedestals, with Vinten heads and Autoscript IP prompters.

“In many cases, the stations the graduates will go to will not have this level of quality in their production systems,” MacSpadden said. “Many stations rely heavily on automation, so students who learn at Cronkite actually get to learn about each component in automation systems individually.”

INNOVATING WITH AR

It’s not unusual for Cronkite staff to be told by production equipment vendors and peers from other colleges that they have never seen such an impressive setup.

“That isn’t an accident,” MacSpadden said. “Cronkite is always innovating, so we try to stay ahead of all of the latest industry practices and trends.”

This year the team has begun to implement augmented reality into its weather segments and topical stories.

“We were just selected through a Google program to receive funding to develop an ‘Interactive Story Wall’ that will be used by Cronkite News broadcasters as a tool to tell data-driven stories through visualizations,” MacSpadden said.

For the fifth straight year, U.S. News & World Report recently ranked Arizona State number one on its “Most Innovative Schools” list, ahead of MIT and Stanford.

“Innovation is as common as sunscreen here,” MacSpadden said.

With more than 10 years since the Cronkite School moved into its state-of-the-art journalism education complex in downtown Phoenix, Lodato is reflective.

“What really strikes me is how our growth aligns with the mission of Arizona State University in that we want to be socially embedded, and that means taking responsibility for contributing to our community,” he said. In this case, that’s providing quality news and information and a wonderful education. “This partnership with PBS NewsHour is the latest manifestation of that, and it’s really a unique place to be and a unique place to work, and a unique place to learn. We’re just all very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish, and excited to see what’s next around the corner.”

WASHINGTON—Judy Woodruff, award-winning anchor and managing editor of “PBS NewsHour,” addressed the challenges of presenting a news program at a Government Video Expo keynote conversation with Paul McLane, managing director of content for Future US.

Woodruff was asked about maintaining integrity and credibility in today’s media climate where the perception of the American public is that the news is biased, fake or opinionated. She said the best way to combat that was “to do the best job we can to cover the news; to make sure we get our facts straight as best we can; to admit it when we make a mistake or when we find out some information we had wasn’t right; correct it as quickly as we can; and to be transparent about what we’re doing and how we’re gathering the news.

“We’ve got to be much better about separating out our own views as we share news on the air and in writing because we do run the risk of hurting our credibility. And in the end, all we really have is our credibility. If the people can’t trust what we’re reporting, if they can’t believe us, then we don’t really have value anymore. So that is the most precious thing we have and we have to guard that,” she said.

THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS

Woodruff discussed the difficulties of preparing for each day’s program and praised the “PBS NewsHour” team. How much time do you spend on a particular piece of news? Should that be a topic covered that day? It is a day-long debate that the staff works on together to figure it out. And a final program can be completely scrapped for late-breaking news.

“It’s an ongoing conversation about what matters,” said Woodruff. “Every day it’s a discussion. Do we run three minutes or 90 seconds? Did we run the story last night? Can we do it better tomorrow night when there might be a more important guest available? We’re including these taped pieces that we’ve worked on for weeks and weeks at the same time we’re covering breaking news.

It’s a constant judgment call and decisions are being made right up until the time to air, according to Woodruff. “Sometimes there is a complete show prepared to go on the air and some late news causes you to throw the whole show out and start over. You have to be flexible,” she said. “Fortunately, I work with an amazing, flexible team of smart people.”

Today’s viewers have so many choices in how they receive their news. As Woodruff pointed out, in addition to the traditional broadcast networks, consumers also get their news from cable channels and social media.

“What that has meant for us at ‘PBS NewsHour’ is that, yes, we are still a traditional news program,” Woodruff said, “but we are also a place that is constantly thinking about how we reach people today where they are… Therefore, we are working on streaming; we work with Apple News; we work with Facebook; we work with so many of the folks who are digitally so far ahead of where we were when we just did television.

“Frankly, [‘PBS NewsHour’ has] an audience that has exploded in size in the last few years due to the interest in news,” she continued. “We have that legacy audience that we are bringing along with us, but at the same time we are reaching people through so many other ways that people couldn’t even imagine a few years ago.”

GETTING YOUR START

Woodruff didn’t actually plan to go into journalism as a career, having spent time as an intern on Capitol Hill. When she was told that Washington didn’t take women seriously, her professor suggested she cover politics as a reporter. After some entry-level newsroom positions and a brief stint as a weather girl, she was offered the position as a reporter covering the Georgia State Capitol and Atlanta politics.

“I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” she said.

A teacher in the audience brought up the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Lab program, in which her students participate. The labs are classrooms, after-school programs and clubs that produce original reports about how national and global issues affect local communities.

“The Student Reporting Lab is something I’m so proud of,” said Woodruff. “It’s one of my proudest things about the ‘PBS NewsHour.’ We work with high schools across the country, I think in all 50 states now. What the students have come up with will just blow you away. They see things that the rest of us don’t see.”

Asked about advice she could share as they teach students to maintain quality and integrity, but still keep them excited about telling stories that matter, Woodruff stressed the importance of values.

“In terms of what you give them, I think you give them the ability to imagine and create the news in the way they are conceiving it. At the same time you teach them the important values; the importance of getting your facts right; of talking to all the people involved. And of course, talk to them about doing quality work in the technical side of it. You may have the greatest story in the world, but if you can’t convey it, if it isn’t lit properly or if there’s no sound, you’ve got a problem. Teaching them values at the same time you’re teaching them the skills, is all matters.”

WASHINGTON—If you’ve missed out on the past 30 years of PBS NewsHour you’re in luck, 32 years of broadcasts will be persevered and available online through the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The Library of Congress, public media producer WGBH and WETA, Washington D.C., will handle the digitization of PBS NewsHour programs from 1975 to 2007. Funding for the endeavor is coming from the Council on Library and Information Resources.

The project will digitize around 10,000 programs with more than 8,000 hours of interviews and reports on major American and foreign affair issues and events. Interviews feature every secretary of state since 1976, presidents, supreme court justices and members of congress, as well as a number of world leaders. The collection will also include coverage of election campaigns, African-American history, end of the Cold War, terrorism and other national issues.

With the addition of the PBS NewsHour collection, the AAPB website will have more than 20,000 programs as part of its online collection. The AAPB is a collaboration between WGBH and the Library of Congress.