WASHINGTON D.C.—WJLA, Sinclair Broadcast Group’s flagship TV station in the nation’s capital, has revamped its Studio A news studio with lighting solutions from Brightline.

The project is the latest in a line of more than 100 such renovations at various Sinclair stations around the country involving the broadcaster and the company, Brightline said.

“Everything we learn from previous stations carries into the next,” said Sam Cercone, managing partner at Brightline. “It’s a very fluid way of working, with each station redesign further fine-tuning [the] approach. I’ve learned and enjoyed so much working with my colleagues at Sinclair. The latest evidence is our work at WJLA, of which we’re extremely proud.”

The WJLA studio redesign was sweeping. The station deployed a full Brightline fixture package. The news set is the new home for “7News,” “Good Morning Washington” and “Fed Government Today.”

In addition to the new Brightline lighting system, LED monitors weave in and around key areas of the set. The news desk has a digital screen displaying the 7News logo, while two pillars on each side of the desk serve as video walls with a curved panel behind the anchors. The setup also relies on XYZ axis pedestals and robotic cameras, Brightline said.

Sinclair handled everything from concept through installation, including the scenic design, resulting in a control and efficient consistency that contributed to the project’s success, Brightline said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

Sinclair has posted a time-lapse video of the renovation on YouTube.

WASHINGTON—Two local television stations in the nation’s capital will conduct an eight week trial of ATSC 3.0’s advanced emergency warning capabilities, including text-based alerts and rich media, and the workflow needed to support the alerts, said Lane Michaelsen, Group News director at the Sinclair Broadcast Group during a June 23 webinar on NextGen TV alerting. 

WJLA, Sinclair’s ABC affiliate, and WTTG, the Fox O&O, in Washington, D.C., will take part in the trial. As of this moment, no start date has been identified, he said.

“We’ve spoken to the people there [at WTTG], and we’ve obviously spoken to the people at Sinclair to create a test environment so we can create a workflow that we can distribute to our partners—a workflow that we know works,” said Michaelsen.

The trial will occur in four two-week blocks. During the first two weeks, the stations will conduct four scheduled tests per day in four different time periods. These will be text-only alerts. “The idea here is that we hit multiple people on multiple schedules,” he said.

The second two-week block will see the addition of real alerts to the scheduled tests during four different time periods. Once again, these tests will be text-only, said Michaelsen.

The third two-week block will include daily scheduled and real alerts during the four time periods. They will consist of text and limited media. The last two weeks of the trial will see the addition of rich media, including maps and video, he said.

Michaelsen made his presentation during “NextGen TV 201: Advanced Emergency Alerting, News and Information,” a webinar presented by the National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) in partnership with the Advanced Warning and Response Network (AWARN) Alliance.

Other speakers included John Lawson, president of Convergence Services and executive director of the AWARN Alliance, Madeleine Noland, president of ATSC, and Jim DeChant, vice president of Technology at News-Press & Gazette. 

Michaelsen discussed the efforts of Sinclair to develop a next-gen emergency alerting workflow. “We want the system to interact with current systems in our newsrooms … because not every single newsroom works on the Avid iNews system, not every newsroom edits with the same platform,” he said.

The goal for the workflow is to not add significantly to the existing workload of producers and reporters. Michaelsen envisions taking the work that is already being done and allowing users to drag and drop it onto a platform that supports advanced emergency alerting. 

Above all, Michaelsen said advanced emergency alerting must put viewers first, giving them the ability to limit alerts to those that are of interest.

“So many alerts come across the producer’s desk every day,” said Michaelsen, “but we want to back up because ultimately this is really about the user—the person sitting at home or the person using their mobile device.”

“We want to make sure that in a sense we are almost partnering with them and not necessarily disrupting their lives,” he said.

Sinclair has begun working with the designers of smart TVs to help them guide consumers through a menu of available warnings as they set up their NextGen TVs. Consumers not only will be able to select the types of alerts, such as tornado warning or flash flood warning, they wish to see but also the level of warnings they wish to see—warning versus watch, for instance. 

The support for location services in NextGen TV will also play an important part in preventing viewers from being bombarded with alerts. “Right now in most television environments, we send out a flood warning, and it doesn’t affect about 95% of the people that get it. It just irritates them,” he said.

For public broadcasters without newsrooms, Michaelsen said there will be opportunities to partner with news-producing broadcasters that support advanced alerting. “These [advanced alerts] would all be pre-programmed so it doesn’t even require anyone to be at your station. It will just pass through,” he said.

NEW BERN, N.C. –Hurricane Florence may have flooded the studios of WCTI, the Sinclair Broadcast Group-owned ABC affiliate in New Bern, N.C., and knocked local power out, but that didn’t keep the station from restoring service to its viewers within a day and a half.

“We were forced to evacuate at WCTI at 8 o’clock on that Thursday night [Sept. 13],” recalls Sinclair SVP of News Scott Livingston. “Then we switched into our Myrtle Beach feed…. Then we went dark due to the storm.”

However, before the station went dark, viewers were advised to continue tracking the storm on the WCTI website and social media pages. Traffic to the destinations spiked when the station went off air, says Livingston.

Broadcasters throughout the Carolinas, eastern Georgia and Virginia began preparing a week or more before what was once a Category 4 hurricane made landfall. For Sinclair, preparations included prepositioning satellite trucks at the transmitter sites of its stations threatened by Hurricane Florence.

In the case of WCTI, Sinclair dispatched a satellite truck from WPEC, its CBS affiliate in West Palm Beach, Fla., along with a satellite truck operator, operations personnel and a group news director, to the station’s transmitter site –a precautionary step to restore television if the studio was affected, he says.

By time the intensity of the storm had subsided in New Bern and power was restored on Sept. 15, the WPEC crew was making final preparations to resume over-the-air coverage to New Bern viewers with the help of Sinclair’s Hurricane Florence mothership at WJLA in Washington, D.C., its digital desk and sister stations around the region, says Livingston.

“The [the crew from WPEC] made it out to the truck around 10:30 [a.m.] on Saturday morning,” he says. “They put the dish up, and we were transmitting around 11:45 [a.m.] and then went wall-to-wall till 6 o’clock.”

As WJLA was wrapping up 30 hours of continuous coverage of the storm, which the station streamed and made available as a backup to Sinclair stations affected by the storm, it began producing coverage for viewers in New Bern. That special feed was beamed from D.C. to the WPEC satellite truck in New Bern and broadcast by WCTI.

“We had a triple box,” says Livingston. “The big box had reports from the field crews of WCIV [contributed via SNG feeds to D.C. from two other Sinclair satellite trucks]. We had radar in another of the boxes, and in the third box live pictures from sister stations and other sources because on Saturday the storm was still impacting South Carolina.”

While Livingston describes the triple box as “fairly simple television,” he says the important thing was that WCTI “was where it was happening—at the intersection of news, literally.”

WJLA remotely produced New Bern newscasts all day on Saturday, Sept. 15, as well WCTI’s evening newscast the next day, its morning show on Sept. 17 and newscasts throughout the week.

Since late last week, WCTI’s newsroom has begun operating out of a trailer Sinclair sent to the station, says Livingston. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, the station’s newsroom took up temporary residence at a local community college.

Hurricane Florence flooded WCTI’s studios with six to eight inches of water, requiring carpet to be ripped out, and sheet rock and damaged equipment to be replaced.

While the station sustained damage, there was no loss of life or injury to station personnel, a silver lining for which everyone involved with Sinclair is grateful, he says.

Although it’s never desirable to get hit directly by a storm like Hurricane Florence, the event gave the station’s news department and Sinclair the opportunity to prove its mettle.

“It was certainly a defining moment for the station and a defining moment for our news organization to be able to pull off what we did,” says Livingston. “I couldn’t be prouder.