As the world of broadcast TV news moves into the AI era, station groups like Scripps are using the technology not only to help improve news coverage and viewer engagement, but also to reform and enhance how reporters and anchors spend their days—focusing on new workflows and adapting to how consumers stay informed.
That was the impetus behind Scripps Media’s announcement several weeks ago that it would adopt a “digital-first” approach to news coverage, in which it would prioritize streaming breaking news rather than waiting for scheduled daily newscasts. This approach reflects the reality of how consumers get their news—a development that is long overdue, according to Dean Littleton. Littleton recently became president of media for Scripps, combining leadership of the company’s enterprise television and broadcast operations in a newly created role.
The company plans to roll out its new process to a dozen of its smaller markets, with plans to increase deployment to all markets over time.
'We've Got to Change Our Business'
The changes were revealed at the same time the station group announced that 268 positions in its news departments were being eliminated. Littleton says Scripps had to make these changes, noting that core revenue across its approximately 60 local broadcast TV stations in more than 40 markets and 22 states is down 30%–50% from 20 years ago. The station group announced a nearly 5.4% drop in core revenue in its latest fiscal quarter, compared to the same quarter a year ago.
“A year ago we sat down and said, ‘We've got to change our business,’” Littleton told TV Tech. “So we took a step back and said, ‘What is our true north?’ And our true north is journalism. It's the journalism that will sustain us.
“So we looked at all of our processes and completely set about reinventing all of them with a focus on the consumer and how they consume content across broadcast, digital, streaming, and social platforms.”
Littleton says today’s news production process isn’t all that different than what it was 30 years ago and that, despite past promises to focus more on digital and streaming, broadcasters were not moving forward fast enough.
“I remember sitting in these meetings talking about strategy, and as much as we would walk out of those meetings and all say, ‘We're digital-first,’ we'd go right back to working on our 5:00, 6:00, or 10:00 newscast,” he said. “Meanwhile, the consumer left the party in large part, and that's been a mistake. I think we lost sight of the consumer.”
Littleton also wanted to move beyond the walled garden of a station news “app,” calling that approach “overly simplistic.”
He says Scripps needs to go where consumers are when it comes to news—giving them access to “journalism that's delivered on the platforms of their choosing, in formats native to that platform, and delivered on a schedule that fits the consumer's schedule.”
We are essentially reallocating resources from the production of newscasts to the development of journalism.
Littleton emphasizes that Scripps is increasing its focus on local news despite the recent layoffs by tapping into new AI processes that automate more of the production process.
“We are essentially reallocating resources from the production of newscasts to the development of journalism,” he said. “[We’re] moving resources from the process of creating the traditional newscast, and then investing in resources to create original reporting in our markets.”
Littleton says he wants to increase the number of reporters in local markets and believes Scripps will expand its local coverage rather than reduce it, as some critics have claimed.
“We'll see more reporters and MMJs, not fewer, with them having geographic beats so that they build expertise, and their stories are told with relevance and context in the communities that they serve,” he said. “And these communities that they're serving often are communities that have been 'news deserts' up until the point that we assigned a reporter.”
“At the end of this process, we'll have more MMJs and reporters overall than what we have today,” Littleton added.
Scripps has developed a new workflow to support its digital-first approach, according to Littleton.
“We've invented a whole new process for operating our newsrooms, where a story gets completed, and the story immediately goes into the live stream,” he said. “The technology that we've built constantly ‘stacks’ and ‘restacks’ the shows on the live stream, and the stories are prioritized based on tags that human beings assign to those stories, so the technology knows how to prioritize the content.
“Therefore, my experience as a consumer watching that live stream at 2:00 in the afternoon is different than it would have been at 1:00, because as new content has moved into the stream, the technology ‘restacked’ it based on priorities that human beings gave it,” Littleton added.
New Role: 'Executive Reporter'
Along with more automated production processes, Littleton also says the management of how news is handled is changing, with the creation of a new “executive reporter” role in each newsroom.
“This person leads the reporting resources inside each newsroom, they have a reporting background, and so their goal is to help improve the storytelling and the journalism, and their focus is on that all day long,” he said. “So we've had to rethink how management works in our newsrooms to support what is an entirely new workflow and process inside our buildings.”
To put the power of AI behind its new news workflow, Scripps developed its own news production platform based on Microsoft Copilot, according to Christina Hartman, vice president of emerging technology operations at Scripps.
Scripps’ “Stacker” platform creates templates based on a producer's focus—whether it be news, weather, business, or sports—and connects those subjects to local community concerns so news reports better reflect local issues.
“Stacker is the platform we built that is responsive to a template that a producer builds, as a reflection of the content strategy of the newsroom, whether it’s heavy on weather, leading with community connection stories, etc.,” she said. “The producer sets the template, and then Stacker as a platform will read what stories we have available and meet the criteria for slotting in the platform, and then it produces a draft or suggested rundown based on that daypart's template.
“It allows the producer to intuitively move stories around if they don't like the suggested order, or if they want to change some of the timing content, they could do that really easily through the platform,” Hartman added.
Better Use of Time
Hartman reiterated Littleton’s assessment of the need to use AI to free up a reporter’s time during the day.
“The amount of time that our reporters have been able to spend being in the field versus doing the shooting, editing, and versioning for social media and the web—the time spent actually with news gathering has shrunk, and the day has gotten longer,” she said. “We remind people that more and more of your day is going to things that aren't why you got into this business.”
Given the level of automation now involved in news production, Hartman stressed that everything aired is still approved by humans.
“Nothing is published or goes to air without human review and affirmative approval, and everything that we publish or take to air is originally reported, substantively written, and reviewed and approved by a human journalist,” she said. “What we have brought AI in to assist with are really the production components: the versioning, the metadata tagging, the sort of rough-cut edit, and the layout of the rundown in a suggested capacity. So from a guardrails point of view, it's structurally built into the process.”
As Scripp’s chief advocate for AI development within the company, Hartman shares her initial skepticism about AI, noting that when ChatGPT was launched nearly three years ago, her first thought was, ‘how do I keep this as far away from our newsroom as possible?’
“It's why I proposed forming AI governance,” she said. “So we started from sort of a ‘protective condition.’” she said. “What I found though is that if I was writing the guardrail and the rules around use of AI, I better know what I'm doing and be using it so that I can understand what the traps and the and the pitfalls were.”
Hartman responded to criticisms that Scripps is using AI as an easy way out to justify downsizing its news staffs.
“If this were purely a financial exercise, there are many other models that that I will tell you candidly would have been so much easier to pursue,” she said. “We could have dripped down to five-minute newscasts. We could have killed reporting and reporting roles, and maintained the facade of a newscast where you have talent that isn't even local, putting on the appearance of a local broadcast. But none of those alternatives would be true to Scripps’ value and Scripps’ promise to its communities.”
With a digital-first approach, a news story is not a finished product, but rather an evolving element that Littleton believes can help make viewers part of the narrative.
“What we are now seeing our newsrooms do with this process where you create a story and you immediately upload it and it goes into the stream, that happens throughout the day so viewers get to go along with the reporter as they develop a story,” he said. “[As the reporter] walks out of the newsroom, they record video that explains what their story is for the day, and as that story gets updated, those videos are created, and they go into the stream also. So the person watching at home gets to go along with the reporter as the story develops throughout the day.”
The fact that news workflow is being built around AI is not new, but technical changes are just one factor in the decision to the shift, according to Hartman, who characterized the new direction as “as much cultural as it is technological.”
