NAB Show NY: Great Programming, Modest Turnout, and the Latest Take on AI in the Newsroom
At NAB Show NY, Local TV Strategies hosted a series of excellent panels last week that left me with as many questions as answers on the topic of how AI will impact our industry. Do media buyers care about the content? Will broadcasters lean more toward building software than buying it from the show’s exhibitors? And just how far have AI editing tools come?
Even in a record strong year for TV bolstered by the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics, the World Cup and a midterm election that has seen inventory sold out across entire states, the uncertainty facing the television business seems as high as ever.
Maybe that’s why the Local TV Strategies sessions were packed in the morning despite an overall audience level that was anemic at best on the show floor, despite foot traffic from a career fair and multiple open stages running content both days.
Here are some of the most notable quotes from three sessions: a morning panel of media buyers and sellers, an afternoon panel of streaming executives and a panel on AI roadmaps for station groups.
A buying process that "is killing us"
Tracy Chavez, executive vice president and managing director of local investment operations at Publicis Media, was the lone agency buyer on the morning panel. She said buying local TV program by program is costing the business clients.
"I think that's where we're killing ourselves," Chavez said. "We are spending so much time looking at every independent program one by one by one, forecasting with measurement that's broken and cracked in so many ways. Outside of sports and specials and tentpoles, there's not a lot of variance between the actual ratings or the deliveries anymore. The digital guys don't care about program-level buying, and the clients are starting to pull further and further back. The clients are not going to sit around much longer and be interested in this format if we don't change how it's facilitated."
Chavez said Publicis will move its local measurement to Comscore and run both platforms during the transition.
Streaming: "It's just the news team"
Mike Braun, senior operating officer and chief digital officer at Gray Media, said Gray streams local content around the clock in every market and no longer treats streaming as a separate staff.
"There's this misconception that someone does a linear side and then this group over here in the newsroom does a streaming side," Braun said. "We look at it differently and say, you're on the content side. Does it matter if the end consumer is watching that big screen in their living room or on the bus going to work on their phone? It's no longer the digital team, the linear team. It's just the news team."
Braun said shelf space on free ad-supported streaming platforms is limited and not every partner is equal, so Gray has become more selective about where it places channels. Sahand Sepehrnia, executive vice president of digital content strategy and business at CBS News, Stations, Entertainment and Sports, said the platforms already hold the leverage.
"These OEMs on the FAST platforms have disintermediated the experience," Sephernia said. "They've taken over the starting experience in the same way that Google did 15 years ago, in the same way that LLMs are today. We all put our content on the platforms, because these guys have the audience. If they don't watch CBS, they'll watch NBC. At this point we've all succumbed to giving a little bit of the power to the FAST platforms. It's a great monetization opportunity, but it's already past the point of no return."
Evan Rutchik, president of Viamedia, put streaming revenue "years, not months" from its potential. By his figures, streaming holds about half of viewing time and takes roughly 20% of local revenue.
AI: buy first, build what the market lacks
The AI panel spent its first segment on whether station groups should build their own tools. Christina Hartman, vice president of emerging technology operations at The E.W. Scripps Co., whose group has built more than most, said the default is still to buy.
"You will think that it's free to build with your internal resources, but where things really get serious is once you launch and what you built is in the hands of users. They have to be supported and walked through and explained to, repeatedly. The advantage of buying a commodity solution the market has already solved for is that you're tapping into support and maintenance resources where the cost is amortized across all of their customers. If you're building it yourself, that cost is only yours."
Scripps built when it had to. Hartman said News Desk, the company's in-house platform, began as a story-planning tool and now runs the pre-publication pipeline from pitch to script review to versioning for the web and vertical video.
"All we've really done over the last decade is add more places for reporters to go and deposit versions of their work. If we are introducing technology to make their lives better, we really need to make their lives better, by putting it all in one place and not adding yet another tab."
Michael Rosellini, senior vice president of digital services at Hearst Television, warned against building everything because the tools now allow it.
"There tends to be this initial, 'Oh, we could just build everything,' because we have an automation pipeline on Cursor or Claude. I have to step back and say, do we do any level of analysis? These SaaS companies that are experts at certain functionality have access to all the same AI tooling that we do. You shouldn't be building everything just because you could vibe-code it."
Rosellini's measurable result is in programmatic sales. Hearst ran a large set of ad impressions through a large language model to test why news pages earn less than non-news pages. Keyword-based brand-safety tools had flagged the pages. The model judged most of them safe.
"Historically the brand-safety tech has been very keyword-based," said Rosellini. "It looks for the density of keywords around content, and thus it's classified as not brand-safe and you're not going to get a bid back. The content might be flagged as crime, but in reality the content is uplifting. There's a chunk of your inventory today that isn't monetizing when it should be. We as an industry need to push for greater use of AI solutions here and work with the holding companies to embrace this."
Erik Smith, vice president of news operations and technology at Fox Television Stations, said Fox builds as much as it can to keep control of its environment, and that individual stations are doing the building. The Atlanta station's meteorologists built a weather dashboard for the newsroom. The Seattle station built a multiviewer for Fox Local, the group's streaming channels.
"We've had multiviewers forever, right?" Smith asked. "But they can be expensive, as we all know, and it's hard to get them where you want them to be with the content you want. The nice thing about this is it's a single place where all of our Fox Local CTV apps, which is the same thing as our FAST channel streams, can be seen. And not only can we all see what the others are doing, but it's pulling data on the back end. We're seeing concurrency, we're seeing the information coming in. So it's real time: OK, I see what's on screen, and I can see whether it's engaging with audiences or not."
Smith said the same team built a distribution tool that will replace a vendor product that "frankly doesn't work very well." On the broader shift: "We really look at ourselves now as 24/7 content producers, and specifically live. We talk less about shows now and much more about constantly feeding all of our platforms."
On disclosure, Smith said: "Human in the loop on everything. We aren't publishing anything anywhere without a human seeing it, whether AI touched it or not." Hartman's rule at Scripps is the same in substance: label a script or article the audience sees, skip process work such as metadata and headlines.
Asked what AI capability will be mainstream in station groups within a year, Hartman said she hopes the conversation moves from efficiency to new products and services, which she called "the next competitive battleground." Smith predicted AI in production control, graphics and automation systems within 12 months.
Sources
Quotes come from machine transcriptions of audio recordings of the three sessions, lightly edited for filler words and obvious mis-hearings. Names and titles were checked against the session listings.
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