This week, E.W. Scripps Company announced it was establishing a leadership team to guide the acceleration of its artificial intelligence strategy.
"Our goal is to quickly and responsibly transform our organization into a nimble environment that fosters innovation at all levels, inspiring revenue growth, efficient workflows and new product development," Laura Tomlin, Scripps chief transformation officer, said. "AI will play a critical role in reshaping our operating systems and company culture."
Scripps owns Texas stations in Waco-Temple-Killeen-Bryan/College Station and Corpus Christi.
Another prominent Texas television station owner, TEGNA, is already working on an AI workflow.
In October, at TVNewsCheck’s Local TV Strategies panel, Ian Hill, director of digital audience development at Tegna, demonstrated Project Spotlight, a unified inbox powered by AI.
"Our journalists are spending up to two hours a day just looking for stories," Hill said. "Through our research, we found that 90% of the emails that come into our newsroom are irrelevant. As we get more confident in the information provided by AI, this is going to be a lot easier and a lot more reliable, and it’s going to save our journalists significant time."
Hill also talked about the upcoming Tegna GPT, an AI chatbot integrated directly into its content management system.
"We can put an AI chat into our CMS and allow our journalists to ask questions of past stories, to ask for headline help," Hill said.
At the same conference, Rafi Mamalian, AVP and head of Innovation Lab at Sinclair, who also owns many Texas stations, said AI will help take live feeds and translate the contents into different languages.
As much as corporate owners believe AI will enhance TV workflows, we have already seen its dangers.
Then, there is the aspect of AI replacing humans, as featured in the above video. While some digital media operations will probably soon use virtual anchors, I can't imagine that every TV company will adopt this approach, especially in the local broadcasting world.
That said, the promised AI efficiency combined with the declining broadcasting audience will not mean AI will stop TV staff cutting anytime soon.
"I’d love to say corporate groups are developing AI primarily to create better newscasts and digital products, but buffeted by industry headwinds and facing what could be a disastrous 2025, several owners have already begun the unpleasant process of cutting staff," wrote TVNewsCheck columnist Hank Price. "That pressure to reduce the number of employees means the first corporate goal for AI will be newsroom efficiency."
Price writes in the same column that local news directors, not corporate types, should be responsible for implementing AI processes since they are the ones in the news trenches.
If you want to see how artificial intelligence is predicted to operate in a TV newsroom, read Price's article from October, "AI Will Change Everything About Local TV News."
One would assume AI will be involved in many aspects of the news business, from news to weather. Earlier this year, I asked meteorologist Tim Heller of Heller Weather about the use of AI in forecasting.
"I already have some clients using AI to help summarize data and simplify the weather story of the day into 3-4 essential messages," Heller told mikemcguff.com. "Many broadcast meteorologists are naturally skeptical of artificial intelligence, but I think AI must become part of the workflow if we’re going to successfully manage the production and distribution of weather content on every broadcast and digital platform. I envision a future when AI can also help meteorologists manage, analyze, and interpret the constant flow of weather data."
It's just starting, folks. Strap in for the ride. And in addition to working on storytelling and interviewing abilities, add prompting to that list.
