Michael Depp
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Articles by Michael Depp
At Scripps’ WTXL, A Local TV News Revolution Is Taking Shape
Business Journalism TVN Plus TVN FOCUS ON JOURNALISM Oct 14, 2026 | Michael Depp Save this article for later! Login or create a Free Member Profile to bookmark it. E.W. Scripps is hoping to reinvent local news with a “reverse broadcasting” approach. Tallahassee’s WTXL is the canary in the coal mine. (Case Cain/WTXL) Please login or become a TVNewsCheck Plus Member to access this page. If you need further assistance please contact . Username or Email Password Remember me Lost your password?
AI, DMF, Storycentricity: An IBC Of Ideas Shifting Into Practice
AMSTERDAM — There’s a comforting placidity to the IBC conference here each year relative to its flashier Las Vegas cousin. The pacing is less frenetic, the conversations more expansive. Anxieties, where they are articulated, seem less existential for broadcasters who typically wake up each morning to some version of a doomsday narrative about their industry.
CNN CTO: News Must Be ‘Business In A Box’
AMSTERDAM — News organizations need to position themselves for constant multiplatform production and audiences with an increased appetite for personalization, CNN SVP and CTO Alex Charalambides told the IBC conference here on Sunday. Agentic AI will be an ever-growing tool in that process, he said.
AI Actor Tilly Norwood’s Universe Is Growing. Her Creator Says Get Used To It
AMSTERDAM — Tilly Norwood was trying her best not to radiate doom, but reassurances can be elusive when you don’t really exist. Norwood made headlines last year as the world’s first AI actor. When she (virtually) took the stage here to open the IBC conference alongside her creator, Particle 6 Founder-CEO Eline van der Velden, it was principally to assure the audience. I come in peace, Norwood offered. Or at least not to wholly obliterate Hollywood jobs and creativity.
New Magid Research At Local TV Strategies: Young News Consumers Crave Community
Elusive younger consumers may be more tuned in to the news than media organizations have feared, upcoming research from Magid suggests. The study, “Connecting With Younger Consumers in the Omnimedia Landscape,” is currently underway and due to be presented at TVNewsCheck’s Local TV Strategies conference on Oct. 21 at the NAB Show New York.
Tegna CEO Says Stability, Innovation Will Lead His Company Through Uncertainty
Business TVN PlusExecutive Session EXECUTIVE SESSION WITH PATRICK PAOLINI Sep 8, 2026 | Michael Depp Save this article for later! Login or create a Free Member Profile to bookmark it. New leader Patrick Paolini says he is empathetic to Tegna employees’ anxieties and believes an audience-centric, risk-tolerant and creative culture will power the company through its Nexstar merger limbo. This story is available to TVN+ subscribers only. Become a TVN+ subscriber or log in here.
Scripps’ Symson: Consolidation Alone Won’t Save Local TV
Business Journalism TVN Plus EXECUTIVE SESSION WITH ADAM SYMSON Jul 29, 2026 | Michael Depp Save this article for later! Login or create a Free Member Profile to bookmark it. E.W. Scripps President-CEO Adam Symson says financial engineering must be coupled with a reimagined content strategy for true market durability in an exclusive TVNewsCheck interview. This story is available to TVN+ subscribers only. Become a TVN+ subscriber or log in here.
At WPLG, Its Breakup With ABC Is A Bellwether For Local Broadcasting
Business Journalism Programming TVN PlusExecutive Session EXECUTIVE SESSION Jun 30, 2026 | Michael Depp Save this article for later! Login or create a Free Member Profile to bookmark it. Bert Medina, president and CEO of Miami’s WPLG, sees his station as drawing a roadmap for unaffiliated broadcasters where super serving local news and sports is the only path forward. This story is available to TVN+ subscribers only. Become a TVN+ subscriber or log in here.
When the world's at stake, go beyond the headlines.
In 2024, Paul Scharre and Michael Depp wrote, “Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Stability,” where they argued integrating artificial intelligence into the nuclear chain of command presents both opportunities and risks. Two years later, as AI becomes increasingly integrated into military systems and processes, we asked them to revisit their arguments.
Dentsu: AI Can ‘Bring Dollars Back To Local’ Linear
Business TVNewsCheck PlusExecutive Session EXECUTIVE SESSION May 4, 2026 | Michael Depp Save this article for later! Login or create a Free Member Profile to bookmark it. Dentsu’s Jennifer Hungerbuhler says agentic AI is making “dramatic changes” on the agency’s buying and go-to-market strategies when it comes to activating local TV in an exclusive TVNewsCheck interview. This story is available to TVN+ subscribers only. Become a TVN+ subscriber or log in here.
For Axios, YouTube Is Center Of A Video Push
Digital Journalism TVNewsCheck PlusExecutive Session EXECUTIVE SESSION Apr 7, 2026 | Michael Depp Save this article for later! Login or create a Free Member Profile to bookmark it. Jimmy Shelton, executive producer for Axios, says the brand known for its access and smart brevity strategy is forging a path from newsletters into video with YouTube as an essential conduit. This story is available to TVN+ subscribers only. Become a TVN+ subscriber or log in here.
Broadcast Tech Vendors Focus On Opportunities, Not Anxieties, At IBC
AMSTERDAM — Autumn set in early for this year’s IBC conference here, a chill riding on the back of blustery winds buffeting the RAI convention center. Inside, broadcast technology vendors were contending with their own winds of change. The industry’s turbulence has only deepened since the industry’s last major convocation at Las Vegas’ NAB Show in April, when U.S. tariffs put an already-jittery market into something more convulsive.
Devoncroft: Stalled Cloud, AI Surge Mark Broadcast Tech’s Next Stage
AMSTERDAM – AI’s paradigm-shattering potential is now at broadcast technology’s gates; it’s up to media companies to have productive, if difficult, conversations about how to embrace it if they’re serious about efficiencies, a leading analyst told the industry here on Thursday. Josh Stinehour, principal analyst at Devoncroft Partners, said AI is poised to make production simpler and less expensive and do nothing short of reinvent content creation processes.
For Tech Vendors, A ‘Rollercoaster’ Year That’s Still Twisting
AMSTERDAM – Nothing about 2025 has been easy for broadcast technology vendors, but the leaders of three of its largest companies told attendees of Thursday’s Devoncroft Summit here that they’re undaunted and even seeing growth despite challenges including tariffs and industry consolidation.
WDIV: ‘We All Need To Innovate In A Way That’s True To Our Brands’
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A CXO For A Local TV Company? Tegna Signals A Shift To A Consumer-Centric Era
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In Post-Peak TV Era, Streamers See The Future As Personalized
DENVER, Colo. — As Adam Lewinson would have it, the age of TV monoculture is now permanently in the rearview mirror. “We’ve gone from the era of peak TV to the era of personalized TV,” Lewinson, Tubi chief content officer, told an audience at the StreamTV Show here last week.
Is FAST A Gateway To TV For Content Creators?
As TV’s programming budgets shrink and multiplatform needs widen, content creators are emerging as the potential solution to both problems. A new FAST channel, Creator Television, offers one vision of how the TV/creator collaborative model might work a little closer to Earth than the MrBeast/Amazon-size deals that broke the ice between the two worlds last year.
Graham’s McLaughlin Adds KPRC VP-GM To Role
Sean McLaughlin, the veteran executive who joined Graham Media Group as its VP of news in April 2024, will also take over as VP and GM of KPRC, its Houston NBC affiliate, he said Wednesday. McLaughlin, who also writes the Reinventing the News column for TVNewsCheck, replaces Phil Lane, who left the station in April. McLaughlin will begin the new role July 1.
A TV Meteorologist Builds An AI Avatar That Creates Its Own Forecasts
Most TV meteorologists have well-honed routines logging on for the day: Check the latest data from the National Weather Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, start to prep the day’s forecasts and ready the graphics, maybe bang out an early post on social.
Tariffs: The Elephant In The Room At The NAB Show
LAS VEGAS — Conventions are often a bubble from the outside world, but at this week’s NAB Show, tariffs popped it. Salvos in President Trump’s trade war were continuously fired, and news alerts buzzed over attendees’ phones. Market uncertainties compounded. A nervous fissure widened. And while vendors said tariffs were seldom an explicit topic of conversations with their broadcaster customers gathered here, they colored everything.
Hughes, Koutsaris To Receive Technology Women To Watch Awards - TV News Check
Carys Hughes, principal engineer, video presentation and PQ display engineering at Sky, and Catherine Koutsaris, product manager at Matrox Video, will receive TVNewsCheck’s 2025 Technology Women to Watch awards during a presentation ceremony and reception at NAB Show in Las Vegas next month. Within just two years of entering the media and entertainment industry, Hughes marked a swift ascent from broadcast engineer to a key role on Sky’s emerging technologies design team.
News Has ‘Narrow Window’ To Make One-To-One Connections On Digital
Sam Guzik has a warning for TV news groups that have left their websites and apps gathering dust as they’ve channeled all their digital energy into streaming and FAST: Do so at the peril of losing one-to-one relationship prospects with audiences.
Guidance for the 2025 AI Action Summit in Paris
In September 2024, the French government, in collaboration with civil society partners, invited technical and policy experts to share their opinions on emerging technology issues relevant to the agenda of the 2025 AI Action Summit in Paris. The AI Action Summit is the third iteration of the AI Safety Summit, following the inaugural meeting hosted by the United Kingdom in 2023, which resulted in the Bletchley Declaration. The South Korean government hosted the second gathering in Seoul in 2024.
For CTV Advertising, A Hazy Path Forward
NEW YORK — Outside the TV of Tomorrow Show in Times Square here last week, the cloud shelf hung low and a steady rain shrouded everything into gauzy abstraction. Inside, where dozens of TV and CTV advertising buyers and sellers, vendors and analysts had gathered to lay out better pathways to revenue, things were no clearer. About the only thing the experts could agree on was that nothing in the complex world of multiplatform TV advertising was functioning nearly as well as it should be.
Scripps News Stymied By News-Averse Advertisers, CEO Says
Business People TVNewsCheck PlusExecutive Session EXECUTIVE SESSION Nov 13, 2024 | Michael Depp E.W. Scripps’ Adam Symson says polarization of both viewers and the ad community dealt critical blows to upstart Scripps News, a dynamic that will continue to challenge the TV news industry at large. This story is available to TVNewsCheck Plus subscribers only. Become a TVN Plus subscriber or log in here. Remember Me Business People TVNewsCheck PlusExecutive Session
Executive Session: Sinclair’s Chris Ripley On M&A, The 2025 Outlook And Gen AI
As the relationship between networks and affiliates simmers towards a boiling point, Chris Ripley sees the latter camp as being better leveraged than ever before. The president and CEO of Sinclair sees more equilibrium at the bargaining table, all down to how much money affiliates are bringing to it. That’s leverage that will be critical as reverse comp fees rise and retrans inches towards a plateau.
At IBC, Conversations Shift From Innovation To Efficiency
AMSTERDAM — It’s a funny thing doing business with an industry you know is in trouble: It tends to bring a fresh sense of frankness into conversations, a real let’s-get-to-the-bottom-line-edness to things. It prompts a snapping out of the airy abstract into the cold, hard reality of the market.
To Win the Chip War, the U.S. Must Prioritize Revolutionary Research
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has described the effort to boost the U.S. semiconductor industry as a technological moonshot — a mirror of NASA’s famed Apollo program. But this moonshot can only succeed if those behind it dare to dream big — and dream up revolutionary technologies.
The Future of Europe with Constanze Stelzenmüller and Nathalie Tocci
On April 25th, French President Emmanuel Macron gave a nearly two-hour-long speech at the Sorbonne that outlined his vision for Europe. In the context of major challenges such as Russia’s war against Ukraine, intensifying economic pressures, and more, Macron warned that “Europe today is mortal” and that “it can die” if Europeans fail to take united and decisive action.
A Blueprint for a Functional China-US Working Group on AI
Late last year U.S. President Joe Biden and China’s leader Xi Jinping met in San Francisco in an attempt to restabilize the relationship after a troubled year. The meeting ended without a concrete agreement on AI, despite rumors of one, but both sides committed to form a working group on AI in the future. Since then, little progress has been made in defining this working group. Even so, it carries the seeds of potential success.
A Blueprint for a Functional China-US Working Group on AI - Tribune Content Agency
Late last year U.S. President Joe Biden and China’s leader Xi Jinping met in San Francisco in an attempt to restabilize the relationship after a troubled year. The meeting ended without a concrete agreement on AI, despite rumors of one, but both sides committed to form a working group on AI in the future. Since then, little progress has been made in defining this working group. Even so, it carries the seeds of potential success.
At NAB Show, An Anxious Hunt For Efficiencies
LAS VEGAS — The broadcasters and vendors gathered here weren’t on the casino floor, but still they were wearing their poker faces. By all conventional thinking, the mood at this year’s NAB convention ought to have been buoyant, 2024 being both a political and an Olympics year. But looming behind whatever windfalls may ultimately come from both were visions of a much darker 2025.
To Govern AI, We Must Govern Compute
Computing power—compute, for short—is a key driver of artificial intelligence (AI) progress. Over the past 13 years, the amount of compute used to train leading AI systems has increased by a factor of 350 million. This has enabled the major AI advances that have recently gained global attention. However, compute is important not only for the progress of AI but also for its governance. Governments have taken notice.
Will France Be the AI Hub of Continental Europe?
France was the most ardent critic of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act in the later stages of the process, but EU-level regulations are not the only laws preventing the country from achieving its ambitions. France is well known for its strong worker protections, making it difficult for employers to fire underperforming workers or conduct layoffs for financial reasons. US tech firms doing business in France have also experienced this.
The Next Step in Military AI Multilateralism
As part of the deluge of new artificial intelligence (AI) policy documents surrounding the AI Safety Summit in November 2023, the United States released a long-awaited update to its Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy. The most momentous part of the update was the addition of new signatories that joined the United States in agreeing to the principles, including the U.K., Japan, Australia, Singapore, Libya, and the Dominican Republic.
The Next Step in Military AI Multilateralism
The political declaration is the United States’s attempt to set the tone for the debate on military AI and autonomy. It represents a positive American vision of international AI regulation in the face of numerous calls for an international regime. It also comes at the same time as renewed interest aimed at banning lethal autonomous weapons in the UN General Assembly and the resumption of the Group of Governmental Experts, which will discuss autonomous weapons in more detail.
TVNewsCheck Returns To Inboxes And Online
After a three-week pause, TVNewsCheck returns to inboxes and as a website fully stocked with continuously updated industry news on starting this morning. Our AM and PM newsletters restart their distribution today, and readers will also see the return of our Tech Thursday newsletter later this week.
New Sports Streamer Dials Up Anxieties For Local Broadcasters
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Talking TV: Laura Ling On Building A Very Local Streamer From Scratch
Hearst Television’s Very Local streaming service launched in Sept. 2021, but it has already produced over 500 original episodes across a raft of genres — destination shows, contests, docuseries and true crime among them. The trick has been shooting fast and on a lean budget, tapping local talent from non-TV media — think podcasters and social media influencers — as presenters to give its shows a fresh, and avowedly local, voice.
Talking TV: Putting An End To Drive-By Reporting At NY1
Annika Pergament has little patience for an old TV news habit: Report on a big story, show how it has upended someone’s life and then … just move on. That penchant for “drive-by reporting,” as she calls it, will find no quarter in The Rush Hour, the new daily afternoon newscast Pergament is anchoring at Spectrum News’ NY1. Instead, she aims to circle back to big stories and the lives intersected by them to see how it all turned for the key people involved.
Talking TV: How NBCU Local Is Strategizing On FAST Channels
There’s a palpable excitement among broadcasters about FAST channels, and there’s plenty to love about them for local TV newsrooms. For one thing, they work just like linear television merely transposed to a streaming environment, allowing newsrooms to tap into muscle memory to put content there. And for another, stations have near-limitless latitude in programming FAST channels, not having to navigate around network programming or other linear guardrails.
Talking TV: News Literacy Project Targets A Threat To Democracy
National News Literacy Week arrives Jan. 22, and it has never been more urgently needed. Social media channels are flooded with mis- and disinformation. Justified or not, growing swaths of the electorate harbor sweeping distrust of TV news. The News Literacy Project, which sponsors the week’s events, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization dedicated to promoting news literacy as a foundational component of a healthy democracy.
Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Stability
Policymakers around the world are grappling with the new opportunities and dangers that artificial intelligence presents. Of all the effects that AI can have on the world, among the most consequential would be integrating it into the command and control for nuclear weapons. Improperly used, AI in nuclear operations could have world-ending effects.
Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Stability
Policymakers around the world are grappling with the new opportunities and dangers that artificial intelligence presents. Of all the effects that AI can have on the world, among the most consequential would be integrating it into the command and control for nuclear weapons. Improperly used, AI in nuclear operations could have world-ending effects.
Talking TV: RTDNA’s Shelley On ‘Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime’ For Local TV News
RTDNA’s President and CEO Dan Shelley says there’s no question that this year’s presidential election will be the most important in a lifetime, and for local TV news, its credibility will be on trial. Having surveyed 2,000 news consumers this past fall, RTDNA found trust eroding, particularly when it comes to political coverage.
Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Stability
This article was originally published by War on the Rocks. Policymakers around the world are grappling with the new opportunities and dangers that artificial intelligence presents. Of all the effects that AI can have on the world, among the most consequential would be integrating it into the command and control for nuclear weapons. Improperly used, AI in nuclear operations could have world-ending effects.
Talking TV: NAB’s LeGeyt ‘Very Disappointed’ In FCC’s Ownership Decision
The FCC’s decision to reaffirm ownership regulations for broadcasters late last month was the Christmas gift no station group wanted, even if it didn’t come as much of a surprise to any of them. For NAB, there’s no other way to see the move than as a blow, and it’s one from which the organization must now pick itself up, dust itself off and regroup for next steps.
Best Of Talking TV: When Is NextGen TV Revenue Coming?
ATSC 3.0’s skeptics — and they are many — will argue that the new broadcast standard and its nationwide implementation are too complex, too fraught with unwranglable forces and facing too much consumer indifference and ignorance to ever become a viable revenue stream for broadcasters. To which John Hane says pshaw.
Talking TV: Ghosts Of TV’s Christmas Past And Future In 2024
Broadcast TV saw its share of headwinds in 2023 with nary a regulatory lifeline in sight from the FCC. As it looks ahead to a lucrative election year in 2024 and a burgeoning atmosphere for sports rights opportunities, it will also face formidable challenges, among them what to do about generative AI and how to handle what may be one of the most fraught, polemicized elections in U.S. history.
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