The TV News journey from TV to multi-platform, and from linear broadcasting to non-linear digital distribution, shows how technology, product and organisational design influence the space we use.

As businesses the world over are rethinking how people use space to work nowadays, the history of TV News has some useful pointers, since it was one of the first industries to be digitally disrupted.

I spent about 18 years of my career in newsrooms in the UK (ITN & Sky) and the US (NBC). The young people who just got their A-Level results weren’t even born when I first started as the overnight General Assistant (runner) in a brand new newsroom for an upstart 5 News at ITN which shredded the old rule book back in 1997.

It all sounds prehistoric now, but it was bursting with innovation at the time - and it was the beginning of two decades of change in consumption, process and production which helps us understand the shape of work and how we use space to do it, both now and in the future.

So let me take you through the ages of media as I experienced it to explore how our work spaces adapted to keep pace with changes in media consumption and developing production technology:

Analogue

Consumption:

The internet was Ask Jeeves & Netscape, and was by no means mainstream. There was no video on-demand TV. Continuous rolling news was only ten years old in the UK. Channel 5 launched in 1997 was the only terrestrial channel to broadcast hourly updates.

Production:

Editing video was very much a linear process: it could take up to 4 mins to rewind a 90-minute tape - there was no jumping back to the beginning. If you wanted to insert a shot, you’d have to re-lay all the shots after it.

Similarly studio equipment was big: studio cameras were my size (6’4”), the control room was like the deck of the Starship Enterprise. Video shot on location was sent back to the newsroom by satellite trucks.

5 News was the first national TV news team to break the conventional division of labour between technical and editorial staff, but elsewhere you were either a journo or a techie.

Space:

It was all about big physical infrastructure: studios, newsrooms, the Main Control Room, the record & replay area where incoming material was recorded to tape, and edited reports were played out, and of course miles and miles of shelving to store all the tapes! 

There were technical areas and editorial areas - except at 5 News, which filmed inside the newsroom. Even the correspondent outposts in other cities and countries were mini versions of HQ, with their own satellite dish, and edit suite.

Our space had to accommodate bulky equipment and our working geography was dictated by the technology of the time.

Early Digital

Consumption:

Sky+ launched in 2001 which enabled viewers to pause, rewind and record live TV- no more programming the VCR!

A few years after the first dot com bubble burst, news websites were gaining traction. YouTube launched in 2006, and a year later 2007 Netflix pivoted from its DVD rental service to streaming media.

Production:

I edited our evening report from the 1999 Orange Order parade in Northern Ireland from a DVC Laptop edit machine in the back of a people carrier. Before then an ‘edit pack’ or mobile edit suite was 3 big flight cases, this piece of kit sat on my lap, but it wasn’t a laptop as we know it.

In 2000, 5 News started using a non-linear editing system. Timeline editing is a familiar to anyone who uses iMovie or GarageBand, but in those days being able to start playing back our opening headline sequence while we were still recording it was mind-blowing. Cameras shrank to the size of a medium sized handycam with the mini DV tape format.

In 2001 at Sky News we used videophones to get live pictures from our correspondents on the front line in Afghanistan.

By 2005 we producers were editing our own video from our desktops by accessing files on a server, and I was cutting the pictures at my desk to go with the headlines I had just written just 3 minutes before going on air, Live at Five.

By 2006 we were able to access the newsroom software INews through a clunky VPN with a key fob code generator, which meant my colleague Jeremy Thompson could read autocue from Thailand for the coverage of the Boxing Day Tsunami, and the online team could make simple edits to web stories.

Space:

Gone was the delineation between technical and editorial workspaces. My first move as Exec Producer of skynews.com in 2006 was to bring the web team onto the same floor as the TV team. We all needed to be in the same room if we were to be ‘first for breaking news’ on TV and the web at the same time. (Remember this was years before Slack!) Newsrooms were like trading floors or fish markets: there was shouting, eye contact, and hand gestures, so physical proximity was important to teams still.

Equipment got smaller and more portable, tapes gave way to digital storage, and work space become less constrained by equipment, and more adaptable to changing roles.

Yet at the same time, more of the production process could be completed outside the office on location. War correspondents could show live video from places a sat truck couldn’t reach.

Dual Platform

Consumption:

With the launches of the iPhone (2006) and iPad (2009), the multi-platform era was in full swing. Our audience not only consumed news on all kinds of platforms, they helped us make it day in, day out. The early ‘User Generated Content’ projects which won us Innovation awards in 2007 soon became old hat. And if your news service wasn’t online and continuous you either needed to get there quick, or plough a different furrow (think the Economist).

Production:

In 2007, one of our reporters used his Blackberry to live blog from a protest at Heathrow sending text to Twitter and pictures to Flickr. And by 2011, ITV News had transformed from a service focused on single TV bulletins to one which published news continuously, with reporters in the regions filing text and video snippets online on stories throughout the day.

But at core, news services were publishing broadly the same content to the same audience on different platforms, with a centralised content management system. Content creators could access a whole news organisation’s content from their desktop, and use it on either TV or online. Social platforms were distribution mechanisms for web content: Twitter linked to web articles, even Facebook Instant Articles launched in 2015 was Zuckerberg’s answer to Google’s AMP (Accelerated mobile pages).

‘Dual platform’ pushed the imperative for better online collaboration. Slack launched in 2013 which was the inspiration for us at NBC to create a newsroom collaboration tool, NewsConnect, which helped journalists from 2 network TV shows, 2 cable channels and 3 web properties to collaborate on stories, at a story-centric level as we called it, rather than writing similar stories in silos.

Space:

With digital advances applied not just to consumer-facing platforms but work tools, collaboration started going digital, meaning offices were connected, and teams were connected regardless of the office they sit in.

To what extent work space transcended bricks and mortar was determined by culture, which, as a behavioural phenomenon, moves at a different pace to technology.

In some places, the old teams stuck together, and old hierarchies formed from old ways of working persisted; many VPs still liked their offices. For others, you could work wherever you had your laptop and an internet connection, and you could find link-minded souls in other teams who you could collaborate with.

Mobile, Cloud & Multiplatform

Consumption:

Fast forward to where we are now, hyper-accelerated in the last 6 months, and technology has completely democratised publishing. Consumers are paying attention to content creators of all kinds who speak to them in a voice which resonates, on a platform which they use.

Established publishers fight for relevance with influencers and creators across a panoply of platforms and an accompanying spread of formats. Not only has the way stories are told adapted to suit the platform, but the choice of story is far more diverse. You can see a completely different service on a mobile phone to the one you see on a TV. On top of that the lifecycle of the platforms has accelerated. It’s Snapchat Discover one minute, TikTok the next, and consumers are more flighty.

Production:

Consumer demand for authenticity has forced publishers to go more native - creating content directly on the platform, just like their creator competition who are making mobile content on their mobiles. Traditionally shot landscape video rarely works on vertical mobile screens, and vertical video stays on vertical platforms unless it’s been lifted for use on a landscape format, in which case it gets ugly side panels either side.

It therefore becomes increasingly difficult to manage content centrally, and video is repurposed less often. The native mobile platforms like TikTok and Snapchat demand content created in the moment, and it’s content which is more ephemeral, with a shorter shelf-life, making archiving less relevant. Nowadays you could just as easily use consumer-facing cloud storage like Dropbox than a big expensive enterprise Media Asset Manager.

To boot, as I’ve mentioned before, the optical electronics of current smartphones compete favourably with traditional cameras, even DSLRs, putting production power into anyone’s hands. (check out the maestro of mobile video production, Toby Sadler aka @smartphoneshooter below)

And even before 2020, fully remote teams have thrived through rich digital collaboration tools and clear processes. In 2018, the editorial team of PC Gamer, the leader in its field, was distributed across at least 6 locations in 4 time zones.

Space:

As technology shifted from fixed computing through laptops to mobile, and from bulky hardware through local digital storage to the cloud, so have our working processes. Agile working in multi-disciplinary teams has dissolved old silos and hierarchies, so the physical space is no longer a slave to technological limitations, nor a blocker to ubiquitous collaboration. Instead it can change form and function to facilitate multiple variants of colleague interaction: physical groups, virtual conferencing, and working alone together.

Workspace is no longer about just offices, it’s a ecosystem of fixed group spaces and remote locations, and it’s no longer about physical distance and bricks and mortar, it’s about connection and agility across nodes.

The biggest determinant of a space ecosystem in 2020 is not technology or production, it’s values and people. So make sure that the space you give your people to do their work is a living breathing expression of your company’s values.