This is a big news year. The last time America went to the polls to elect a president was November 3, 2020, and although it’s only been four years, it may as well be another lifetime. In this short time, we’ve seen change on an unprecedented scale with social, political, cultural, and technological advances that have redefined how we all live. Broadcasting in particular has had to adjust to these new realities.

Celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, Calrec has worked with broadcasters through multiple technological step changes, like the transition from analogue to digital, the move from mono to stereo to surround to immersive, and more recently the transition into pure IP and cloud environments. But the speed of change over the last four years has been unprecedented, and the biggest shifts are not so much about what is broadcast, but how it is broadcast and to whom. Nothing illustrates these challenges as much as the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, one of the most mission-critical and important news events of recent years.

The headlines are in: Local news is the most trusted source

According to the Pew Research Center’s survey of 9,680 U.S. adults, conducted a few weeks before the elections, television news is still the most trusted news outlet for American voters, and local television news in particular. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has known this for a while. Based on results from the Swing State Project, a survey that polled 3,969 voters across seven U.S. swing states in May, the NAB’s Chief of Staff and Executive Vice President of Public Affairs Michelle Lehman concluded that most Americans trust local broadcasters for election news more than any other medium.

“In a rapidly evolving media landscape, broadcasters remain a vital bastion of the free press in communities all across the country — an especially critical role this election year,” she said. “As misinformation runs rampant on social media, journalists at local TV and radio stations continue to bring unbiased reporting, urgent emergency updates and accurate fact-checking every day. Broadcasters provide voters the facts they need to make informed decisions on Election Day.”

News follows sports

For reporters and news agencies on the ground, who may be located in key swing states, new broadcast technologies are helping redefine how they are getting content to air. It’s why more and more local news broadcasters are following the example set in live sports and are taking advantage of more distributed and agile working patterns. Remote, distributed, and centralized production has been helping sports broadcasters generate content for years. In fact, by the time the biggest live sporting event in the world got underway in Paris this summer, more broadcasters than ever were taking full advantage of these technologies to save money, maximise efficiency and generate additional content by centralising resources.

Calrec has been working with broadcasters to work remotely for several years now, but 2024 saw a peak in these workflows with customers like NBC Sports, Sky and the BBC all exploiting what are now trusted remote broadcast technologies to get live content to their audiences. It has enabled them to cover much more for much less and with a much smaller environmental footprint.

Shades of gray

In the run up to the election, broadcasters like U.S. news giant Gray Media are finding the same efficiencies. As the largest owner of local television stations and digital assets in the United States, Gray Media serves 113 television markets and reaches more than a third of U.S. households. It is exactly the kind of trusted channel that American voters are going to for information and has spent the last few years standardizing its audio configurations across its entire portfolio. Placing Calrec’s Type R mixing console at the centre of its audio infrastructure, it has automated workflows and minimized its reliance on physical control surfaces.

Global news

Operating 15 local stations providing community-based news, weather, and information across Canada, Global News is another news network taking advantage of Type R’s remote connectivity. Commenting on its recent Calrec Type R integration, Ralph Carstens, Systems Specialist, Audio at Global News said, “We have the ability to adjust things like levels and dynamics remotely using VPN and the Calrec Assist GUI, if needed” he added, “The DSP cores are connected to Viz Mosart, an automation system that allows just one to two operators to control all aspects of news production such as the cameras, playout, graphics, and audio. All the cores handle live local news production. Global National is produced out of Vancouver and all three cores produce morning, noon, and evening news shows plus cover elections and other special events.”

More changes to come

According to the Pew survey, around 35 percent of Americans still get their political news from television, trusting the traditional national news networks like ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox. This number rises to 64 percent in adults over 65. But the fight for eyeballs — and ears — has never been more intense, and the survey exposes some deep generational differences. The majority of adults under 30 rely predominantly on social media, and adults aged 30 to 49 exhibit an even split between television news (23 percent), social media (23 percent) and news websites/apps (24 percent).

The results are clear. As we approach the biggest news event of the year, broadcasters are battling more and more for share of mind despite being the most trusted outlets. And while channel diversification in broadcasting is not a recent phenomenon, audience fragmentation looks to be at an all-time high.

Streamlining content creation

We can see TV broadcasters are being forced to adopt more hybrid approaches that blend linear video and cross-channel content, and this is why manufacturers like Calrec are so committed to helping news broadcasters streamline their processes. As sports broadcasters have increasingly adopted remote workflows to centralize production and generate more content for increasingly diverse channels, news broadcasters are looking to do the same. They’re enabling news outlets to not only generate the localized coverage that viewers have learned to trust, but also to reach bigger audiences by expanding their digital reach into other channels.

Competition for viewers has never been higher, and the more vendors like Calrec can partner with broadcasters, employing new initiatives like Calrec’s True Control 2.0 and ImPulse V cloud DSP engines to create more flexible workflows, the more news broadcasters can embrace remote and distributed workflows. And the more they can encourage up-to-the-minute trusted content that their viewers are relying on.