Fox News recognized a dramatic shift in the way people were consuming news. Linear viewing patterns had given way to mobile and on-demand consumption. Fox sought to revolutionize the way broadcast news production was presented and chose Smith’s News Deck as its platform. This involved a complete overhaul in the way news gathering worked and, subsequently, a complete overhaul of the studio in an accelerated timeline.
While the studio was being built, journalists were training on the state-of-the-art technologies that would fuse incoming news feeds to digital and social media.
The signature studio would serve as the command center for breaking news, capable of interrupting programming to bring viewers news as it happens. Journalists were thrust into an on-camera environment, working on BATs (55” Big Area Touchscreens) that could be put on air at a moment’s notice.
Smith has complete control of the specialists’ workstations for true collaboration in news-gathering. He can move images across the 38-foot video wall that he calls “Monster” while “The Ribbon”, a string of suspended monitors, tracks videos, photos, news feeds, weather and stock prices. Additional content is displayed on “The Wall”, an enormous floor-to-ceiling grid of monitors that can route live and pretaped feeds.
A true first in broadcast news, Shepard Smith’s team can now sift through and vet a multitude of news feeds, compiling them onto one platform that can be called up on the fly. Viewers are able to get their news as it happens and however they choose to get it.
