Carver Corner
I watched the videos from FOX 26 Houston anchor Caroline Collins several times.
My first reaction?
Kudos. Seriously.
This is exactly the kind of experimentation local television needs right now. Collins is learning a system that lets her anchor while handling tasks traditionally done by others. She is producing, directing, handling audio and running graphics, essentially punching portions of the show while sitting on the set.
And she is doing it in Houston.
Not exactly a sleepy little television market.
Collins has been transparent about the learning curve. After her first attempt, she described it as “incredibly stressful.” She also said she had support while learning the system and expects to improve with repetition. FOX 26 is expanding its streaming operation as part of what Collins described as a 24-hour live-news cycle.
She may be right.
But I think we are asking the wrong question.
The question is not whether one person can do it.
Clearly, she can.
The question is whether local television should build its future around the assumption that one person should.
Technology ought to make people more productive. It should remove needless steps, eliminate work that exists only because that is how television has always done it, and free journalists to spend more time on journalism. AI will change jobs. Automation will change workflows. If technology allows one person to take on certain functions without harming the product, the industry would be foolish not to examine it.
I am not interested in protecting a job simply because that job existed in 1997.
But efficiency and sustainability are not the same thing.
Something can work beautifully for one show. Or five. Or fifty.
What happens on show 500?
What does the product look like then? What does the person look like?
Those are fair questions in an industry that already asks people to do more, on more platforms, with fewer people around them.
Houston makes this experiment especially interesting. This is a market where the carefully constructed rundown can become irrelevant in 30 seconds. Hurricanes, flooding, severe weather, major crime, elections, industrial accidents, and breaking news do not wait for a workflow demonstration to finish.
In one of Collins’ videos, breaking news entered the process: a student was shot near Westfield High School. The 15-year-old later died, and authorities took a 14-year-old into custody.
Ugh.
That is the business.
One minute, you are demonstrating a new system. The next, your community needs clear, fast, accurate information.
The technology does not get to pick the day.
Neither does the journalist.
Show me the hurricane. Show me the breaking-news event at 5:57. Show me the moment when information changes by the second, reporters call in, live shots move, graphics have to change, and somebody has to decide what is true, what matters, and what goes on next.
Then ask one person to anchor the coverage, produce it, direct it, manage audio, and operate the technology.
Maybe the technology can handle it. Maybe the journalist can handle it.
But that is an awfully important maybe.
This is where the business needs to be careful. We have spent years learning to do more with less, then a little more with a little less, then even more with even less. Each decision can make perfect financial sense. Automate this. Centralize that. Combine those responsibilities. Give one person another function because technology now makes it possible.
Eventually, you can create an operation that is extraordinarily efficient right up until something goes wrong.
And in local news, something going wrong is frequently the product.
The storm is the product. The breaking news is the product. The election-night surprise is the product. The unexpected is precisely when viewers need the newsroom most.
That is when what looked like redundant staffing yesterday can suddenly look like capacity.
Or resilience.
There is also a quality question that should not get lost in the discussion. If one journalist is listening to a reporter, watching the clock, monitoring audio, tracking graphics, processing new information, preparing to speak and physically executing the show, something is consuming cognitive bandwidth.
It has to be.
That does not mean the newscast will be bad. It does not mean Collins cannot become exceptionally good at all of it. But the benchmark cannot simply be: Did we get the newscast on the air with fewer people?
That is a production metric.
The more important question is whether viewers received a better product. Was the journalism stronger? Was it more accurate? Faster? More useful? Did it provide more context when context mattered?
If the only measurable improvement is that fewer people were required to produce it, we are not really talking about innovation.
We are talking about cost reduction.
Those can be the same thing. They are not automatically the same thing.
But I am not going to lie. I like part of what Collins is doing.
She does not look like she is delivering television news the way we have taught people to deliver television news for the last 50 years. She is showing viewers behind the curtain. She is talking directly to them. She is letting them see her learn something difficult. There is stress. There is personality. There is imperfection.
It feels less formal and less like the polished anchor-behind-a-desk model local television spent decades perfecting.
Maybe that is not a bug.
Maybe it is part of the opportunity.
An entire generation has grown up consuming information from people talking directly into a phone. TikTok. YouTube. Instagram. Podcasts. Creators. The relationship is different.
Collins is particularly well positioned to test that relationship. FOX 26 says she has more than 2 million followers across social platforms, including more than 1 million on TikTok. She is not simply an anchor being asked to experiment with social media. She has already shown she can build an audience there.
So there are really two experiments happening.
One is operational: How many traditional production functions can technology allow one person to perform?
The other may matter more: Can local television present news in a way that feels more personal, direct, and relevant to people who never developed the habit of watching a scheduled newscast?
The timing of this isn’t lost on me. My latest The Talent Signal column was published today on TVNewsCheck, titled “Local TV Inherited Its Audience. Now It Has To Build One.”
And that’s exactly what makes this experiment so interesting.
And I’d put the probability at about 99.2% that some version of this conversation is happening in C-suites across the television industry right now.
Is this how local television starts building it?
Maybe.
Maybe taking viewers behind the curtain, letting them see some personality and imperfection, and creating a more direct relationship between journalist and audience is part of the answer. Maybe the bigger innovation here isn’t one person running more technology. Maybe it’s changing the relationship between the person delivering the news and the person consuming it.
If so, that’s worth paying very close attention to.
I hope the answer is yes.
But I also recruit people in this business. I talk to News Directors, Executive Producers, anchors, producers, engineers, sales leaders, and General Managers. People are not necessarily afraid of hard work.
They are tired of unlimited work.
There is a difference.
Every time an exceptionally talented employee proves she can do five things, somebody somewhere will start wondering why they are paying five people. That is where “can” has a funny way of becoming “should.”
And “should” eventually becomes the job description.
I have seen no evidence that FOX 26 is using this system to eliminate positions. This is not an accusation about one station. It is a question about what the industry decides to learn from success.
A journalist may see a new skill. A technologist may see innovation. A viewer may see a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at television.
And somewhere, somebody looking at a budget may see four salaries.
That is when the conversation gets more complicated.
Local television does not have the luxury of refusing to change. Use AI. Automate. Eliminate obsolete workflows. Question processes that exist only because “that is how television has always done it.”
Please.
But the goal should not be discovering the absolute minimum number of human beings required to keep a signal or stream on the air. The goal should be using technology to build a better local-news product and a stronger business around it.
Sometimes that will require fewer people. Sometimes it will allow the same people to accomplish far more. And sometimes the person technology appears to replace will turn out to have been providing judgment, creativity, verification, institutional knowledge, or capacity that did not show up neatly on a spreadsheet.
Caroline Collins is showing the industry what transition can look like. Parts of it, frankly, I hope are the future.
If this more personal, direct, creator-like approach helps local television build a relationship with people it is not reaching now, we should learn from it.
Finding a new way to connect with younger viewers would be a genuine breakthrough. Finding a new way to burn through talented journalists wouldn’t be.
But if this is the future, let us make sure we are designing it around more than how few people it takes to operate it.
Efficiency matters.
Innovation matters.
Reaching the next generation matters.
But resilience matters, too.
And when everything goes sideways in a major television market, resilience may be the thing viewers need most.
Carver Corner | Ty Carver
Carver Talent — WE KNOW MEDIA.
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Carver Talent specializes in recruiting high-impact leaders across local television, digital media, revenue leadership, news management and broadcast operations nationwide.
We understand the media business because we work inside its talent market every day — talking with the leaders running stations, newsrooms, sales organizations and operations, including many who aren’t actively looking for their next opportunity.
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Ty Carver is the Founder and CEO of Carver Talent and brings more than 30 years of recruiting, HR, sales and leadership experience, including the last 15 years focused specifically on the broadcast media industry.
Before founding Carver Talent, Ty served as Head of Talent Acquisition for Raycom Media, where he developed deep relationships throughout the industry and gained a unique perspective on the people and leadership challenges facing local media companies.
Today, Carver Talent helps media companies identify and recruit management and executive talent nationwide, with a particular focus on passive candidates who may never respond to a traditional job posting.
Have a corporate executive or television station management recruiting need? Contact ty@carvertalent.com to learn how Carver Talent can help.