Behind Election Night Scenes, Fox News Launches New Multimedia Era

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On Fox News, the stars of Election Night are usually Bret Baier, Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer. This year, some of the most important players will rarely be seen on camera.

New control rooms are debuting Tuesday evening at the Fox Corp.-backed outlet that allow producers to move content more easily across its many platforms, whether they be TV, streaming, digital or social. The idea, says Doug Rohrbeck, Fox News’ executive vice president, Washington news and politics, is to allow for quicker distribution of the content and information being collected from reporters and correspondents, rather than having a report earmarked for one particular opportunity, like a segment on a TV program or a video for social media.

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“You really want to share reporting and resources across the company,” says Rohrbeck, during a recent interview, in order to “reach more people without duplicating the entire operation.”

Fox News is, like its TV-news brethren, operating at a time when audiences have spread out across a panoply of different viewing windows. Some might watch live TV. Others might stream a show on demand via a streaming outlet like Fox Nation, or jump from one clip to another of similar subjects on the subscription outlet Fox One. Some followers may keep up with the news by keeping track of Fox News correspondents like Trey Yingst as they post videos on social media outlets.

“We don’t want to try to silo the content,” says Rohrbeck. “We want to have it all there and each platform can sort of curate what they think works best for their users. But it’s really sharing all of the reporting, all of the data.”

On Election Night, Fox News will have several different operations going on at once.

Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network will simulcast the company’s signature Election Night coverage, led by Baier and MacCallum, with Trace Gallagher handling overnight hours. Meanwhile, Fox Nation and Fox News Digital will stream “Ruthless Live!” from a Washington D.C. bar with co-hosts Josh Holmes, Michael Duncan, John Ashbrook, and Shashank Tripathi offering perspective on what shapes various state races. Fox News users will for the first time be able to ask an AI-powered chatbot questions about specific races and voting trends and get answers drawn from the outlet’s reporting.

The recalibrated operations nod to the fact that different users are, as “Ruthless” co host Josh Holmes says, “experiencing news and information differently.”

Fox News has in recent years been paying more attention to people who may not watch its TV lineup in day-and-date fashion. The company has spread its resources into books, audio and digital, and launched streaming products built around weather and lifestyle programming, among other niches.

The wider aperture comes as linear TV companies grapple with splintering audiences. On Monday, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch acknowledged that Fox News is working its way through some “viewer fatigue” with news that caused a downturn in third quarter and October ratings. Competitors have noticed the trend in recent weeks, which surfaces ahead of midterm elections that polls have suggested are likely to be favorable for Democrats, and not the Republicans who are Fox News’ strongest audience.

Murdoch appeared sanguine about the dynamic, noting that Fox News executives have a “playbook” and know how to navigate the trend. They did it in the lead-up to the 2006 midterms, when President George W. Bush was an incumbent Republican whose approval ratings were in decline. Even so, news aficionados have never had so many competing options offering high-quality video and information.

The news audience may be spread out, but many different parts of Fox News are working to corral them. “We take all the different divisions of our company into this,” says Bill Hemmer. “You will see me on TV, but we’ve got a politics team, a graphics team. We’ve got an augmented reality team.” They’re doing what any modern news organization has to do in the streaming era — placing equal importance on many different media types.