While this year’s US election has seen plenty of drama already, the events of November 5th could still prove to be explosive. As the race to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue reaches its final hours, viewers around the world will be tuning in to see who gets the keys to the White House for the next five years.
In the UK, Sky News will bring viewers the results throughout the 5th and into the 6th of November. The broadcaster will have presenters based in Washington DC, at both candidates’ events and the key swing states. But in a first for Sky News, its main gallery will be based in the UK with the team employing remote production throughout the project.
Planning for the election has been ongoing since 2020, as the fixed cycle of US elections means that broadcasters know what date they’re working to, something that is unusual in the news business. But planning took a step forward in November 2022 when Donald Trump announced his candidacy for a third run at the White House.
“We’ve been thinking about the story in a news gathering capacity for a long time now,” says Emily Purser-Brown, Sky News’ Washington bureau chief. “The Primaries were a really big deal at the beginning of this year, and from an output and programming perspective, we’ve been in very serious planning for several months.
“There was a moment I think that we and the rest of our colleagues in the media thought we might have a US and a UK election running right alongside each other and so some of our planning was around that contingency. I think it’s a relief to all of us in the news business to be able to cover the stories at different times.”
Purser-Brown adds that planning election coverage while also keeping up with the story has been a huge challenge over the last few months. “It’s been a wild summer of developments and keeping not just at pace with that, but hopefully in front of it, whilst planning and trying to execute a big project of this nature with many 10s of colleagues in London has been a lot of work.”
Separation of powers
Sky News is basing its on-air team in DC Studio N1 in NBC’s Washington news bureau, home to the US broadcaster’s Meet the Press, America’s longest-running programme. Because Sky and NBC have existing fibre infrastructure between DC and London, the gallery will be based at Sky’s HQ in Osterley, West London.
“We are very lucky to have the Meet the Press studio. It’s an iconic studio and it’s in constant use, and this is one of the challenges,” says Niel Finlay, senior director at Sky News.
“We have very limited time with the studio, so we don’t want to change it too much, especially as it’s quite iconic and we can’t disturb the studio too much because NBC need to use it in the two hours after we have it for rehearsal. The current set has a neoclassical and federal style architecture, which refers to the Capitol building and other architecture around it, so we’ll be leaning into their set, but we’ll be trying to make it distinctive by using our graphics with our presenters and our journalism.
“We’ve done some latency checks. We were in their studio at the end of July/beginning of August, for a tech check, and we were really impressed,” he continues. “We’re lucky being top-end broadcasters, we’ve already got that infrastructure in place. It’s just one of the facts, when you run a remote production, there is going to be slight latency in there, but it’s nothing that we aren’t used to dealing with. We’ve got all the cameras coming into the studio, we’ve got sound coming into our gallery, and we’re piping back all the graphics that are feeding the video wall.”
The master gallery in Osterley will be fully crewed with the team working alongside a director in Washington. Finlay says there was some discussion as to whether to run the production completely remotely, but it was decided that there should be someone on the ground to guide the US-based crew.
“Not to blow our trumpet too much about the whole remote production part of it but Sky News and Sky Sports have been leaders in remote production for many years now,” he continues. “Our Millbank facilities in London are remote production robotic cameras, we do have some technical people down there when we need to. But this election is just our next step onwards, where we’re effectively controlling someone else’s studio.”
Access
Sky will have some technical people in the US, but the collaboration with NBC means that a lot of the production staff will come from the US broadcaster.
“Editorially, we have got two overnight presenters plus a screen presenter, so we have to have enough production team to be able to cover that as well as all our teams in the field,” adds Lucie Charlton, Sky News output editor. “This isn’t just a one night production, either. We’ve got the days running up to it, and however long it may be before the results are called. So you have to have enough editorial team to cover all those correspondents and presenters.”
Sky News will have correspondents on the ground across the United States, including with both campaigns as well as several of the swing states, particularly the likes of Pennsylvania and Georgia. “One of our core principles is eyewitness journalism. To do that, you need to have boots on the ground,” states Charlton.
To help cover all of the locations where they intend to have reporters, Sky News will rely on LiveU for feedback feeds and on NBC’s infrastructure in certain locations.
“This election night project is really an extension of our day to day relationship with NBC,” states Purser-Brown. “Particularly here in America, we work hand in glove with NBC, it’s a close working partnership from news gathering to picture sourcing, to, in this case, the technology.”
Talking points
Back in DC, Sky News intends to make full use of DC Studio N1’s location on Capitol Hill with all of its windows looking out on historic landmarks. The studio also includes four window archways, which Sky News will use as graphics screens. One of the screens will also be employed as a way for the presenters to speak to correspondents and guests.
“That helps us add to the set but it’ll also help us to tell the story throughout the night,” says Charlton. “The bit I’m excited about is one of the big archway screens will be used as a map of the United States, and as the night goes on, each state will go red or blue as the result comes in and the audience will be able to see that happening in real-time behind our presenters. The other screens allow us to show live shots and images of the White House and the Capitol building as well.”
Augmented reality powered by Unreal Engine will also come into play during the night – although the team are reluctant to give too many details as they want to surprise viewers. “We do have an AR White House that our graphics and innovation teams have made, and that includes the grounds of the White House and all those kind of iconic shots that you see on TV,” explains Charlton. “It will allow us to show how close we are getting to the winner of the election and that magic number of 270 electoral votes. All that will help feed into our coverage throughout the night.”
Lewis Goodall is also joining the on-air team for the election and will be in charge of a famous piece of kit – the NBC touchscreen used by Steve Kornacki as part of NBC’s broadcast. “Lewis will be talking us through all the data throughout the night. We’ll have state level and county level data coming in so we can see exactly who’s voting for whom, in which state and county and and really tell the story on a granular level,” says Charlton. “We’ve had access to a level of data for the US election before, but this type of data and this type of technology, the way the touch screen works, it’s very quick and responsive. It allows us to tell the story really quickly, so it’s quite exciting, and it’s going to be our kind of shining star hopefully of the night.”
Game on
Working alongside its US sister network is a big challenge for Sky News, and one that Finlay says needs to be acknowledged. Not only is the Sky News team dealing with the time difference between the US and UK, but they’re also getting to grips with different technology, including a different comms system. “We use Riedel for comms, and it’s always a challenge mixing comms systems. The tech team have gone down an embedded audio route, so we’re going to embed and de-embed audio streams to feed into presenters. We need to have ISO recordings coming back as well. We might want to clip particular moments up so we need all the cameras and ISOs and sound paired together.”
“We’ve obviously been working with NBC for a long time, but on this scale, and using one of their studios, using all their data that’s coming through and using their touchscreen, is just the closest and biggest collaboration that we’ve ever done,” adds Charlton. “It’s all very new to us but so far, it’s all been very successful.”
