NBC News and MSNBC’s Election Day Gameplan: Data Is the Star of the Show
Viewers tuning into NBC’s 2024 election coverage on Nov. 5 might be forgiven for thinking the anchor desk is smack dab in the middle of New York’s Rockefeller Plaza. On MSNBC, Steve Kornacki’s “Big Board” may appear to be feet from a window opening to the White House.
NBC and MSNBC’s election coverage will originate from 30 Rock, but from interior studios, not outside. Instead, the company is leveraging advanced mixed reality technology to create the illusion of immersion, placing the anchors on NBC in Rockefeller Plaza, and on MSNBC outside the White House grounds, created with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.
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The end result is dramatic, with 30 Rock’s 69 floors seeming to loom over the anchors on NBC’s coverage (with data and graphics “projected” onto the side of the virtual building), and the White House mere steps from Kornacki’s big board.
See the NBC virtual set here:
And the MSNBC set here:
In a tour of the 30 Rock studios earlier this week, Marc Greenstein, the senior VP of design and production for NBC News and MSNBC, walked The Hollywood Reporter through the company’s tech plans, adding that while he was “a little nervous” with some of the tech, he is “happy” with how things are looking.
“This is what we have that anyone else does, it’s our home field advantage, right? We have Rockefeller Center,” Greenstein says. “So we think it looks really great, obviously, just as a backdrop for a sense of place. It’s giving us this ability to do storytelling in this really dynamic way, and because of technology, expand what is a physically difficult space for us to work in.”
Indeed, Rockefeller Plaza, despite its storied history, can be a difficult building to broadcast from. The largest studio in the building, Studio 8H (long the home of Saturday Night Live) is tiny compared to many studios in Los Angeles, for example.
“It’s a building built for radio, right in the middle of the depression. They built this for radio, and then said, ‘hey, let’s make a TV studio,'” Greenstein says. “We wouldn’t trade that for the world. We love 30 Rock, but how do we still get some of that magic of being in a big studio, and more important than the look factor of it: How can we use that as a canvas for all of our storytelling? Because this is a night all about data.”
For viewers of NBC’s and MSNBC coverage, the data will be the star of the show, and so the technology and design elements — however many bells and whistles there are — are all meant to serve that larger goal.
In the case of the MSNBC studio, that means that the anchor desk, where Rachel Maddow and the team of anchors will be sitting, can clearly see Steve Kornacki and his board (interested viewers can also check out a “Kornacki Cam” on Peacock with uninterrupted video of the data guru. The camera is actually a GoPro, attached to Kornacki’s desk via a suction cup). That could speak conversations or analysis based on what they are seeing.
On NBC, while viewers will see Rockefeller Plaza behind the anchors, the studio is actually placed right in the newsroom, with Tom Llamas’ big board just steps away (like on MSNBC, Lester Holt and Savannah Guthrie will be able to see what he is looking at), and the newsroom directly adjacent to the set.
“The big editorial mission was to actually do our broadcast from the heart of the newsroom, meaning all of the journalists in the newsroom who may not necessarily be on there [on set], we have direct access to them from the actual set,” Greenstein says. “Rather than have this sterile environment where the anchors would sit and then journalists spread out, we wanted the ability to move between that set and immediately get to a journalist.”
In the control room, Greenstein directed a camera operator to demonstrate the shot, shifting from the dramatic virtual background to the real-world newsroom, zooming in on a chair and desk that, on Tuesday, will be where Chuck Todd will be sitting.
“We literally could hit a button and turn the lights on, bring the camera there,” he says. “Lester and Savannah could walk over as well and talk to them. That’s what we think is going to be really dynamic about this space, is that we can go directly from the anchor desk to the journalists in the newsroom, or bring them right to the desk without any massive choreography or phone calls.”
But more than anything, NBC’s tech efforts are about transparency around data, especially given the 2020 election, where the timing of certain calls sparked confusion.
“I think with every election, you always start with the data,” Greenstein says. “How do we make sure that the viewer can see the data, see the vote as it’s coming in, and make sure we’re showing it in a way that’s understandable and as transparent as possible, especially in an election like this one. So we started there, and that led us to what are the different ways we could display data.”
That’s where the Big Boards come into play. Their placement on the sets is meant to put the data (and the data’s avatars in the form of Kornacki and Llamas) at the center of the action.
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