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The conventional school of thought teaches that the best way to engage younger viewers is to produce short, snappy, “snackable” content, but the people at LX News must have skipped class that day.
The ongoing experiment in programming for millennials and Gen Z from the NBCUniversal Owned Stations took a big leap forward last month with the launch of its first live news programs. We didn’t just say, ‘Hey, let’s create something that’s different for younger audiences’ and do it,” says Matt Goldberg, Vice President of Content Strategy for the LX TV and streaming network, “We really spent a lot of time looking at what makes a different kind of product and what was working.”
That evolution began almost three years ago, and after incubating LX-style storytelling, mostly on YouTube, last year (as we reported here), Goldberg and his team went live on June 1 with two-hour morning and evening news programs, both called LX News. “That was our marching order: how do we create content that appeals to a younger audience? What we found in that process and that journey is that it’s really about depth and context,” Goldberg says.
Delivering on that promise is the job of four hard-working hosts, all new to LX this year: Jobeth Devera and Tabitha Lipkin in the morning, Ashley Holt and Nic Zecevic (“Nic Z” on the show) in the evening. No surprise: they are all young, engaging, and comfortable with the camera. “We wanted people who wanted to do things