LIVE IN THREE, TWO, ONE: HOW BROADCAST PRODUCTION TAUGHT ME TO THINK LIKE AN INNOVATOR

By Ethan Bergman

Most people in media pick a lane early. Production or strategy. Storytelling or data. I’ve spent two years at UF doing both, and I stopped feeling like that was a contradiction a long time ago.

I’m majoring in media production, management, and technology with a specialization in management and strategy. The innovation minor is where those two worlds actually click. The IA classes pushed me to look at the media industry differently, not just as a practitioner asking “how do we do this,” but as someone asking “why does this system exist and what would work better.”

Right now I work as an Assistant Director on WUFT’s Midday and First at Five live broadcasts. This past year, I independently directed a full live show. Live television genuinely does not wait. You’re making calls in real time, there’s no margin for error, and every person in the control room is counting on you to be decisive. The biggest thing IA put in my head is that your response to uncertainty matters more than your plan. You can prepare for every scenario and still end up improvising at the last second. Getting comfortable with that is the difference between freezing and leading.

But production is only part of what I care about. Automation and AI are already changing how live media runs, and the more I worked inside a newsroom, the more I wanted to understand what was happening outside of it, specifically how audiences actually consume content and what that data means for how we make it. Thinking about those questions through an innovation lens, rather than just watching the industry shift, is what pushed me toward the strategy side.

This fall, I’m joining the UF Atlas Lab as a research assistant, focusing on digital strategies and audience analytics. For me it’s a natural next step. Having real production experience while studying how audiences engage with media puts me in a position most people don’t get to be in this early. I’m not just looking at the numbers from the outside. I know what it costs to produce the content those numbers are measuring.

If there’s one thing I’d tell anyone in the Innovation Academy, it’s that the program works best when you let it push you somewhere you weren’t already headed. I came in focused on production, and somewhere along the way IA made me curious about strategy, WUFT put me in a control room, and the Atlas Lab is putting me in the data. None of it was part of a plan, but all of it connects. That’s kind of the point.

Being named a Trailblazer is a good reminder that a career doesn’t have to be linear to be moving forward. Mine is built on a live control room and an analytics lab, and I’m only a junior. The path is still being written, and that’s exactly how I like it.