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Andrew Gillfillan
Case study 07Streaming · Original programmingCBS News Miami · launched January 24, 2022

A channel that needed its own reason to exist

Twenty-four hours is a lot of hours.

I oversaw the January 24, 2022 launch of the 24-hour CBS News Miami streaming channel: staffing models, workflows, original programming and daily editorial execution. The hard part was never the technology. It was answering what a viewer gets at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday that they cannot get from the 6 o’clock news.

I led the January 24, 2022 launch of CBS News Miami’s 24-hour stream: staffing models, continuous-news workflows, original programming and daily editorial execution. Then I conceived Headliners, designed it around the newsroom capacity we already had and took the stream-only weekly review from idea to air in two weeks.

Headliners on CBS News Miami
Headliners on CBS News Miami · Watch

The opportunity

A new 24-hour channel with a schedule to fill and no programming of its own. Repeating the broadcast would have taught the audience there was no reason to come back.

What I built

Staffing models and workflows for continuous streaming coverage, plus Headliners, a stream-only weekly review I conceptualized and launched in two weeks.

What I learned

Streaming-native audiences do not watch a channel; they watch a thing. Give the platform a franchise of its own and the schedule stops being a hole to fill.

The programming

Two weeks from idea to on the air.

Headliners was a weekly review built for people who had missed the week: the stories that actually mattered, the reporters who covered them, and the context a daily newscast never has room for. It ran on the stream only. That was the point.

Two weeks from decision to first episode, with no new headcount, because the format was designed around the capacity the newsroom already had, the same constraint that later shaped The Signal.

Concept

A weekly review for the platform, not a rerun of the newscast.

Workflow

Built around existing staff and existing material, assembled on a fixed weekly cadence.

Talent

Reporters on camera explaining their own beats, which is what viewers remember.

2022 election coverage on CBS News Miami
Election night 2022 · CBS News Miami · Watch

We rebuilt election coverage around real-time data and our politics team, with interactive results on air and on every platform, so viewers could follow the race they cared about instead of waiting for it to come around again. The same instinct produced WKAR’s Election 2026 four years later.

A 24-hour channel needs its own programming, not repeats of the broadcast.

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