Local TV Anchor Leaves Small Screen For Second Screen

By Jordan Chariton 

Jenni Hogan was a local TV anchor in Seattle, Portland, and Idaho for 10 years, but she recently left the small screen for the second screen, developing an app that curates viewer tweets and puts them on-air live during broadcasts.

TVinteract is Hogan’s creation for iPads that allows TV personalities the ability to pick their favorite fan tweets, and air them live on TV. How it works is a TV personality can look at their @mentions on the left side of the app screen, and drag the tweets they like over to the right and hit live. This automatically flags the tweet to the show’s director, who can then bring the tweet live to air through airplay or HDMI cable.

Her experimentation worked while anchors used it at KING TV, an NBC station in Seattle, as interaction to their Twitter handle @KING5Seattle shot up 28% from 4am to 8am Monday-Friday in the first two weeks they used it, according to PeopleBrowsr.

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Lost Remote spoke with Hogan, who told us her love for social TV drove her to leave her traffic anchoring job in Seattle.

“I made the decision my heart was with social media and social TV,” Hogan said. “I feel like I have this army on the rise supporting me.”

Hogan has already shown the app to TV networks, including ESPN, and in year since leaving local TV anchoring, she’s launched a weekly podcast on iTunes called “The Next Best Thing” and has been on-air for Mark Cuban’s AXS TV.

Watch Hogan give a demo of TVinteract and an example of it in use on air.

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