CHICAGO — While WGN-Ch. 9 made news last month by slashing its on-air staff, rival WMAQ-Ch. 5 has executed a different kind of downsizing with a $70 million reimagining of the local TV newsroom.

In January, NBC 5 Chicago, Telemundo Chicago and the national NBC News Chicago Bureau consolidated from five floors into one 70,000-square-foot space on the formerly vacant second floor of NBC Tower, once the home to “The Jerry Springer Show.”

Now it’s the domain of NBC 5 anchors Allison Rosati and Stefan Holt, newly hired sports anchor Lou Canellis, meteorologist Brant Miller and dozens of reporters, editors and other staffers spread out at workstations across an expansive newsroom. It also includes five on-air studios, administrative and sales offices, break rooms, meeting rooms and a labyrinth of technical nooks and crannies.

“We have condensed our space, but it also feels like we’re in a bigger space,” Kevin Cross, 57, president and general manager of NBCUniversal Local Chicago, said during a recent tour of the new digs. “I think that’s a pretty cool thing to happen.”

From a giant wall-to-wall video screen tracking weather, trending stories and reporter assignments to an illuminated ring orbiting an endless ticker above the center of the futuristic newsroom, NASA’s Mission Control doesn’t have much on the new NBC Chicago facilities. The downsized offices for NBC’s 200-plus employees also include studios with the latest in robotic cameramen, a game room, a lounge and panoramic views of Michigan Avenue and the Chicago River.

A convergence of remote work trends, technological advances, a smaller staff and an expiring lease all drove the decision to reduce space at NBC’s eponymous tower, a move that has been in the works for several years, Cross said.

NBC made the distinctive masonry-clad skyscraper its Chicago home nearly four decades ago.

In 1989, after 40 years in the Merchandise Mart, WMAQ-Ch. 5 moved 600 employees, TV cameras and other equipment eight blocks east along the Chicago River to a newly built 37-story, art deco tower in Cityfront Plaza. NBC leased the first five floors — more than 250,000 square feet of space — getting naming rights and the network’s logo atop the building.

The Chicago broadcast operation needed all of that room for years.

In 2003, NBC moved Spanish-language station WSNS-TV, part of its then recently acquired Telemundo network, into the tower as well. That same year, NBC 5 created Chicago’s first streetside studios on the ground floor of the nearby 401 N. Michigan Ave. building in Pioneer Court.

The station pulled the plug on the remote plaza studios in 2013, moving network-owned NBC 5 back inside the tower on the first floor with its Telemundo sister station. The vertical offices also housed engineering on the third floor, NBC national news on the fourth and sales, marketing and administrative on the fifth.

For decades, the second floor was the home of nationally syndicated talk shows, including Jerry Springer’s unabashedly sensational TV circus, where shoe-throwing guests were egged on by a raucous studio audience to chants of “Jerry, Jerry.” Springer taped at NBC Tower from 1992 to 2009, before relocating the show to Connecticut.

The controversial talk show host also briefly found his way to the first floor at NBC Tower. In 1997, WMAQ-Ch. 5 made the disastrous decision to add Springer as a commentator on the 10 p.m. news, an ill-fated experiment that prompted the flight of then-anchors Ron Magers and Carol Marin.

Other talk show tenants over the years included Jenny Jones, Steve Wilkos and Steve Harvey, who all taped their shows from the same NBC Tower studios.

The syndicated “Judge Mathis” show was the last to hold court at NBC Tower, taping there for 24 seasons before it was canceled in February 2023. That created a massive vacancy on the second floor, and another catalyst for NBC to rethink its entire five-floor office space.

“We didn’t need 260,000 square feet,” Cross said.

A longtime executive with NBC Sports Chicago, the former regional sports network that has since given way to CHSN, Cross took on the top job for the network’s Chicago stations in 2021. His tenure coincided with the seismic shift in the Chicago office market during the pandemic, where remote work created downsizing and vacancy at many downtown buildings.

Cross said technological improvements in local TV also contributed to a surfeit of space at NBC Tower, such as moving storage of its expansive digital library from servers to the cloud.

“We had entire rooms dedicated to just servers, where we stored all of our digital content,” Cross said. “We don’t have those rooms anymore. All of our content is now stored in the cloud.”

With its lease set to expire at the end 2025, NBC negotiated a long-term deal to keep the second floor, giving back the rest of the space and reducing its footprint to about 70,000 square feet. NBC retained naming rights for the tower as well.

That meant moving the NBC 5 studios, Telemundo Chicago and the Midwest bureau of NBC News — 200-plus on-air, technical, administrative and sales employees — onto one floor. It also gave NBC a blank canvas to reinvent its offices and studios for the postpandemic digital age.

The 15,000-square-foot newsroom features 40-foot ceilings, monitors along the walls and an egalitarian workspace, where local TV stars are scattered among dozens of behind-the-scenes staffers. Embedded nooks have been carved out to file on-air reports, while glassed-in meeting rooms line the perimeter, with at least one cordoned off by a tarp as workers finish the build-out.

“I can already see this transforming how we operate, and how we move through the space and how we work together,” Cross said. “We’re all now together and that’s creating moments where we really brainstorm in ways that we wouldn’t have been able to do before.”

The newsroom design itself was collaborative, drawing on employee input, Cross said. There was even a group behind the decision to have real rather than fake plants throughout the office, with the “green thumb” committee committed to watering the vegetation.

Beyond the newsroom there’s designated space for the sales staff, a cluster of administrative offices and a variety of break rooms. That includes a speakeasy with views onto Pioneer Court and Michigan Avenue, featuring a trophy case, bar and a “Da Bears” sign with the visage of Chris Farley in his “Superfans” role from “Saturday Night Live.”

There’s also a separate game room with a pool table, shuffle board, video games and a popcorn machine.

“The world that we cover every day can just beat you down, and you need a place that you can just go and hang out and decompress, and we were able to provide that,” Cross said.

Other design touches include full-length hallway murals representing iconic Chicago themes, meeting rooms named after Chicago neighborhoods and plenty of windows onto the city itself, including some previously obscured by walls before the redesign.

Some windows look out on nearby Tribune Tower, the century-old neo-Gothic cathedral of print journalism that has been converted to million-dollar condos, a sign of the changing times for legacy media.

But the most important views at NBC Tower emanate from five on-air studios, two of which — NBC 5 and Telemundo Chicago — are up-and-running. The live studios employ the latest technology, including four giant Artimo robotic cameras in each that are preprogrammed to operate autonomously.

The robots, which cost more than $120,000 each — not including the actual cameras — rise up, zoom in, pull out and move around on their own to get a shot. Such innovations have replaced cameramen and other technicians in the studio during newscasts, according to Jonathan Garratt, vice president of technology and operations at NBCUniversal Local Chicago.

“Everything is automated,” Garratt said.

When anchors deliver the news, it’s often just them and the giant robotic cameras in the studio, Garratt said. Producers are monitoring from remote control rooms, with technicians standing by in case a robot goes rogue live on the air.

Garratt said they’ve had to swing into action on several occasions to quell a robotic rebellion.

“In our Telemundo studio, one of them decided to do its own dance, spin around,” Garratt said. “We’ve had a situation where more than one had a problem. Yes, there is a kill switch.”

The studios that have yet to come online include a hybrid virtual studio featuring a 3D green screen for broadcasts replicating nearly any environment. The other two studios will be devoted to podcasting and social media. All are expected to be completed by summer, Cross said.

While the $70 million remodel remains a work in progress, NBC is riding high in its first two months in the new space.

In February, NBC had the Winter Olympics and Super Bowl LX, tentpole live sporting events that boosted ratings for the network and its local stations, helping NBC 5 to topple ABC 7 as the 10 p.m. news ratings leader for the first time in two years, Cross said.

It’s been nearly 37 years since Magers and Marin co-anchored the first news broadcast from NBC Tower, before streaming, podcasts and other digital platforms changed the media landscape.

Now settling into streamlined TV studios designed for a new media era, NBC Chicago expects to call its namesake tower home for years to come.

“We have a long-term deal with the NBC Tower,” Cross said. “We’re going to be here for a while.”

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