Over on Fox News' website, Shepard Smith gives us a tour of the the Fox News Deck's upgraded studio which inexplicably features a team of staffers in the background working at what appear to be gigantic tablets. According to Smith, those are actually "information specialists" frantically pawing away at what Fox calls BATS—or big area touchscreens (most likely Microsoft hardware running Windows 8)—that puts 55-inches of Twitter feeds and other news sources at their fingertips. What?


The individual displays can be sent to air at a moment's notice, but why Fox thinks we want to see its reporters checking their Facebook feeds or tagging themselves in photos is beyond us. What is for certain, though, is that the future of broadcast news looks exactly like the Enterprise's bridge from J. J. Abram's Star Trek movies—minus all the lens flares... yet. [Fox News via Boing Boing]