Weekly episodes of ANN are now being streamed on the Novo Tempo Network in South America Brazil, marking a significant milestone for the global Seventh-day Adventist Church.
While episodes have been available in both Spanish and Portuguese for over a year on the ANN YouTube channel, this new avenue of distribution allows ANN International to reach a new audience of up to 200 million people across South America.
“It’s been a goal for a long time to expand ANN in terms of distribution. So when we finally got an agreement this year with Novo Tempo that we could distribute Portuguese and Spanish episodes, it was a dream come true,” said Arnaldo Oliveira, ANN International producer.
Three versions of ANN News are being produced for Novo Tempo: a full 29-minute episode for television, a 9-minute version for local Unions, Conferences and institutions, and a 3-minute teaser trailer.
“The 3-minute teaser is shown during Novo Tempo’s existing news program on Friday night. The idea is to invite people to watch the full episode when it airs on Saturday,” Oliveira explains.
Currently, Portuguese episodes are hosted by Williams Costa Jr., GC communications director, while Spanish episodes are hosted by Ivette Ovalle.
GC communications are grateful to Bruno Elmano, Coordinator of Journalism and Infotainment at TV Novo Tempo, and Pr. Antônio Tostes, Director of Novo Tempo Communication Network, and their teams, for their instrumental work in establishing this new avenue of distribution for ANN.
How are the new episodes made?
Currently, Spanish and Portuguese episodes of ANN are produced in-house at the General Conference (GC) studios, with each news story or segment being translated and either dubbed or voiced-over, and then presented by dedicated news anchors in each language.
“We have about 30 people on the team working to make this a reality,” Olivera explains. “Every new language means bringing at least 3 new people onto the team.”
Practically speaking, the news-writing process involves sourcing news from the 13 Divisions and associated fields, writing this into a script, and then translating it. A team of editors then create language-specific audio and undergo a quality assurance process before each episode is released.
“We have to translate every single video clip we use—for instance, if we have a clip of 3-4 people talking, we transcribe the script and then add voice-overs for every individual person. But now with the aid of artificial intelligence, we’ve been able to simplify this process,” said Oliveira.
What is ANN’s vision for the future?
ANN’s emphasis on translation was clarified at GC Session in St Louis last year, where news was produced in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French for the first time, allowing leadership to reach 85 percent of the global church in their native languages.
“Covid-19 really helped us to understand the importance of good communication, and we’ve been able to see this become a reality in the GC communications department under Williams Costa Jr’s leadership,” said Oliveira.
As well as Spanish and Portuguese episodes on Novo Tempo and online, ANN is also produced for Hope Channel International, Adventist radio networks and world church social media channels in English, French and Swahili, with more languages also planned to be added soon.
Going forward, the GC communications team has plans to distribute ANN across more global channels, as well as increase the number of languages available in both video and web formats. Currently, there are plans to distribute news in Hindi (already available on YouTube), German and Tagalog, in hopes to further establish ANN as the globally-recognized official news source for the Adventist Church.
“Our goal is to reach 20+ languages by the next General Conference Session,” says Olivera.
Watch and learn more about ANN International every Friday on ANN's Youtube channel!