In Broadcast - November 2012 - 68

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

N E W S

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 14 - NOV/DEC 2012

InSTUDIO

Spreading The News & Watching The Weather
News broadcasters need to respond to the rapid introduction of social media and mobile platforms as newsgathering and news dissemination tools, while weather presentation too continues to evolve, writes Adrian Pennington…
The overriding business strategy among broadcasters just now is to create more content with less budget and no-where is that more pressing than in the 24/7 newsroom. News organisations have already abandoned the notion of channelcentric production, where content is created for a speciﬁc channel, in favour of a more global approach where content is produced for distribution on any platform. Journalists are often responsible for the entirety of their story creation (scripts, videos, graphics, voice-overs) as well as the ultimate destination - web, mobile devices, or traditional channels. “Economic and business imperatives have driven the evolution of the one man band – producer, researcher, writer, shooter, editor and publisher – performing all or most of the tasks while on the move and feeding every available distribution channel,” says Mike Palmer, Director, ENPS Design & Integration Strategy at Associated Press. “This new kind of journalist lives in the rising tide of content, consuming and contributing content to the same ocean in which they swim. While most journalists don’t yet embody these traits in the extreme, organisations have taken clear notice of the direction of change.” Since the same story has to go in different ﬂavours onto TV, radio online and mobile, “journalists need accurate planning and management of all story-relevant information,” agrees Annova Systems’ CEO Michael Schueller. “This brings key challenges that news broadcasters have to handle such as complicated rights management, use of information out of social networks, approval-workﬂows for UGC, and the transparency of all available information to all journalists.” Raoul Cospen, Director of Marketing at Dalet, dubs this a ‘storycentric’ approach which requires reorganisation within the newsroom as staff roles and responsibilities shift or merge. “To streamline operations broadcasters are asking for a system where video production, NRCS, and archives are now accessible through one user interface,” says Cospen. “A journalist, now commonly called a ‘multimedia content producer’, has access to all the tools needed to construct the entire story. That means video, script, graphics, rundown information, and metadata for archiving and publishing, as well as related web links or images.” Traditionally, stories have been created and assigned from a rundown. But increasingly stories are created directly from the planning level, building on information such as the location, date and time, descriptions, tags and keywords or people’s names from glossaries and related footage from the archive, or related wires. “Those planning events can be turned into a story,” says Cospen. “Even more signiﬁcantly, the story is going to evolve over time, with new versions or new pictures with all of these assets kept together.” Annova’s news management s o f t w a r e OpenMedia has been tuned to this topic-oriented workﬂow for two years, according to Schueller. “New modules like EventCalender or StoryBin give journalists the chance to collect content, plan and create stories in regards to a topic and then decide what news show to use it for.”
Adrian Pennington

Fast Moving
At IBC, the German company demonstrated a Journalist Portal, based on Microsoft Sharepoint, which provides a browser-based view of relevant information in OpenMedia. This enhances editorial collaboration by linking with additional content from social networks, email or media asset management. New iPhone and iPad apps bring editorial processes like task assignments, planning and agency wires to the journalist on the move. One of the main recent drivers of change in the newsroom has been the increased quality of consumer cameras and ubiquitous mobile bandwidth. “Smart mobile devices mean larger numbers of the public and journalists have the ability to shoot and transmit audio and pictures from anywhere,” says Palmer. “Content from mobile devices is arguably now as good or better than that produced by professional ﬁeld equipment as little as ten years ago. “Notionally, this means journalists have more and better content to work with, providing them access to a broader range of perspectives and views,” he says. “Often it means they also have an uncoordinated collection of apps, tools and UI’s open on their screen in order to make an attempt at monitoring this constantly rising tide of content.” Most journalists are also driven to create more output for multiple distribution channels – including various ﬂavours of social media. “As with monitoring, such multi-channel distribution also requires journalists to open an uncoordinated and often discordant collection of apps and tools,” says Palmer. Palmer says one aim of the latest release of the ENPS platform due by end of 2012, is to reduce the number of apps and user interfaces exposed to the journalist. “In many cases AP ENPS will ingest online and social media content where it can be exposed to journalists through a common set of search, alert and browse tools,” explains Palmer. “This also allows journalists to move content from the social universe to their own production environment and then on to distribution systems through

simple drag and drop operations – skipping unnecessary FTP transfers, transcode steps, drop folders and lost metadata common to most of today’s multi-channel workflows.”

Michael Schueller, Annova Systems

68

“…Journalists need accurate planning
and management of all story-relevant information

”

Pushing Content
Dalet is testing a prototype that automatically publishes content to different platforms, and where all usage data, such as number of views, ratings, number of tweets, number of Facebook shares, and any relevant information, are fed back into the Dalet MAM. “In such a way, you have a real insight on how your content is used, what is successful, and ultimately, the ROI on every single story,” says Cospen. “Typically each broadcaster has its own tools for CMS, online publishing, etc - and now we can provide a set of tools that lets them leverage all this rich online information and bring it back into the MAM driven production environment.” Avid is also addressing the issue. The interface of Interplay Central enables iNEWS users complete access via web browser or smartphone. When used with Interplay Production it also allows the creation of complete news packages with script, video, and audio voiceover. An editor doesn’t
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Avid’s iNews Command system
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In Broadcast - November 2012

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