In Broadcast - April 2018 - 64

64

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 8 - Issue 4 | April 2018

InFocus

Newsroom Systems:
Steadily More Social
Whatever social media platforms do with content (never mind the data collected)
newsroom systems have striven to include relevant and accurate social media content,
Contributing Editor Andy Stout examines the latest advances...

H

aving spent several years
assiduously
courting
them,
Facebook decided to turn on news
organisations at the start of the year
with its announcement that it was
going to deprioritise news articles and
videos.
The effects on some small companies
were catastrophic, and, with organic
reach down overnight by as much as
75%, some closed down almost as
quickly. And while broadcast news
organisations who publish on the
platform tend to be less dependent on
it than most, and thus insulated from
the vagaries of however it decides to
rewrite its algorithms, it does highlight
the disadvantages of dealing with such
a monopolistic outlet.
Currently there is a resurgence of
interest in video on Twitter underway
and a re-examination of YouTube,
while Facebook - which has other
high-profile problems lately - looks
to ignite interest from a sceptical
industry about a news section on its
Watch video hub. Whatever the end
results however, and however the
social platforms decide to treat video
content, newsroom systems are still
busy adding comprehensive tools
into their offerings to both publish
onto them and monitor the trends,
firestorms and breaking news that
flashes between their billions of users.
The OpenMedia suite by Annova
Systems is a case in point. As part of
an impressive line-up of modules that
Annova
Newsboard
orchestrates
content

can be incorporated into the system,
the company has a sophisticated social
media solution that interfaces with
Twitter and Facebook. Its recently
introduced Newsboard, takes this
further, orchestrating OpenMedia
content from the newsroom system
alongside social media content from a
diverse range of sources.
As well as the usual social media
platforms there's a degree of
customisation here, with users able to
add RSS feeds, Google alerts and
more as widgets to the browserbased main screen. The columnar
interface will be familiar to anyone
who's used services such as TweetDeck
or Hootsuite to keep up with multiple
information sources.
Avid's venerable iNEWS is on the
way out. While the company says
it will continue to be marketed
as such for a while at least, its
replacement is already being ushered
to market. MediaCentral | Newsroom
Management is billed by the company
as a fully customisable newsroom
specific workflow module for its allsinging, all-dancing MediaCentral
networked
media
environment,
which in turn it has spent US$500m
improving and porting to the Cloud.
It too will feature the same sort of
social media channel monitoring as
Annova's Newsboard, a MediaCentral
| Research coming soon as part of
a range of apps that tap into the
whole
MediaCentral
ecosystem.

Avid's MediaCentral Newsroom Management modules tap into
an overarching networked media environment

There's a | Message app for team
communications, a | Publish app for
delivering on-air content to websites,
social and mobile apps in turn, a |
Maestro News app providing drag and
drop functionality to accelerate realtime broadcast graphic production, |
Tasks for workflow management and
more.
With native, customisable UX
interfaces for Android and iOS also
available, it has also been certified
to run on Microsoft Azure, meaning
that the whole MediaCentral-based
newsroom system can now be
configured to deliver complete story
creation and rundown management in
the cloud for news teams.
Introduced for the first time at
last year's IBC, Octopus Newsroom
8.1 adds what the company says
is a record-breaking 500+ new
features, improvements and fixes to
the previous 8.0 version. With the
aim of improving planning and news
production this includes detachable
notification widgets, custom shortcuts
to quickly create
new slugs in a
rundown,
quick
editing of stories,
an improved version
of
the
Octopus
Journalist App (both
on iOS and Android)
and a whole lot
more. There are

also the inevitable social media
collaboration enhancements too, with
support for Facebook comments and
the ability to post video to Twitter
all integrated into the main Octopus
interface.
More will be on show at NAB too,
with Octopus promising advanced
integration with Viz Opus, Traco
MediaBridge to allow for seamless
operation with MediaCentral, and the
debut introduction of a news workflow
that includes Bitcentral's Core News.
The Core News suite is a popular one
in the US, installed in over 255 TV
stations and 1,000 media operations,
and it will be interesting to see what
an integrated solution can achieve.
Ross Video has been making
newsroom products for over four
decades, and it's little surprise to see
its flagship Inception browser-based
system in newsrooms worldwide. One
of its more intriguing recent products
though launched last year is Inception.
cloud (the period is part of
Ross Video's user interface
for Inception.cloud
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.avid.com/products/mediacentral https://www.annova.tv/en/openmedia/openmedia-newsboard/ https://www.rossvideo.com/social-media/inception/
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