Since broadcasters first began posting news stories on their websites, they have been looking for better ways to generate content for multiple platforms. The increased economic pressure facing the industry today has only heightened the emphasis on producing stories for linear newscasts and digital outlets with the greatest amount of efficiency and least amount of redundancy. And those same cost pressures have also led to calls for greater integration between news workflows at networks and local stations.
But significant progress is being made in tackling these challenges by implementing the latest production tools such as story-centric newsroom systems, said top technology executives who gathered Tuesday at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum in New York for the panel discussion “Rewiring Tomorrow’s Newsroom Today,” moderated by this reporter. The technical changes being made can also require significant change management with existing staff, they added, as news personnel who may have long identified their work with a particular show or station now have to think more broadly about generating stories for a multiplatform world.
Streamlining CBS With The Super Desk
CBS News and Stations is now using a new collaborative platform, “Super Desk,” to streamline workflows between its linear and digital teams and foster better collaboration between the network and stations. Ross Dagan, EVP and head of news operations and transformation, CBS News & Stations, said the genesis of Super Desk came three year ago when different teams across the network and stations were reporting on a major building collapse in Mexico City. Multiple parts of CBS News and Stations were all chasing the same information, which wound up annoying local sources.
“That got us thinking there must be a better way to do this,” Dagan said.
CBS decided to “embrace a story-centric approach” to gathering and finding information, Dagan said, and “looked long and hard” at options from multiple vendors to come up with the best model for its needs. After an “exhaustive RFP process” it wound up choosing to base Super Desk on the multiplatform planning and publishing technology from Norwegian firm Wolftech (which was acquired by Avid last month).
“Effectively, it’s an uber-platform,” Dagan said. “It’s a collaborative platform where if someone has an idea for a pitch in their minds, we can capture that information, capture the starting point for the story and we can follow the story’s lifecycle through the entirety of that lifecycle until it gets to archive.”
Dagan said the Super Desk allows CBS journalists to more easily extract data and understanding from stories that CBS is covering and lets “the whole organization knows what’s going on,” whether it’s a new confirmed fact on a breaking story or a new piece of video that been cleared for use. There are more than 3,000 users on the Wolftech-based system today across the CBS News and Stations division, digital and social properties, CBS Radio and “other parts of the Paramount world,” he said.
Dagan said the Super Desk is helping to meet CBS News and Stations CEO Wendy McMahon’s goal of having “content flow like water” across the CBS organization by making it much easier to find, share and output content.
“Previously we had different editing systems, different MAMs, different on-prem, cloud-based, hybrid solutions depending on the location,” Dagan said. “This has made that irrelevant, effectively.
Collaborative Change For The CBC
CBC News is on a path to create a Super Desk-like system of its own to foster better collaboration between the CBC network and its local stations, said Marc Lefebvre, senior director of operations, CBC News. The Canadian broadcaster is working on the process and tools aimed at “giving us visibility across the entire organization so everyone can see what everyone is intending to do so we can better coordinate our efforts.” He said CBC is perhaps 18 months behind where CBS News in its development process.
But Lefebvre added that changing the mindset among CBC employees about how they go about their daily jobs is perhaps more important than implementing new software-based production tools.
“I remember being in a local newsroom 25 years ago in rural Canada, where the only sharing of content happened in these limited satellite windows every day,” Lefebvre said. “And there’s still a lot of thinking that guides people’s thought processes in local newsrooms still, that say we’re an island, we’re a city-state, we operate on our own. We’re not necessarily part of this integrated fabric that is the whole of CBC. And that’s the part that we need to address as we go through our journey to build our own Super Desk and start to integrate things from a product and process standpoint, is making sure people embrace the change so that we can leverage all the benefits that it can deliver.”
In the past a reporter might have strongly identified with a particular show or station, and valued the relative success of their day on whether they beat the competition to a story or got a thumbs-up from the newsroom. But today’s journalists need to shift themselves from motivators based on their “internal ecosystem,” Lefebvre said, and start focusing on success with audiences.
He cited an example of a FAST channel show, About That, which revived its fortunes with the addition of top CBC News network anchor Andrew Chang and has now become popular YouTube viewing for younger audiences. He said the About That production team now dissects audience engagement data with a granularity that he couldn’t have imagined just two years ago.
“Giving people the right motivators to chase, to encourage them to engage in the right behavior, is really critical,” Lefebvre said.
Story-Centric Workflows From Station To Field
Gideon Gilboa, chief product officer and GM for the Americas for LiveU, also sees the human element driving the new momentum behind story-centric workflows.
“What we’re hearing today from a technology point of view is not that new,” Gilboa said. “What’s different in the market is the sense of urgency. When you look at the latest election in the U.S. and the surveys show that 50% of the 18-30 year-old people out there, their first source for political news is social media, it’s really about staying relevant. What I see with all our major customers is that the story-based workflows that have been discussed for a decade are now becoming reality. People realize now that they have to move faster, and they are moving faster.”
As an example, he said LiveU worked with a major U.S. network to implement an end-to-end story-centric workflow just before the 2024 election. The system allows field crews to select specific stories on their LiveU units, assign the video that they send back to the station to that particular story with associated metadata and then feed the video “as a growing file in real time to the media asset management system,” thus closing the loop from the newsroom computer system to the LiveU unit in the field back to the media asset management system. During its election coverage this network recorded 4,000 hours of video this way.
“What it allows them to do is to share very easily between stations that were siloed with their own separate MAMs until not so long ago, and to speed up the whole process and to extend the story-centric workflow approach into the field,” Gilboa said.
He added that LiveU has also made some big changes of its own by opening up its systems to work with IP transport protocols besides its own proprietary LRT, LiveU Reliable Transport. LiveU now supports protocols like SRT and RTMP in its ecosystem.
“And we also integrate with people who may be competitors in some way,” Gilboa said. “Because in order to facilitate the full story-based workflow, you need to integrate with an NRCS, with a MAM, with other vendors. That is also something we have to change as an industry going forward.”
A Unified Set Of Toolsets
Marcy Lefkovitz, SVP of product innovation for Dalet, noted she was thinking about story-centric workflows over a decade ago when she was working for ABC News. While the concept isn’t new, she said both broadcasters and vendors have made implementing story-centric workflows feasible today after a little trial and error on both sides.
Lefkovitz said that historically when news organizations have talked about efficiency, that has meant reorganizations followed by layoffs. Unless the news organization also overhauls the production tools at the same time, this approach only results in the surviving staff doing a lot more work, leading to both a loss in morale and a drop in editorial quality.
“Now I think the vendor community, and Dalet in particular, has finally given newsrooms enabling technology so they can decide how they want to organize internally,” she said. “They can choose to continue to have separate teams if they want to, doing digital FAST channels and the broadcast world. Or can they decide to start to converge on the workflow side as well.
“But the tools are giving them are a unified perspective, glass to glass, from the conception of a story all the way through to the planning to the assignment of resources, to tracking all of that, tracking the editorial and the scripting. And then also to the actual production of the story, to the ingest of the video, the editing of the video and then the distribution of the content whether it’s in broadcast or to any of the other channels out there.”
Having a “unified set of toolsets” that brings linear and digital teams together then allows a news organization to implement “story-centricity however they want,” she added. How many different platforms a single journalist produces content for can sometimes be dictated by budget, but even with today’s flexible tools focusing on one platform may yield a better end product.
“I think that there is probably value for certain types of organizations in knowing the audience that you’re actually producing for,” Lefkovitz said. “A broadcast producer or editor who knows the audience for a network news show doesn’t necessarily have the skillset to producing videos for X or TikTok. I wouldn’t say that making everybody do everything is necessarily the right way to go.”
New Avenues For Avid
Avid has seen its customers focused on consolidating their operations to fight against revenue pressures on their traditional linear business while “trying to make up some of that delta” by monetizing digital platforms in more meaningful ways, said Ray Thompson, its senior director, partners and alliances.
“How does that manifest itself?” Thompson asked. “It really manifests itself in efficiency. It also manifests itself in driving collaboration as much as they can. Getting those teams to do more with less.”
For Avid, its focus became on how to achieve better efficiency and collaboration on its established MediaCentral platform. The company found an answer in Wolftech, which Thompson first came across years ago when he was working on a project with CBS.
“And over time we realized what a great platform it indeed was, as it relates to everything from pitch to delivery, regardless of what the delivery mechanism is, and all of the benefits it provides,” he said. “We’re very excited about what the possibilities are for Wolftech on an Avid platform, but also Wolftech just as a standalone application.”
Avid has also opened up its popular Media Composer editing system to easier third-party integration by introducing the Panel SDK, a language-independent solution for Windows and Mac that connects to a range of commands and functions through an integrated HTML5 panel and allows vendors and customers to integrate apps and services directly into the Media Composer editor. While Media Composer could support AVX plug-ins in the past, Panel SDK really “opened up Media Composer in a meaningful way,” Thompson said.
“To Gideon’s point, it’s vendors really embracing ‘co-opetition’, if you will, and allowing third parties to run on your platform for the benefit of the platform itself and the customer,” Thompson said. “You’re basically enabling workflows that in the past would have been really cumbersome or really hard to achieve or maybe not even possible at all.”
Thompson said the response to Panel SDK has been “amazing” and that 250 companies are working on panel integrations. He mentioned as an example a cloud-based workflow with U.K. firm Marquis that allows content to be brought as files with metadata directly into a Media Composer environment that’s on prem or in the cloud. The system works with the Sony Ci cloud platform as LiveU and Teradek.
“It allows you to bring in file-based media, the editors can start cutting faster because it’s a growing file,” Thompson said. “Editors then can create a sequence, and once the sequence is finalized, they then go out and request the hi-res media from Sony Ci, and it basically just brings in what’s in the sequence.”
