NEW YORK — Broadcasters have been wrestling with the challenge of producing news for multiple platforms for the better part of the past two decades. There has been no shortage of technology innovation in that time, from newsroom automation systems to storycentric newsroom systems to cloud-based editing. But delivering traditional newscasts while also producing compelling and differentiated digital content still remains difficult, despite much effort by both broadcasters and vendors at solving the problem.
The biggest stumbling block remains integrating the still-disparate systems and editorial personnel that produce stories for linear newscasts and digital platforms within most broadcast news organizations. Storycentric workflows have been touted as a solution for years. But most big networks are still rundown-focused, with legacy newsroom computer systems (NRCS’s) serving as their foundational tool and linking to multiple third-party systems to support digital platforms. The end result is a lot of tools that don’t play that nicely together.
Real help may be coming with the latest big technology innovation, artificial intelligence. AI is already used in news production to handle time-consuming tasks like transcription. But its biggest value may be in automating and integrating the existing systems networks and stations already have, according to top broadcast and vendor executives who gathered Tuesday at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum event on Tuesday for the panel “Technology Leaders on Optimizing News Workflows,” moderated by this reporter.
The adoption of storycentric workflows has certainly been slower than NRCS vendors expected, conceded Brian Hopman, VP & GM of workflow solutions for AP. He said that is because the promised time savings of going storycentric haven’t been fully realized, partly due to the “tool fatigue” that journalists experience in having to use myriad systems to do their jobs. Hopman thinks that agentic AI, which can automatically plan and execute multi-step tasks, can solve that problem.
Hopman said it’s great that journalists might have “17 different tools” to help them do their job, but vendors need to consolidate the interfaces to make it easier for them to figure out what to do. That is particularly true for new hires — he said customers he visits frequently complain about how long it takes to train new employees on all the systems they need to know to do their job.
This is where agentic workflows could be a game-changer. “I think it represents a full-on shift in just how software works,” Hopman said. “We’ve been used to a world in which we come in, and we have to push these buttons in all of these different software platforms, and then we switch between them in order to get our jobs done. And I think that future now looks like I come in, and the system is smart enough to know what I need to do. It’s anticipating some of my needs.”
Changes Coming For Bloomberg, ABC
Bloomberg is rundown-driven for its live programming but uses story-centric tools when producing for digital platforms like its apps and podcasts, said Dana Ucciferri, head of video and design, Bloomberg Television. And as the “life cycle of media” grows, she expects more work to be done outside of the broadcast newsroom.
“I feel like it goes from rundown to Slack room pretty quickly, and a lot of collaboration in there,” Ucciferri said. “I think over time, over the next few years, that’s going to come to a halt. And we need to figure out a solution.”
Bloomberg has already been using AI for closed captioning and transcription for several years, and in 2025 staffers also began using ChatGPT to help with writing emails and crafting scripts, all with human approval before publishing. A new project is testing an AI tool that allows journalists to search video with natural language, with the goal of making it easier to find archived material. Instead of having to first track down time code and file names, when a production assistant searches with AI, they are now automatically getting a sequence of video clips.
“You’re using this more robust tool to start your process much more quickly than you would where you’re finding file names and time codes,” Ucciferri said. “You are actually looking at content. And from our testing what we’re finding is that we’re getting content that we might not found from our archive, because we may not have all of that data. It’s really improving that, and we’re looking forward to rolling that out.”
ABC also relies on a rundown-based system for its linear newscasts, said David Gwinn, director of software solutions & system sustainment for Disney/ABC News. While he appreciates the value of storycentric workflows for multiplatform production, making the move in a large organization like ABC remains very hard.
“We all want to innovate as fast as everybody else here,” Gwinn said. “The problem is we have to support the legacy systems that we’ve been working on for years. So, you talk about storycentric versus rundown-centric, we’re not going to do anything that potentially could put our rundown-centric news in jeopardy. We have to have the team and the infrastructure to support that.”
Gwinn would like to see vendors push storycentric workflows forward by offering a solution “pre-baked” into their products, and perhaps by using AI to integrate rundown- and storycentric-based systems.
“We need a single pane of glass, we need to stop having ‘tool spread,’” Gwinn said. “I love that we have gigantic screens at all our desks as a tech person. But not everybody loves that. And if we can cut down on the screens that we have to stare at to get to the story and get it on air, that could really pay off big-time.”
People Are The Process
Listening to what journalists want from their news production tools is the responsibility of Gwinn’s colleague Jenna Kreindel, manager, product-editorial solutions for ABC News. Kreindel is helping guide ABC’s overall digital transformation by working with committees of internal stakeholders like producers and editors, such as in newsgathering or digital production, to design and refine workflows.
“Then I’m able to translate the business requirements and needs for our stakeholders back up to our vendors and our internal teams, while also serving as that bridge to make sure that what’s being built aligns with our goals and timelines and, of course, our workflows,” Kreindel said. “Because you can spend all of the time building this great technology, but if it doesn’t meet the needs of your users, and it’s not familiar to them, they’re not going to be adopting that.”
One of the shifts in modern multiplatform production is that stories often originate on the digital side, perhaps as a social media post, and then make their way to the linear newscast. That can present challenges beyond just upconverting low-resolution video, such as tracking down the source video itself while also ascertaining the relevant rights attached to it. But it can also cut down on duplication of work.
“A lot storycentricity is bringing together who’s working on this story at my company, and who else produced something for this?” Kreindel said. “What’s available? What was their script? What can I look at that’s already been done? What clips have already been cut for some of our affiliates that we can repurpose? And a lot of people just don’t know how to look for that. When they think of being assigned a story, they’re kind of starting from scratch, as opposed to perhaps looking at what’s already there.
“Searching through things is something big,” she continued. “I would assume, if it’s something you published on social, that you have that video in some type of management system that you can then search for. You can find out all the metadata and information that you need about that in order to properly use it for linear, especially from rights and restrictions. Sometimes you have digital rights to something, and you don’t have broadcast rights. There’s a lot that goes into being able to repurpose different kinds of content for different lines.”
A ‘Swiss Army Knife’ For Storycentric
Changing to storycentric workflows is a “big effort” for a broadcaster, said Erik Hauters, founder of Cuez. But he thinks his company has a solution with its “Storiez” software module, which he describes as a “Swiss Army knife that connects to everything.”
Cuez’ first product was a cloud-based rundown platform, Rundown, followed by Automator, a cloud-based automation system going after the same market as production automation systems like Ross OverDrive or Vizrt’s Mosart. Hauters said Cuez is up and running in about 100 stations in the U.S.
While Cuez has partnered with traditional NRCS vendors like AP, it has also launched a product that might compete with them in Storiez. The AI-powered Storiez is an NRCS and content planning system that breaks news stories into reusable blocks, such as text, graphics and titles, and lets the same producer repurpose them for TV, web or social without having to switch between tools. It is based on the MCP [Model Content Protocol] open standard, which acts like an API for connecting LLMs to external applications, and automates tasks like headline writing.
Hauters said that the story, not the rundown, is where content needs to start to allow for easy repurposing with AI. “What we find is that the rundown item that you’re preparing is not a good source for the story,” he said. “We are investigating another source of the story that is easier to publish in all these different channels, because most of the time the story starts online. The first thing you do when something happens is you put it on your website, and then you share it over different channels, and only then there’s your newscast. And so, we believe that the source of the story, the primary script, is something different than the rundown script as a good source for AI.”
About Glen Dickson