Tech Leaders Tout CMS, Workflow Advances

Demand for ever-increasing quantities of content to be produced faster for linear broadcast TV newscasts, station websites and social-media engagement more or less simultaneously has transformed traditional TV newsrooms, broadcast tech pros say.

As a result, they’re looking for content management systems and workflow solutions that will help their newsroom managers wrangle and organize content created at their stations for both linear and digital, as well as user-generated content from social media that often emerges as the first video that stations have available for breaking news stories.

“The newsroom has really changed dramatically,” said Del Parks, SVP and chief technology officer for Sinclair Broadcast Group, during a panel discussion Tuesday in New York on the second day of the two-day NewsTECHForum conference sponsored by TVNewsCheck.

“You almost live in two worlds now because digital is so important,” he said. “And yet, the traditional newsroom systems kind of just bolted on an access point into Facebook [and other social media sites], but it’s not the same as a content-managing system.”

When listening to what the tech panelists said, it was reasonable to form the impression that station newsrooms today have evolved into electronic reception centers for a variety of video content coming in from different directions at all hours — including raw video transmitted from news teams in the field via traditional satellite and microwave trucks or via so-called IP packs (using bonded cellular transmission technology) or even cellphones, plus video culled from social media and other sites.

To handle it all, and to direct the pieces to the correct work stations, broadcast operations are looking for “content-managing systems that can deal with both the linear broadcast and the stations’ digital requirements,” Parks said.

He noted that the Sinclair group developed its own content management system called Storyline that even he admitted doesn’t fulfill all of the Sinclair stations’ content-managing needs. “Someday we’ll get to Nirvana and somebody will build one,” he said.

At the heart of the content managment challenge is the need for speed. With ordinary people uploading video onto social media sites from the scenes of breaking news before broadcast news teams have a chance to get there themselves, the need to quickly find user-generated video before the competition does becomes paramount.

In fact, user-generated video has become a huge component of both local and network news, as almost anyone who watches these newscasts well knows.

“User-generated content is a huge part of the news workflow and news-gathering process now, and being able to find that content quickly through the various outlets out there — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram — and then bringing that into a centralized location by story was key for us,” said Fabian Westerwelle, director of news acquisition for ABC News in New York. Westerwelle was describing a “social media tool” developed in-house at ABC for this purpose.

The speed required to post stories quickly on station digital platforms, coupled with the need to always be generating video to go with them, has spurred an evolution in portable transmission equipment in the field and a trend toward increased automation in newsroom control centers, the panelists said.

The panel discussion, titled “Tech Leaders on the Issues,” delved into such hot-button issues as the continued viability and usefulness of elaborate satellite and microwave trucks. Under questioning by moderator Harry A. Jessell, editor in chief of TVNewsCheck, the tech pros said the trucks are still very important to their stations’ news-gathering operations, even if more portable means of video transmission, such as IP packs, are available and increasing in use.

“The ENG truck still has significant value,” said Joe Addalia, director of technology projects for Hearst Television. Addalia and other panelists agreed that a fully-equipped truck has benefits as a mobile studio with technology and creature comforts that can greatly aid a news crew in the field, particularly when they are covering a big story lasting a number of hours from a fixed location such as a fire or sensational court trial.

But Westerwelle and other panelists also agreed that the more portable IP packs have been a great help in covering news from all sorts of locations where the positioning of news trucks is wholly impractical. This is particularly true for a worldwide news operation such as ABC News, Westerwelle pointed out.

The tech pros also noted, however, that generally speaking, new technology usually winds up complementing the old more often than replacing it. For example, Blake Russell, SVP of station operations for Nexstar Broadcasting, admitted his department has not bought any new news trucks for a while. But at the same time, his stations are continuing to invest in maintaining their existing trucks — replacing transmissions and engines when needed.

“It’s never one thing,” Parks said about the various technological tools now in use in TV news gathering. “If you have a photographer with a camera that’s equipped with a cellular stick who shows up at a brushfire, he can stream that back right from his camera.

“But if that brushfire turns into a two-alarm fire, you’re sending your ENG van out. If that turns into a forest fire, then you’re going to send your satellite truck out. You’re going to build these assets just as if you were fighting a war. You’re going to send one guy in, then you’re going to send two guys in as the story builds.”

All of the choices of technology “just allow more people to contribute more content.… It’s about more content, and it’s about more choices,” he said.

To listen to a recording of this panel session, click here.

Read all about the NewsTECHForum here.