Better Tools Advance Story-Centric Workflow

TV newsrooms may not have yet achieved a story-centric workflow in their day-to-day operations, but new digital tools and more mobile- and social-oriented audiences are bringing that closer to reality.

Digital leaders at CNN, Tegna and the BBC said Tuesday at the NewsTECHForum that the shift was necessary, and pointed to their own incremental improvements toward story-centricity as evidence of its attainability.

Frank Mungeam, VP of digital content at Tegna, says that putting shows at the center of production is a decades-old and now outmoded artifact built for programming, not audiences. Those audiences are heavily on mobile now, and they’re using social as the distribution network for content that they’re finding on a story — not show — level. He points to The Tonight Show as a great example of a show reverse-engineered to make its deconstructed parts optimized for such audience-driven sharing.

At Tegna, Mungeam says, “Our view is if you change the tools, you disrupt people’s habits,” and he points to five such tools that have been particularly impactful to that end. They are:

• Crowd Tangle, which uses social as a listening tool and surfaces content getting above-average engagement on those platforms.

• Metrics tool Chartbeat, which gives stations a view of content performance not just at their own level but across the Tegna network.

• Videolicious, which has “changed the way we think about video.”

• Tagboard, which allows for social display on broadcast.

• Roku, where all of Tegna’s stations now have on-demand apps.

Mungeam says Roku’s most useful function has been to allow users to create their own newscasts based on content they want, and that it has been a boon to lengthening the tail of franchise content categories at stations, not to mention elevating non-commodity news with more of a storytelling emphasis. “It’s a much easier way to find the good stuff,” he says.

At BBC Digital, Robin Pembrooke, director of news products, says “Connected Stories” — or bringing the full story together so that it makes sense across all of BBC’s platforms — has become the workflow focus.

“Production processes haven’t really changed over the decades,” he says, so now the organization is developing common data models and incremental and agile improvements to its workflow and platforms toward a better-connected end.

One manifestation of that change has been a Linked Data Platform built initially for the 2012 Olympics. The platform allows personnel to associate any given piece of content with any given person, place, organization or story to better aggregate the full story across the organization. Another new tool, VIVO, enables content creation and curation organized around topics.

Next steps for the BBC are more organizational, Pembrooke says, bringing together its engineering, digital and worldwide technology divisions into a single entity.

Michael Koetter, SVP of media technology and development for Turner Broadcasting, says that at CNN, they thought they’d have been in a story-centric position two years ago. Digital, where newsrooms really need to pivot around a story, will finally hasten the shift, he believes.

“At CNN, we’re right at the point where we have to do this,” he says, acknowledging the difficulty of pushing through lingering broadcast cultures and habits to do so.

“I really want to challenge the industry to figure this out.”

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

Read all of our NewsTECHForum 2015 coverage here.