Newsroom Workflow Evolution Crucial

One day, Michael Koetter walked into the CNN newsroom and found a piece of paper taped to a journalist’s computer monitor with 25 different log-ins written on it, recalls the Turner Broadcasting SVP of engineering and operations.

That was the day Koetter, one of four broadcasters on the “New Workflows, New Rules, New Tools” panel at the TVNewsCheck/SVG NewsTechForum in New York City yesterday, says he knew there were too many silos of information journalists must comb through to get the media and other elements needed to do their jobs.

“Once you are into the systems, you are in lots of more silos of data,” says Koetter. “So we stepped back and thought, ‘How can we make the act of journalism less about jumping through technical hoops and more about telling a story?’ ”

Koetter was joined on the panel by Blake Russell, SVP of station operations, Nexstar Broadcasting; Del Parks, VP engineering and operations, Sinclair Broadcast Group; and Peter Brickman, chief technology officer, WNET New York. While each had a unique newsroom workflow story to tell, they all share the common goal of finding technologies that make it easier, faster and less expensive to produce news for TV and digital platforms.

During his presentation, Koetter explained CNN’s effort to create a platform that brings the different pieces of the news production cycle into one place.

The news network developed a system based on an HTML browser to tie together all of the different systems around the production process. The result is a unified look and feel that gives journalists access to the editorial resources they need without having to log-in to multiple, discrete silos of data.

Russell echoed Koetter’s comments: “I’ve had many discussions with vendors about what I call the one-screen approach. I believe the NRCS [newsroom computer system] has to be one master serving all. Right now it is far from that.

“You should be able to have one screen that handles scripting, social publication and video distribution.”

However, unlike CNN, Nexstar does not wish to develop technology to address the problem. “In reality, while we may own umpteen television stations, we are not in the business to develop our own technologies and support them,” Russell says.

Rather, Nexstar wants to be able to rely on a vendor to manage the implementation and integration of its newsroom products as well as provide service and support, he says. “Content is the big thing for Nexstar. We use our unique regional footprint to drive content.”

During his remarks, Parks harkened back to the days of film in TV news to illustrate how important technology historically has been to TV news and how workflows have grown up around it. “Workflow in our newsroom has changed dramatically, and young people today who come into this business expect it to be changed,” he says.

They enter the profession of television journalism with the expectation that they will take their camera and laptop into the field and begin reporting news, Parks adds. They are eager to use the technology and have embraced new tools, such as IP newsgathering backpacks, which Parks says have “been handed out like candy.”

With 61 news operations and hundreds of local journalists, the central workflow challenge Sinclair faces is sharing content among its news-producing stations, Parks says.

“The backbone of our distribution has been 100 Mbits sitting on an MPLS [multi-protocol label switching] system that we trade stories on every day,” he says. “And sitting inside that is a product called Emerald from MassTech. That is our archive system, and that is how we trade stories.”

At WNET, new technologies have enabled the public broadcaster to produce nightly news for its New Jersey channel NJTV and PBS NewsHour Weekend “on a micro budget, says the public station’s Brickman.

“We have been amazingly challenged with the budgets,” he says, “but we have been able to make it work through use of the emerging technologies.”

Brickman credits LiveU for news contribution from the field; the Dalet newsroom automation system, “which puts everything together”; and Aspera to move files with helping WNET to “push out a large amount of content for traditional channels and all of the digital ones” on a tight budget.

During the panel, CNN’s Koetter said one of the next big things on the network’s newsroom workflow agenda is a rethink of the newsroom computer system. “It’s a 40-year-old data model. It goes back to typewriters. It is fundamentally the same backend that we had when we had a command line system called Basic many years ago,” he says.

The future of digital journalism requires a much more sophisticated data model, says Koetter. “We are really trying to think about how we can get to where we need to be around this idea of story-based production. How we can pivot around a story on all platforms?”

Media Object Server, MOS, the thread that ties together the technology driving today’s newscasts “has been a wonderful thing,” he says. “But I don’t think that would be what I would choose to build a brand new newsroom system today,” says Koetter.

Perhaps newsroom systems can be built with content management systems as the centerpiece in the future, Parks says. That approach could make it easier for broadcasters to satisfy demand for news on all of their distribution platforms.

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

To read more stories from the 2014 NewsTECHForum, click here.