Story-centric workflow
Oct 1, 2010 12:00 PM, By Raoul Cospen
The change in method is philosophical as well as technological.
Antena 3 in Madrid, Spain, chose Dalet Enterprise Edition for its newsroom production system. The software includes a broad range of production tools and MAM functions.
Anyone who has spent time in a television newsroom as airtime approaches will tell you that the word “busy” doesn't really begin to describe it. The film “Broadcast News,” made in 1987, accurately captured the panic caused by late material as journalists and production staff battled to get it on the air ahead of the competition, despite all the obstacles put in their way by human frailty and unhelpful technology. It was amusing on the big screen, but it was — and still is — a lot less funny when you have to live it.
It has been almost 25 years since that film was made, but many of today's television journalists will readily recognize the world it portrays. The truth is that in many of today's broadcast newsrooms, working practices have still not quite caught up with the opportunities offered by new technology nor with the new requirements imposed by evolving business models for broadcasters.
A new way of working, in both technology and workflow terms, is not only possible but profoundly necessary. It's called story-centric workflow.
To understand why this is so different, let's look back at how TV news has traditionally been put together.
Figure 1. The story-centric newsroom draws on many sources to build a story.
Select figure to enlarge.
In the past, the work of creating news items and getting them on the air had to be divided up. There were a number of reasons for this, such as time pressure. Breaking an item down into separate small elements, each of which could be done quickly, meant (in theory) that the whole process would take less time to complete.
Also, people had different functions. For example, journalists wrote words but didn't edit video. That was the job of a craft editor using complicated and dedicated tools that required special training (and usually membership of a specialist trade union). Production and playout were separate functions requiring quite different teams of people with individual skill sets.
All the distinct elements of a given story — moving pictures, stills, graphics, subtitles, voice-overs, prompter text and so on — were created and stored in different places, using different systems that had little or no connection with each other, making any kind of repurposing difficult or impossible.
The old way
All of this was labor-intensive, inflexible and error-prone. At the heart of the operation were a series of separate “containers,” tapes with video or audio, scripts with words, and above all lists. The lists consisted of assignments, stories, scripts, video packages, graphical elements and audio clips. Playout was achieved by coordinating the lists and the simultaneous operation of all of the separate systems in what was a complicated process involving highly skilled specialist operators.
Moving creative tools from dedicated hardware to the desktop helped make the story-centric workflow possible.
Late changes were possible but usually extremely difficult to achieve. Inserting a new story into an existing running order involved updating multiple lists simultaneously and then managing their coordinated playout, and it all had to be done with split-second accuracy.
When the program was over, all of the elements went back into their separate piles. To reuse a story, broadcasters had to access all the separate stores (if they were available) and reassemble the story as it had been transmitted. Then there was the matter of searching, which was even more difficult.
While enormous changes have taken place in the tools and techniques available to broadcast journalists, it's surprising how many of the old ways persist. It is much harder to change working habits than it is to update technology, and the innovations of the last decade or so have created their own issues and introduced new complexity, without necessarily changing the mind-set — or, crucially, the underlying workflows — of the people who manage and staff newsrooms. Change delivers enormous benefit to today's news organizations, but they must work to adapt and make the most of it.
Here are the most important evolutionary factors in broadcast news production, each with its advantages and challenges.
The new way: a story-centric approach
The story-centric approach to newsroom workflow exploits all of the innovations, evolutions and philosophies discussed to realize both efficiency and business benefits. The story becomes the basic unit around which management and creativity are organized. (See Figure 1 on page 34.) It is a virtual container that brings together all of the elements necessary to create, identify, modify and deliver a unit of news that can be delivered through many different channels. In other words, a story-centric workflow is not rundown driven but content- driven.
Figure 2. A story can be delivered in different languages from a single timeline
Select figure to enlarge.
A story's life cycle is one of evolution over time. It may begin with little more than an idea, an item in a news diary, an assignment given to a camera crew or a placeholder in a draft running order. As time goes on, and as the editorial elements around it develop and change, the story will include a variety of elements: video clips, audio voice-overs, subtitles, graphics and references to sources such as wire stories, webpages, contacts files or news agency feeds, all of which may be useful at some point in the future. Crucially, the story may also include a number of different output formats or templates into which the content elements can be fitted manually or automatically.
This collection of material and references can be managed and treated like a reservoir from which a number of different versions can be derived to suit differing audiences or to reflect developments in the story as time goes on. Rather than managing each element separately, as in the past, the story-centric approach allows all of the elements in the story to be assembled and managed together as one unit.
Dalet Enterprise Edition manages the full workflow from ingest to logging to rundown and playout at Antena 3 in Spain. There are more than 250 workstations at use in the facility.
These delivery channels illustrate another aspect of the story-centric workflow: automated processes to convert content from one delivery format to another, e.g. from a broadcast script to Web content, from one language to another, or into a templated format for an individual customer.
Another automated mechanism that is particularly adapted to 24-hour news channels is the concept of the wheel, a carousel of preproduced stories that are played out continuously, with the ability to update individual stories as news events develop.
In the story-centric process, each content item becomes a focus for the creative efforts of different people who can collaborate concurrently rather than wait for the previous step to be completed before they can begin their work. The story can be managed as a single entity from initial planning all the way through to long-term archiving. As the story evolves over time and is ultimately archived, all of its component parts and previous versions are kept together.
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