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Developing the next-generation television newsroom

Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By John Curzon

The transformation to a modern workflow can revolutionize the way news is produced, making it more direct, more dynamic and more relevant.

Journalists at ITV News in London take full advantage of the new file-based news facility. Photo courtesy ITV News.

The raw technology is not the issue. Moving bits and bytes around a network is well understood by everyone today. The real issue is the application software represented by those bits and bytes, and building the workflows that allow journalists and their editors to make the best possible news television.

The task for the newsroom system vendor is to look at the broadcaster's vision of how it wants to work and develop a workflow that supports that. It is a new way to approach systems engineering. It uses what people want as the basis to drive the technical pick list.

Some years ago, YLE — a Finnish pioneer in integrated newsrooms — presented a paper on its experience to the EBU. YLE stated that of all the issues raised in implementation, 10 percent were technology related, and 90 percent were people related.

ITN, which serves both the ITV network and Channel 4, recently installed a completely new system. Keith Cass, director of technology for ITN, did not look at this as an engineering project. It was a project to was design the newsroom by the newsroom staff. The implementation went so smoothly was partly because of good buy-in from all editorial staff.

This is good practice. Workflow champions help to design the system based on the way they need to work. This engages the senior decision makers as well the journalists on the ground. It encourages them to take ownership of the solution as early as possible, making it their solution, not something that a remote manufacturer has sold them. Finally, it feeds into the training program, ensuring that it is tailored for each individual user in the right context.

Thinking visually

One critical fact that is often overlooked in this debate is that television journalists must think in terms of pictures. If you do not have an idea of the visual elements of the story in the back of your mind at all times, then perhaps you should consider a move to print media.

When updating newsroom technology, buy-in from staff is essential. Photo courtesy Channel 4 News.

Of course, the vast majority of television journalists have learned this skill. So the logical extension of that is for the journalists (who have the visual structure of the story in mind) to put the story together.

Once the initial skepticism is breached, then journalists embrace this idea with great enthusiasm. Because they start thinking about how the finished story will fit together from the moment they set out, journalists change the way they approach the location, too.

Our experience, repeated over many installations, is that the amount of content typically shot for a news story is cut in half or more, simply because the journalist knows exactly what is needed. While media costs are probably insignificant, this represents real savings in time on location, time to ingest and time spent shuffling through the rushes looking for the right shot.

Some news operations will still shoot on tape, so you need an ingest stage. Even if you shoot on disk or solid-state memory, you have to get the content from the camera media into the newsroom so there is still ingest, even if it is then much faster than real time. The result is the same; all the content is available on central shared storage. Having all the content stored centrally and available to all drives some important technical and operational concepts.

News operations generate huge amounts of content, much of which needs to be kept forever because you never know what tomorrow's news agenda will demand. I will return to the topic of archives a little later, but for now it is clear that the storage sub-system needs to be able to expand readily to meet a growing need. The central storage network at ITN has approximately 160TB of storage capacity, corresponding to around 2000 hours of online material.