Why NBCU and ABC News are adopting story centricity
Executives at NBCU and ABC News talk with Qvest at NAB New York about their journey toward story-centric news programming
The news landscape is evolving rapidly. Organizations like NBCU Local and ABC News are modernizing their newsrooms by organizing workflows around individual stories – not the shows or channels where each story will appear. Executives from both companies met with Qvest to talk about how a story-centric approach will allow their news teams to generate higher quality stories, more rapidly and efficiently than ever.
At the recent NAB conference, newsroom transformation was the topic on everyone's mind. How can large organizations stay relevant in a news environment that appears to evolve by the minute?
During a panel moderated by Qvest's AVP of Broadcast Transformation, Raghu Srinivasa, executives from NBC Universal and ABC News discussed their ongoing efforts to transform their news operations.
For both NBCU and ABC News, a key to transformation is moving away from today's channel- or show-centric approach and toward creating workflows around stories that can be shared across multiple channels and shows.
Breaking down internal silos
Modern newsrooms are working to address three major pain points, says Jamie Simmons, senior director of content technology for NBCUniversal Local.
The first is a lack of collaboration between internal teams. Under a traditional show- or channel-centric approach, different reporters are often working on the same stories at the same time, leading to redundancy, wasted effort, and slower news reporting.
"We have journalists creating content for different platforms who don't understand what other journalists in our newsroom are doing," Simmons says. "That's because they're not seeing each others' work."
Another pain point is the increasing volumes of archival and live video footage news producers must sort through to put together a story, adds Fabian Westerwelle, vice president of product and strategy, production & operations, for ABC News.
"Real-time content is coming in so fast that it's not easy to track what's available for any particular story from the multitude of sources we have access to," he says.
Westerwelle says a third challenge is that news producers sometimes struggle with quickly locating all the best editorial or assignment information for each story, resulting in some duplicative administrative and production work.
Seeking a single source of truth
Organizing broadcast workflows around stories can maximize content sharing, visibility, and collaboration across all units within a news division, says Simmons.
In a story-centric environment, you're organized around the story, not where it's going to be published or aired," he says. "But you need all of your information in one place to maximize collaboration and content sharing. With the right tools in place, someone who works for linear TV could see what someone else is doing on TikTok and think, 'That's really cool, let's use that.'
By having a single source of truth for editorial information and media content, story centricity also allows news teams to customize stories for different audiences, Westerwelle adds.
"We can create different types of outputs for social media, broadcast, and real-time streaming and organize them all in one place," he says. "That leads to a more dynamic experience for our over-the-top and direct consumer applications, enabling us to serve up the right pieces of content to the right people at the right time."
Another benefit: A centralized approach can improve the organization's ability to gather analytics and determine what types of content perform best for viewers, Westerwelle notes.
Getting buy-in from stakeholders
But uprooting and replacing disparate Newsroom Computer Systems (NRCS) that have been in place for decades, and integrating new technology into ongoing workflows, is no trivial task. Simmons says NBCU is still trying to identify the right vendors and platforms that can do everything their news organization needs.
Yet a bigger hurdle may be persuading veteran news production teams to adopt new ways of working.
"The change management challenge is huge," Simmons says. "The only way to get over that hurdle is to get the right stakeholders involved in your proof of concepts, make them part of the feedback process, and ask them to define how the system should work."
Westerwelle adds that getting buy-in from users like journalists is essential. This means selling reporters and producers on how a story-centric approach makes it easier for them to produce higher quality stories, faster and easier than before.
"You can't just come to them and say, 'Hey, we're rolling out story centric'," he says. "If we're not making their lives easier and their work more creative, it's not going to be effective and it won't be adopted."
Partnering for the long haul
The news cycle is relentless and unending. News organizations can't stop to integrate new workflows and relearn how to report stories. They've got to rebuild the engine while traveling at full speed.
Choosing the right technology partners is key to making transformation work.
In a modern software-based production environment, we need a solution that integrates into all of the complex production environments and systems we use," says Westerwelle. "It's critical to find tech vendors that we can collaborate with over the long term to help us evolve this environment.
Learn more about how a story centric approach can transform your newsroom.
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