Next Gen News

The news media landscape like so much of our world today, is transforming and challenging news organizations in many ways. Issues facing news providers range from how to deliver better stories, create more efficient workflows, strengthen collaboration among remote teams, make a profit while delivering next gen news across multiple platforms 24/7, and meet changing consumer habits and needs. It’s enough to make the head spin.  
 
To learn about the changes taking place, the DPP, the media industry’s business network, launched the Tomorrow’s News initiative, gathering 50+ contributors from major news organizations across Europe, the Americas, and Australasia.  
  
The results of the discussions were compiled into a three-part comprehensive set of reports—What’s the News?, The News Business, and Making the News—that details the conversation about the newsroom of the future and how to prepare for it.  

This article is the first installation in a series of articles—summary report, newsroom collaboration, business efficiency, remote and distributed working, and cloud and hybrid working—that provide an overview of the DPP reports.  
 
“Every organization has its own view on how things should be,” says Raul Alba, Director of Product Management at Avid. “I’m really happy when news organizations talk to each other to share their view, to form a unified view.” 
 
The DPP approached Avid to co-sponsor the project. As a news solution provider for three decades, Avid helps news production teams adapt to changes in how news is created and consumed. Avid’s unified media production platform, MediaCentral, connects teams, tools, and media to create more content across more channels with speed and efficiency.  
 
Meeting the demands of 24/7 news consumption  
 
The modern newsroom is distributed with remote news teams reporting ‘round-the-clock, collaborating and sharing stories digitally, in addition to traditional media. Next gen news audiences are increasingly accessing news through phones, iPads, desktops, or social media and determining their own news feeds. The news industry has to go where audiences consume content.  
 
“We no longer own the means of distribution,” says Kamal Ahmed, editor-in-chief and co-founder of The News Movement. “So, we’re no longer competing with each other. We’re competing with anything you can do on your mobile phone, or any other type of screen. And that means that our content approach is going to have to change.”  
 
Keeping up with the increasing number of platforms to be covered with individually tailored content because the audience is everywhere will be an ongoing challenge. Audiences continue to rely on the news media to be a reliable breaking news provider. 
 
Newsroom collaboration 
 
With today’s complex news distribution process and news teams remote and dispersed, removing silos and uniting journalists, editors, and producers in a collaborative workflow is critical. The process of bringing teams together is being helped by the shift to a story-centric approach to news gathering, where linear, online, and social teams work closer together than before.  
 
One key benefit of this approach is that it can generate more content for more platforms. News can be found everywhere—newsprint, radio, TV, website, laptop, app, smartphone—even where people might not recognize they are actually consuming news. To deliver to those multiple platforms, news teams must be everywhere, too, not just gathering, but also delivering news regardless of location. This poses challenges for news operations around how they are organized, the technologies they deploy, and workflows they implement. They need to continually adapt to these shifts.  

At the BBC, the move to a more collaborative story-based approach required changing news production from being output-based to being story-based. In the past, content was produced for specific uses like linear news or social platforms using separate planning and communication processes that did not promote collaboration. The BBC unified the approach by narrowing down their process to one planning tool and one common tool for chat. 

Avid’s approach is to drive new solutions to meet these needs; to enable remote workflows and support distributed teams delivering from anywhere to any consumer platform with collaborative tools on mobile, on the web and in the office. 
 
Business efficiency 
 
Providing news to audiences across multiple platforms while maintaining high journalism standards and making a profit is challenging news organizations in many ways. To realize an income, news operations are exploring new income sources along with technology innovation like creating a cloud newsroom. 
 
“Diversification of our revenue is absolutely critical to continuing forward for another century. That is acknowledged across every facet of our organization, from news to product to technology,” says Sara Trohanis, Vice President, National, Latin America and Tech Partnerships for AP.  
 
As news production and delivery more closely resemble the software-based digital world, then so too will revenue models for news. Bringing the models of the digital world into the linear world of print, TV, and radio, for example, is about data. And therefore, it’s a very technical challenge. 
  
To continue to provide news to the biggest possible audience, topical content providers must be in the feeds of consumers—which is harder to monetize than traditional TV broadcasts and news bulletins. The challenge is getting journalists on board to help with finding ways to make money while maintaining editorial purity. 
 
Remote and distributed working 
 
Breaking down silos between traditionally different parts of the organization—on-air and online for example—enabling new workflows for remote and distributed teams , and making it easier to share content between teams regardless of their physical location, are ways that Avid’s news solutions have developed in recent years.  
 
While individuals can maintain specific skills in the newsroom, some multi-skilling will be required. As technology makes it easier for journalists and other users to manage their own tools, it is the crossover between technology and journalism that is most relevant. 
 
Reporters still must write well and be accurate under pressure. But today’s journalist must also be comfortable shooting video, using social media in news gathering, and data to tell a story. The expectation is that one journalist and their team in the field will deliver different assets for different platforms.  
 
Challenge brings opportunity  
 
Despite the complexities of the changing news production systems, Nathalie Malinarich, Executive News Editor, Digital, BBC News, and Kamal Ahmed see great potential.  
 
“It’s fantastic that we can find new ways of telling stories, but also that we find new ways of reaching audiences with news,” Malinarich says. “We do see lots of people interested in news and we just need to keep going at it.”  
 
“The distribution mechanisms are changing so rapidly and are so creative, it’s a wonderful time to be in the business of informing the public and doing journalism,” Ahmed concludes. “Because you can do journalism in so many different ways—way beyond anything I ever thought I would see in my career.”
 
Avid has been at the forefront of news workflows for more than thirty years. Our solutions, which are deployed globally by some of the world’s largest media organizations, encompass newsroom editing, storage, graphics, ingest and playout, and asset management. 
 
“Innovation is at the heart of what we do, and Avid is helping the industry to adapt to changes in team collaboration, content creation and audience consumption,” says Avid Product Evangelist Craig Wilson.  

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