Avid History in Broadcast, Social, and Online News
News videos on TikTok. Viral posts on X. Driving traffic to websites to generate revenue and increase reach. Producing the nightly news show for TV and streaming it online live or for later catchup. Doing Facebook live events. Creating podcasts. Meeting audiences where they are, when they are available and on whatever device they choose to use. Delivering to FAST channels. The world of news is complex and ever evolving. Avid’s news solutions have evolved — and continue to — to meet these changing needs, now with the addition of Wolftech News to build on that rich heritage. But where did Avid’s history in broadcast, social, and online news all begin? Let’s take a walk back down newsroom memory lane, then a look forward into the future.
June 1988, and a very fresh-faced young reporter walks into his first job in journalism. At 18, having just left college in Edinburgh, Scotland, after doing a two-year journalism course, I began my career in weekly newspapers. The East Kilbride News was where it all began for me, in a small office in a shopping center, in the town just south of Glasgow.
A notepad and pen (my T-line shorthand was pretty hot in those days) for taking down quotes. A very large, and incredibly heavy, typewriter for typing out the stories (on A5 sized pieces of yellow paper, using carbon in-between two sheets so that you had two copies). The desk also had a large wooden block with a massive nail sticking out of it – health and safety would never approve that kind of nonsense now, where stories which did not make it, ended up on the spike.
A miniature tape recorder for recording interviews was regarded as the highest of high tech. and when the fax machine came in, good grief that was a revelation. No longer did you have to post stuff to people then hope it arrived, you could send something to someone almost instantly – though lack of faith in the technology to start with did mean that you would end up phoning them to check it had arrived, which rather negated the need to fax them the information in the first place as you could have just told them the details during the call. These were also the days before the widespread use of mobile phones, so when you left the office, you were totally out of communication – other than if you found a telephone box or booth – until you came back. Heady days indeed.
Technology transformation
But a revolution was coming, and not just for newspapers. The whole journalism industry was to be transformed by technology. As I neared the end of my two years in East Kilbride, the company brought in the first desktop publishing software, and the reams of paper were reduced as we moved into the electronic age.
As we headed into the 1990s – the decade which would bring us such revolutions as the Tamagotchi, Tickle Me Elmo, DVDs and some small tech startup called Google – change was afoot. And change was afoot for me as I moved from newspapers into the world of television, joining a company called Grampian TV in Aberdeen, Scotland. So here I was, moving into this high-tech world.
I walked into the newsroom to the distinctive thundering noise of typewriter keys thrashing against sheets of paper with a carbon copy!! While many other elements of TV production had fundamentally changed in the move to electronic news gathering (ENG) video cameras and moving away from two or even three person crews to single operators, the newsroom I went into (having just moved into the computer world in East Kilbride) felt like a bit of a throwback.
Stories were typed out then sub-edited (using pencils) before being handed to copy typists, who would then type up the stories onto what can best be described as a very large toilet roll of paper for it to then be put into the machine to enable the presenters to read it in the studio. If a story got dropped, then it was out with the scissors or a knife and the story was literally cut out, then the roll was stuck together with sticky tape and the show carried on. We even had a “rip and read” wire machine, where the stories coming in from wire agencies would chatter through all the way through the day, and if you wanted to get the info, it was literally your job to tear off the story and take it away with you as the machine clattered out the next incoming story.
While we now had mobile phones, the digital revolution in editorial tv production had not yet made it to the North East Scotland. But that was not the case elsewhere.
The electronic newsroom
Since the late 1970s, companies such as Basys were developing electronic newsroom systems. Indeed, without Basys, it is questionable whether organizations such as CNN would have been able to produce in the way they did when they went on air in Atlanta, in 1980.
It may have been done through a dumb terminal and now would appear incredibly clunky, but the sheer speed of making changes and responding to breaking news stories in a live running order for a show – gone were the days of the scissors and sticky tape – meant that news coverage could become more instant, more responsive. Combined with other developments in broadcast technology through the 1980s, such as moving away from film to tape, and then tape-to-tape editing; more portable, mobile camera units, and advances in satellite capabilities to go live from more places faster, this was a true revolution.
So while in many ways, by 1992, when Grampian TV introduced Basys to the newsroom in which I worked, we could have been seen as being late to the party, it still represented a massive leap forward in how broadcast news was produced. Wire stories were now being delivered electronically, too – so at least the newsroom was a bit quieter without the constant “bap, bap, bibbety, bap, bap” of the rip and read chattering away almost nonstop.
Avid was, of course, leading the way in the non-linear editing realm, and collaboration across the media production business has always been at its heart, so in 1994 it made two strategic acquisitions which would transform the newsroom business. It acquired Softech, maker of NewsView, and then Basys from the Digital Equipment Corporation. As Basys had an impressive customer list of major worldwide news organizations, it became the key focus for Avid development in this area.
Under Avid’s ownership, Basys became first Avid NetStation and then, in 1997, AvidNews. In 1998, Avid and Tektronix entered into a relationship to market systems with a combined product mix into the broadcast space. As part of that relationship a joint venture was formed between Avid and Tektronix merging AvidNews and Tektronix NewStar into one company, called AvStar. The former AvidNews product was rebranded also as AvStar.
This is where I then got my first training on a new operating system called Windows – yes, honestly kids, there were days before Windows – because we were about to introduce AvStar into our newsroom, in 1998. While Basys had been a leap forward, Avstar was like going supersonic. Just having to get used to using a mouse and multiple panels in a UI was bizarre! Like the introduction of any new technology, initially it slowed us down as we had to get used to what it could do, but once you became familiar with it, linear TV news production would never be the same.
With integrated wire services, drag and drop to move stories around, or to move them from one running order to another, with multiple windows you could open to look at different running orders or rundowns simultaneously, and also with top line messaging (like Basys), it was quite incredible.
At the end of 1999 Tektronix revamped their business and moved their broadcast products out into the Grass Valley Group, including the stake in AvStar. At roughly the same time AvStar renamed itself to iNEWS, which also became the name of the new flagship product. At the end of 2000 the Grass Valley Group sold their interest in iNEWS back to Avid and the product once again became wholly owned by Avid.
But behind the slightly more mundane ownership and name changes, more revolution was happening in the news game. Multi-skilling was the buzzword. Fewer people were expected to do more. Technology advances were rampant and Avid was central to the developments.
Moving beyond text
By the mid to late 1990s, MediaServer was in use in some major news organizations. Resembling a fridge freezer in size, it enabled multiple Newscutter edit clients to connect to shared media and edit.
Increasing demands were coming for the newsroom and new ways of collaborating were needed. This led to the development of a solution called MediaBrowse, allowing news teams to schedule and record incoming feeds and journalists to do rough cut editing. Some may even remember the joy of the low-res encoding boxes, generating proxies in real-time with the high-res video (SD of course).
MediaBrowse had a basic desktop video browsing and editing software application, with modes which varied from view only all the way to editing with voiceover.
It also had the capability for journalists to add additional metadata, which, of course, no one ever did. So you see, it just goes to show that metadata entry has always been a problem in the industry, it is not just a new phenomenon. Maybe AI will sort this out once and for all. One can only hope.
The world of multi-skilling
Journalists were now being expected to edit packages as well as write them. Grampian TV, where I was, was to become one of the first stations in the world to deploy an end-to-end Avid system with centralized storage (Unity Medianet) with connected ingest and playout devices (AirSpace), which could be controlled electronically for ingest (Capture Manager) and playout (ControlAir).
The central storage had an asset management system attached (Media Manager) and journalists and editors could work on Newscutter (a variant of Media Composer specifically for newsrooms with connection to iNEWS and ENPS) to craft their stories for broadcast.
Similar to MediaBrowse, journalists could edit while a feed was coming in. No longer was there the anxious wait for the tape recording to finish so that it could then be grabbed from the machine and rushed into the edit suite to be cut. Then taken to another edit room for someone else to grab a shot for the titles or the teaser. Multiple people could work with the same material at the same time. Oh my god, this was AMAZING. News for Avid had moved from being about the NRCS to being about everything.
iNEWS could also connect to other devices so not just prompters could be linked, but video playout servers and graphics servers could also be connected. Using protocols such as MOS, studio automation systems controlling cameras, lights, and microphones could also be linked to the stories in the running order. If you made changes in the running order, these would instantly be reflected across all of these other devices. Drop a story with a video attached to it? The video would be removed from the playout rundown. Add a new story in as something breaks during the show, it was instantly there on the prompter for the presenter.
Digital disruption
But TV broadcasting was facing new challenges, and that was the growth of something called the internet, and subsequently by the rise of social media. TV News had always been a one-way conversation – here is the news which we are going to tell you about – now it was entering a phase where it needed to address audiences in new ways, and TV was only going to be one part of that.
I moved on in my career, progressing from reporting to producing then into management at Grampian TV, before I made the leap from behind the newsdesk in Aberdeen to the ranks of Avid, helping customers across the world meet the challenges they face in delivering the news to their audiences.
Avid’s news offerings continued to evolve. The asset management system, MediaManager, was replaced by Interplay – enabling hundreds of users simultaneous access to media – with desktop editing tools such as Interplay Assist and iNEWS Instinct. As storage systems increased in capacity, the role of the media manager grew in importance. Archive systems could be integrated so that rather than searching through library cards to find material, it was at the journalists or archivists’ fingertips.
iNEWS was still the central powerhouse for show production. Incredibly fast and responsive and with a rock-solid reputation for stability, but there was also a need to extend its capabilities beyond the newsroom itself. Remote connectivity became an option with the iNEWS thick client, even if internet connectivity could be spotty and unreliable, and then there came the first mobile app (Blackberry, yes really, and iOS) where journalists in the field could write their story on their phone direct into the rundown.
ControlAir was replaced by iNEWS Command. Capture Manager was superseded by Interplay Capture. Both had greater capabilities than their predecessors, with the ability to control many more channels. Nothing stood still.
Interplay itself was changing, as the industry moved toward more lightweight tools, accessible through a web-browser rather than through an installed, thick client. Interplay Central, unlike Assist or Instinct, no longer required a massively powerful machine to run it. It was just a web page, with a flexible layout, and it included the ability to edit video, record voiceover and write scripts all together.
Social media teams were, in those days, regarded as something of a separate beast. The main newsroom – still heavily focused on the nightly show – did not really get what all of this stuff was about. As a result, many of the teams were siloed, disconnected from the wider team. This was where some concepts around story-centric news would emerge.
Collaboration redefined
Now story-centric means many different things to many different people – but let’s take it at its most basic sense. The story is the heart of everything. And that story will have many different distribution points – TV, radio, online, social (multiple platforms) - and different versions to meet the needs of each of those platforms. What is needed is a centralized way of coordinating that news coverage and a central place where the raw materials for the story (wire stories, unedited camera footage, archive footage, etc) can be accessed by everyone who is working on it. Avoiding duplication of effort, avoiding confusion about who is doing what and when, this approach is a much more efficient way of delivering coverage.
But, and there is always a but. This kind of change also requires a change in the mindset of the newsroom. Teams need to work together across the different platforms in ways that they did not before. The news team – for so many years the dominant force in broadcast news – needs to recognize that the 6 p.m. show is no longer the appointment to view show it once was, and that if a story breaks at 2 p.m. in the afternoon, the priority is to get that out as soon as possible on whatever platform you have access to. Story-centric does not mean simple. News has never been simple.
To meet these needs Avid has continued to develop further solutions. While iNEWS was renamed MediaCentral | Newsroom Management back in 2017, that rock solid reliability and functionality has remained at its core. At the same time, Interplay Production was renamed MediaCentral | Production Management. Interplay Central became MediaCentral UX, and then the user experience was significantly improved with the delivery of a completely modernized web-based application, MediaCentral | Cloud UX. It is more lightweight, more secure, faster, more responsive, and with significantly enhanced capabilities overall to cater to the growing needs of the modern broadcast organization.
There are many advantages compared to what existed before:
- Editorial teams can edit with up to four tracks of video and eight tracks of audio
- AI powered phonetic search has been introduced
- Multi-site connectivity brings teams together regardless of location
- Users have more power over settings with their own favorite folders, shortcuts, and saved layouts meaning they can speed through work more efficiently
- Multi-factor authentication adds additional layers of security
The Publisher app has replaced MediaCentral Distribute, delivering not just to web CMS systems but also to new social media platforms such as TikTok.
Returning to the theme of story-centric workflows, the latest exciting development is the acquisition of Wolftech, the Norwegian-based industry leader in delivering story-centric planning and publication. Wolftech News brings integrated planning, content sharing, project tracking, and distribution together for more efficient workflows between teams delivering to all of the station’s platforms.
Key to Wolftech News’ appeal is the fact that everything is integrated together. The planning department can easily see everything related to the story, as can anyone else. The journalist working in the newsroom can quickly see the planning calendar without the need to use a separate application. The editor in the suite can get notifications of what jobs need to be done. The reporter on location can track what is happening, update the status of jobs, and share their progress on the go. And much, much more.
Wolftech also enables customers to get more insights into their business, enabling further efficiencies to be driven within businesses. And as we all know, the business of news is one which is under significant pressures, not least financially, to ensure they remain relevant and adaptable to changing audience needs.
Work is now ongoing to fully integrate Wolftech News with the wider Avid newsroom solution – bringing the best storycentric workflows together with the best collaborative story-writing and video editing production systems in the business.
Yes, and iNEWS is still there, though it was renamed to MediaCentral | Newsroom Management back in 2017, the iNEWS name just sticks. It continues to quietly and effectively deliver those core linear TV workflows which are often now taken for granted, but in reality still play such a significant role in a broadcaster’s output, delivering revenue for commercial broadcasters and reach for public service organizations. It’s available in MediaCentral Cloud UX, too, through the Rundown app, and the UI of the thick client is being updated to deliver a more modern look, with light and dark themes.
The newsroom market has changed massively since those days of the typewriter, copious amounts of paper and the spike, and Avid has changed massively, too. The newsroom computer system remains a key component, but it is just one element of a much larger, more integrated story. Avid history in broadcast, social, and online news is deeply intertwined with newsroom industry development. Avid’s recent developments — such as the acquisition of Wolftech — continue to move the industry toward the future, with a shared, collaborative space where teams can contribute and deliver to wherever the story needs to go.
As for me? Well, more than thirty-five years since I walked into that newsroom in East Kilbride, I still love the thrill of a breaking news story. It is the one thing which still makes me hanker to be back at the center of the newsroom once more, but then I remember that when I joined the newsroom I had hair, and when I left I had none, and that all of those stresses and strains of getting the show out of the door probably contributed to that!! So it is probably best I leave it to the next generation of journalists to enjoy the benefits of what Avid brings to a solution that has expanded far beyond the text on the prompter.
Why not check out the latest Avid innovations in news, available today.
Craig Wilson
Craig Wilson is a newsroom specialist with more than thirty years of experience in the broadcast industry. Craig has held various roles with Avid and is now the Global Media and Cloud Product Evangelist and host of the Making the Media podcast.