The benefits of a story-centric approach

Shifting to a Story-Centric Newsroom: Making Transformation Work

Shifting to a story-centric operating model can materially improve how news organizations operate – but delivering that transformation is challenging.

Legacy workflows, cultural resistance, and fragmented tooling mean most initiatives fail to deliver full value. At the same time, the pressure to evolve is accelerating: more platforms, more content, and tighter cost constraints.

Key takeaways

• Transformation is unavoidable: Newsrooms must deliver more content, across more platforms, with fewer resources.
• Story-centric working drives efficiency: Centring workflows on the story enables faster, multi-platform production.
• Collaboration and simplicity are key: Wolftech News and MediaCentral unify teams and workflows, reducing friction.
• Modernization must be incremental: New capabilities must layer into live operations without disrupting output.

One leading news organization who is pioneering story-centric ways of working is ITV in the United Kingdom. The country’s largest commercial broadcaster, ITV delivers both regional and national news, along with significant coverage across multiple digital platforms.

The network news is supplied by the international news organisation ITN. Their Chief Technology Officer, Jon Roberts, recently spoke with Avid’s Chief Product Officer Kenna Hilburn about how they are reinventing news workflows within the organisation.

Roberts summed things up, “The challenge is how do we produce more outputs in more formats than ever… the only way we’re going to do that is how we collaborate.”

Watch the full discussion

Why Change Is Now Urgent

News organizations are being asked to deliver:

• More content
• Across more platforms
• With fewer resources

Digital consumption continues to grow, while linear broadcast remains commercially critical. This creates a dual-operating reality that traditional newsroom models struggle to support. Digital is seeing significant expansion, with ITV News’ own platform registering more than seven billion views last year.

Avid’s news solution - anchored by Wolftech News and MediaCentral - is designed to address this challenge by aligning workflows around stories rather than silos.

From Silos to Story-Centric Working

Traditional structures separate broadcast, digital, and social teams, creating duplication, delays, and inefficiency.

A story-centric model - enabled by Wolftech News within the Avid platform - reorients the newsroom:

• The story becomes the core asset
• Planning, production, and distribution align around it
• Teams collaborate from a shared starting point

Roberts highlights the impact of this shift:

“We are far more powerful than any individual newsroom… but to unlock that power, we need to make it far easier to share media, ideas, and updates throughout the day.”

With Wolftech News acting as the central planning and collaboration layer, newsrooms can unlock that collective capability.

Simplifying Execution: A ‘Single Pane of Glass’

A major barrier to transformation is operational complexity.

Over time, newsrooms have accumulated disconnected systems for planning, scripting, editing, and publishing - forcing teams to navigate multiple tools to deliver a single story.

The Avid approach brings these capabilities together through MediaCentral and Wolftech News, enabling a unified experience.

“There’s a real quest for simplicity… how do we keep the capability but make the experience much more straightforward?” said Roberts.

The “single pane of glass” model delivers on this by providing:

• One interface for planning, creation, and delivery
• Seamless access to assets and workflows
• Reduced need for context switching

Roberts added, “A journalist starts their day… and everything is in one place. I’m not context switching, I’m not dragging between systems.”

This directly supports faster, more efficient story production.

Intelligent, Context-Aware Workflows

Avid’s evolving platform - further advanced by innovations like Avid Content Core - adds intelligence to story-centric workflows.

Avid’s Chief Product Officer, Kenna Hilburn, highlights the importance of data-driven systems:

“Understanding the content, the workflow, and who’s working on it allows us to tailor the experience, just giving people what they need when they need it.”

Within Avid’s architecture, this enables:

• Role-based experiences
• Workflow-aware tooling
• More efficient interaction with complex systems

This intelligence is critical to scaling story-centric operations across large, distributed teams.

Refocusing Newsrooms on Storytelling

A key benefit of Avid’s story-centric approach is the removal of operational friction.

Through Wolftech News’ integrated planning and MediaCentral’s production tools, journalists can stay focused on editorial work rather than process overhead.

“No journalist got into the industry to copy and paste between systems or manage logistics,” said Roberts

By embedding story development, scripting, and asset management into a single workflow, Avid’s solution enables teams to focus on output quality and speed.

Collaboration Built Into the Workflow

Story-centric working depends on collaboration being intrinsic - not layered across disconnected tools.

Wolftech News serves as the collaboration backbone within the Avid ecosystem, enabling teams to:

• Share updates in real time
• Coordinate resources and coverage
• Maintain a single source of truth for each story

“We want more of our journalists’ work happening inside producing content, and less in coordination, such as emails, message groups, phone calls,” Roberts added.

This reduces duplication and accelerates decision-making across the newsroom.

Transforming Without Disruption

Newsrooms cannot pause operations to transform.

Avid’s approach is designed for incremental modernization - allowing organizations to adopt Wolftech News and MediaCentral capabilities alongside existing systems.

“You don’t have the luxury of stopping… we layer innovation on top so teams can just get their story to air,” said Hilburn.

This enables: 

• Continuous output during transformation
• Reduced risk
• Faster time to value

Knowing where to start is half the challenge. This ten-step readiness checklist turns that incremental approach into something concrete — a way to assess where your newsroom stands today and where to layer in change first.

The Bottom Line

A story-centric operating model - enabled by Avid’s integrated news solution with tools such as Avid Content Core, MediaCentral and Wolftech News - is not just a workflow improvement. It is a strategic shift.

It allows organizations to:

• Scale output without scaling complexity
• Align teams around a shared story lifecycle
• Reduce friction across planning, production, and publishing

In a media environment defined by speed, scale, and fragmentation, this shift is becoming essential.