Cloud-based newsrooms represent as big a change as the transition to file-based workflows 20 years ago.
Before 2020, the majority of news organizations treated the cloud-based newsroom as an interesting experiment. Now, for reasons that don’t need repeating, moving towards a virtual newsroom is no longer regarded as ambitious but necessary for business survival. Journalists and film crews found themselves adapting to a remote model, a completely cloud-based newsroom with its own unique set of workflows.
One of the technology vendors at the interface of the digital newsroom, story asset management, and cloud workflows is Dalet. It talks about how cloud-based newsrooms adopt a “story-centric” approach to deploying resources it calls “storytelling 360.”
“By having all sources, assets and tools clustered around a ‘story’ it is easier to produce multiple, platform-optimized versions because everything is to hand,” explains Raoul Cospen, Dalet’s Director of Product Strategy, News. “Without this approach, producing multiple versions would be more expensive and far less efficient. This approach will be at the center of all virtual newsroom operations, a story-centric approach understood and adopted by a majority of newsrooms and technology providers.”
“Newsrooms are under pressure to produce more and higher quality content. This means more work with smaller budgets available. When this is combined with an unprecedented demand for news (because of unprecedented events) it is clear that a new paradigm is not just ‘nice to have’ but necessary.”
— Raoul Cospen, Dalet
The transition to the virtual newsroom begins with the principal resources of a traditional newsroom: a Newsroom Computer Systems (NRCS) and News Production System (NPS).
“Another benefit, by design, of the virtual newsroom is its ability to be mobile,” says Cospen. “Your browser essentially works as a standardized portal across individual computing platforms. Pairing mobile apps with browser-based platforms allow news professionals to work on any suitable computing device, wherever they are, at short notice.”
The cloud-based newsroom offers many familiar benefits such as the ability to expand or contract scale of the enterprise at short notice and the ability to continuously develop and update the software-driven functions.
All of this culminates in a unified user interface, Cospen explains, with the potential of AI used to filter or “curate” incoming feeds and assets, watching for relevant material and offers it as a suggestion for inclusion in the story.
The company’s own system, called Dalet Pyramid, combines planning, news production, asset and resource management, playout and multiplatform distribution into a unified system. It’s capable of conventional news production as well as more mainstream formats like current affairs shows.
“Newsrooms are under pressure to produce more and higher quality content. This means more work with smaller budgets available. When this is combined with an unprecedented demand for news (because of unprecedented events) it is clear that a new paradigm is not just ‘nice to have’ but necessary.”