Getting the mojo working – news workflow finally comes together

by Ed Casaccia, 02.11.2010

The industry has been talking about improving the workflow in television news for 20 years or more. It is perhaps worth taking a moment before we start to consider what this actually means.

News is seen by broadcasters as a way of establishing a strong sense of identity. Viewers will choose their preferred source of news, and tend to be largely faithful to them. If it is your news output that is the preferred source, then you have a good chance of retaining that audience through other programming too.

Why do audiences prefer one news broadcaster over another? To succeed, you must deliver the news accurately, with a great deal of authority. Reporters must know what they are talking about and complex stories should be covered from a number of angles, perhaps meaning more than one reporter on the story.

The final requirement for news is that it must be fast. When a story breaks you have to be there and get the report back for the next bulletin. However polished the package, if the rival network beats you to air then you are not properly serving your audience.

It is a desire to meet these challenges that has advanced the technology. 30 years ago news gathering made the big jump to video from film which needed an hour’s processing before the editing could even start. 20 years ago saw the start of collaborative working, with the networking of word processors to build newsroom computer networks which allowed wire feeds to be distributed and scripts to be shared.

10 years ago servers meant that video could be available to more than one user at a time. And since then we have developed cameras which record onto non-linear media to speed up or even eliminate the ingest time so users can get at the pictures and sound even faster.

These have all been major advances which have, each in their unique ways, delivered against the fundamental requirements of news broadcasting.

Achieving the goal of implementing file-based workflows, in which all content is available to everyone in the newsroom more or less instantly, has been the great step forward. Newsrooms operate by sharing. Journalists do not want or need to go everywhere to collect all the information they need. Some of that information will be in the archive, some in library shots, some will be prepared by colleagues, and some may come from external services.

The ability to access all of this content, however it was originated, is the great benefit of tapeless technologies and connectivity in the newsroom. Journalists can tell the story in their own way, pulling in information from all of the resources of the broadcaster.

Out of the newsroom

But there is still a fundamental limitation on this as a solution for news. Being able to share information around the newsroom is terrific – but that is not necessarily where you need it.

It is an inescapable fact that news very rarely happens in the newsroom. If television journalists are in the newsroom then they are not out gathering news, which means one of two things: either you are heading for a very thin edition of your main evening news programme, or the big news of the day is happening right there in the station, and admiring the efficiency of your file-based workflow is probably the least of your worries.

So far the model for tapeless television news has been built on capturing the information then handling it really smoothly and seamlessly when you get back to base. But there are practical reasons why that is not necessarily the best solution, and why technology has to continue to advance. Most cities today, wherever they are in the world, suffer from traffic congestion which sits in the narrow range of slow-moving to gridlock.

Getting the journalist and the content back to the newsroom may be the big time-limiting factor, and in some cases the reporter may be forced to leave a story before getting right to the bottom of it, simply to be sure of getting to a desk to edit it in time for the next newscast or as a breaking event to interrupt programming.

Even if traffic congestion is not a consideration, it is an unnecessary journey with the carbon consumption that implies. Perhaps most important, the news director wants to see journalists out there gathering news, not sitting around in the office or spending large amounts of time on slowly moving highways.

The final requirement for the perfect news workflow, then, is to be able to take all those collaborative research, editing and publishing tools that are now established in the newsroom, and make them available anywhere. The good news is that this is now practical: a journalist can be more or less anywhere and still use all the functionality of the newsroom.

I think that is an important statement, and worth underlining. The technology now exists to take the tapeless, file-based news workflow out of the newsroom to wherever the journalist needs it.

There is a second and perhaps equally important point to make. This is achieved not because of any special magic on a Grass Valley newsroom system. It simply uses FTP and the ubiquity of connectivity. If you can plug right into a T1 line at the site you will be able to share content faster, but the functionality works precisely the same if you are connecting over a cellphone.

The important consideration here is making this access simple and seamless. The journalist in the field does not have time to waste on IT hacks and manipulations so, to concentrate on the business of gathering news there are huge advantages in implementing a Grass Valley newsroom system which will incorporate all of this remote functionality within the familiar user interface. With it, you can serve the newest breed of television reporters, the mobile journalist, or mojo for short.

Open connectivity

Because the Grass Valley Aurora newsroom system is built on open standards, we can easily implement remote connectivity. As bandwidth expands, this will continue to become ever more powerful.

Regular cellular technology can deliver assignment information or scripts to a smart phone. Windows Mobile software is available which talks to the Grass Valley Infinity camcorder to put the story and shot information into the metadata, so that however the content gets into the newsroom system it is already carrying the right tags. Apps exist to turn an iPhone into a prompting device.

Armed with a Wifi card, the journalist can access the asset management database of the newsroom, and search for content in exactly the same way as a colleague sitting in the office.

Grass Valley is working to give journalist in the field the ability to browse archive and library footage, and then transfer the browse resolution version of desired material to the laptop for editing wherever they are. There it will be available to intercut with the new material just shot by the field crew for publishing in the final package. The laptop editor will be given the option of pulling the full resolution version of archive or library material to the field, or sending the semi-finished product back to the newsroom include some low resolution shots and letting an unattended conform server in the newsroom add in the archive or library footage.

That minimises bandwidth in both directions, and puts complete control of the story in the hands of the journalist, all of this from the story location to get the latest and most up to date coverage of the story.

Where more than one reporter is working on a big story, the same connectivity will be usedd to ensure that each is aware of what the others are doing. The combined report can be compiled just as easily in the field as in the newsroom.

A variety of third party products are available to optimise bandwidth utilization between the field and station to best effect. Because content is transferred as files not in real time, sending HD from the field is not a problem, given enough bandwidth and/or time. In general, though, you will be sending back to the newsroom just the required content, not the whole of the shoot, so getting the completed story and selected material back to the studio will be fast.

Any content to air

Another trend that has changed the way television news is made is citizen journalism. Content is shot by members of the public, who may be passing as something newsworthy happens. These pictures might be on a consumer camcorder or even a mobile phone, but they might be critical to understanding the nature of the story.

The ability to deal with this content again depends upon open standards, but this time applied in a different way. The Grass Valley EDIUS editor has many tremendous features, but in this context the most important is its ability to accept virtually any still picture or video format, and combine it on the timeline seamlessly with any others.

The journalist in the field who wants to use some eye witness footage does not need an engineer, nor a rack full of standards conversion equipment, to ingest the content, because all consumer cameras and phones use standard USB or Firewire interfaces. Simply plug the device into the laptop, drag the content into the appropriate bin, and start cutting.

While video editing was once a complex skill requiring a great deal of experience in the equipment, today the basic skills are immediately obvious to anyone familiar with a computer, and video editors tend to be bundled with new computers today. If there is a challenge in news editing for the mojo it is to ensure that they do not take too long making it look polished. Field editors, like desktop editors for journalists, tend to be supplied with reduced functionality to minimise this risk.

Finally all the elements are in place. Given a well-designed system based on open connectivity standards, there is no reason why the journalist and crew need ever go to the newsroom. Shoot the story, cut it on location and send it back from wherever you can get online. With Wifi hotspots everywhere, that is not a challenge.

It means that the mobile journalist can spend less time sitting in an office processing material and much more out gathering news. The time has come for news directors to get their mojos working.




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