To meet these demands, most newsrooms have adapted their workflows to be more story-centric. This sees a shift from planning around broadcast rundowns to planning around the story itself to accommodate both linear and online news production—enabling digital teams to cover stories as they happen without needing to wait for a later broadcast. Newsroom technology has evolved in line with this, expanding the tool set to include News Production System (NPS), NRCS, Media Asset Management (MAM) Systems and Content Management System (CMS) to cater for the growing volume of media assets and online distribution.

But this complex web of tools contributes to fragmentation and silos between newsroom teams. So, is it time to evolve your newsroom technology once again?

Let’s explore how you can better align your newsroom technology with story-centric reporting through a new, centralized system that empowers digital and linear teams to break stories in real time, without relying on the other.

The Importance of Story-Centric Reporting to Modern Journalism

The way news is consumed and produced has fundamentally changed in the last 20 years.
With the rise of digital, audiences increasingly expect to engage with news stories as they break across streaming platforms, social media, and websites. Story-centric reporting empowers newsrooms to reach broader audiences and work smarter—repurposing content across channels to break stories as they happen, maximize reach and reduce duplication of effort for digital and linear teams.

So, how does story-centric reporting impact delivery for broadcast journalists?

1. Speed and Agility

Breaking news waits for no one. To stay relevant, journalists need to be the first to break a story. This means they need immediate and remote access to media assets, including archival footage and cloud-based editing systems like Dalet Cut to compile accurate, quality stories in real-time.

A story-centric workflow enables digital and linear teams, as well as journalists, freelancers and the many other news professionals to work on the same narrative at the same time, without needing to wait for the other. This means any updates and adjustments can be made at pace as new information becomes available, ensuring the story evolves fluidly across channels. Having access to modern solutions combining NPS, NRCS, PAM, and MAM into a single, story-centric platform provides teams with the assets they need to react quickly while maintaining accuracy.

2. Consistency Across Platforms

Inconsistent or disjointed narratives can confuse audiences and dilute the impact of a story. Journalists require tools that help them adapt stories for different formats without sacrificing the integrity of the message.

Story-centric reporting ensures that the core message is preserved across channels, enhancing the audience’s understanding and engagement. With the capabilities to ensure all relevant assets are connected to the same story, teams can maintain consistent messaging across all distribution channels and get the story out faster.

3. Collaboration Without Silos

Modern reporting demands that all newsroom teams including linear, digital and social work together regardless of their location. Traditional newsroom workflows often separate linear and digital production, leading to silos and inefficiencies.

Story-centric reporting breaks down these barriers by uniting all contributors around a single narrative giving all stakeholders access to resources, updates, and insights in real-time, so digital teams can produce stories before the broadcast is finalized and linear teams can incorporate digital insights—ensuring a seamless workflow between teams for more cohesive storytelling.

How to Align Your Newsroom Technology with Story-Centric Workflows

Although modern news production systems support a story-centric approach, digital and linear teams are often left using different tools impeding collaboration and efficiency. To capitalize on the story-centric reporting needed for future-proofing the newsroom, you need more than just upgraded hardware—you need an integrated platform that evolves with changing workflows. Dalet unifies the core newsroom technology of NRCS, NPS and MAM into a single, unified newsroom solution that integrates with your CMS to provide:

1. Centralized Planning Around Stories

To move to story-centric workflows, you need story-centric capabilities within your planning, NRCS, and production system. If you have separate platforms across your workflow you can suffer from misalignment and loss of connection to the original story.

Dalet’s unified news solution, Dalet Pyramid, combines your planning, NRCS, NPS and MAM for a story-centric news production approach. With all the tools you need in one place, your teams can manage all aspects of production from a central hub—maximizing access and collaboration. Centralizing your tools in this way simplifies planning, enabling teams to focus on the core story and not navigating disparate systems. This means digital teams don’t have to wait for a linear broadcast before covering stories as they break.

2. Multi-Platform Distribution

Today’s audiences expect news tailored to their preferred platforms. Meeting these expectations requires publishing to multiple distribution channels quickly and effectively.

Dalet Pyramid ensures that stories can be easily adapted and distributed to TV, social media, and digital platforms simultaneously. Linear teams no longer need to finalize a broadcast before repurposing content for digital teams—everything can move forward concurrently. With seamless CMS integration, stories can be published to your desired digital channel directly from the same system used for TV. This means that both teams can create platform-specific versions of a story without duplicating effort, allowing for broader reach with minimal delays.

3. Enhanced Collaboration Across Teams

At the heart of a story-centric workflow is collaboration and so breaking down silos between linear and digital teams is critical. Dalet Pyramid enhances collaboration through:

• Real-time updates: All contributors can access the latest version of a story, ensuring alignment and reducing duplication of effort.
• Remote Collaboration: Multi-user, real-time collaboration from anywhere on scripts ensures alignment, accuracy and speed to delivery.
• Shared media assets: By centralizing media storage, Dalet’s platform empowers teams to work from the same pool of resources e.g. digital teams can access archival content as a story breaks for accurate, digital-first stories, while linear teams can incorporate elements prepared by digital contributors into their broadcast like graphics or social insights.
• Cross-discipline integration: From social media managers to on-air producers, all team members can contribute to a single, cohesive story within the same platform.

By facilitating collaboration, Dalet’s unified platform ensures a more consistent and efficient story-centric workflow.

4. Simplified Media Access

Having quick access to media assets is vital for crafting impactful stories as they break, especially for digital channels where speed matters most.

Dalet’s integrated MAM functionality ensures that digital and linear teams have instant access to centralized media assets, regardless of location. For example, digital contributors working remotely can pull footage, graphics, or statistics from the archive without delay, streamlining their workflow and covering stories as they break.

Dalet: Enabling You to Focus on Storytelling

The mission of newsrooms has always been to tell impactful stories and in today’s multi-platform environment, technology can either be a barrier or an enabler.

When it comes to story-centric reporting, news systems often have fragmented tech stacks that force digital and linear teams to spend time switching between tools, managing assets and troubleshooting workflows. Dalet Pyramid simplifies newsroom operations by integrating planning, production, delivery and management, eliminating the need for separate tools and boosting collaboration between teams.

By centralizing these capabilities, Dalet helps you focus on what truly matters; delivering compelling stories as they break to audiences everywhere.

Ready to level-up your story-centric reporting? Request a demo.

The post Aligning Newsroom Technology with Story-Centric Workflows appeared first on Dalet.

A story-centric approach still includes linear news production, but subsumes it into a wider framework that’s also able to accommodate online, on-demand news production. Critically, this allows digital teams to start covering a story as it breaks, rather than waiting for the ‘10 o’clock news’. We’ve gone into more detail on these differences in our previous blog post: ‘Story-Centric Vs. Traditional News Production’.

Raoul Cospen of Dalet shared that “Today broadcasters are focused on telling the story as richly as it can be told on the platform it’s being published to“. As a story-centric workflow integrates all aspects of news production around a single narrative, this naturally fosters a more seamless and collaborative workflow—ideal for today’s fast-paced, multi-channel newsrooms.

In this blog, we explore how story-centric workflows not only support digital-first storytelling, but also incorporate traditional news production to create a unified, collaborative model for news teams.

How Story-Centric Workflows Optimize News Production

Let’s face it, news production can get a bit messy. The weight of accuracy and urgency can make for a multifaceted, complex, and volatile work environment. The good news? From small, niche operations to large, international news producers, story-centric workflows are leveling up the game in the following ways:

1. Covering the story when it happens

To keep up with ‘breaking news’ industry standards, digital teams need to be able to start covering a story as soon as it happens. Before story-centric planning, news cycles were often limited to planning around rundowns and linear workflows with the NPS and NRCS. Centered around a single story rather than an end point, story-centric planning includes linear news production while also empowering online news production so digital teams can share news as soon as it’s ready outside of broadcast news slots.

2. Driving collaboration and productivity

When the story is the common goal, linear and digital teams are more synchronized, tasks are streamlined, and collaboration and productivity rise. By focusing on a single story, a story-centric model enables teams to start covering a story through a preferred channel and coordinate coverage across channels, rather than having to wait for news production slots and repurposing the content after. This results in better time management where teams can update stories in real time—keeping pace with breaking news and effectively handling stories across multiple channels.

3. Reducing costs

Of course, a boost in overall productivity and efficiency paired with better time-frames can lead to significant cost savings for news organizations. Better collaboration leads to improved internal communication, and story-centric workflows help minimize errors and revisions required. What’s more, with a centralized platform, digital and linear teams can access the same content from the cloud—removing the need for file duplication and therefore minimizing media storage costs.

4. Enabling consistency and personalization

By bringing teams and resources together around a single story, a story-centric model allows for richer, more consistent narratives across channels. By centralizing planning, teams can maintain the story’s message but optimize the format and editorial content of the story for delivery to a given channel e.g. TV, radio, social media, and digital outlets. Creating consistent, quality content in this way translates to a coherent experience for audiences wherever they choose to engage.

Centralized Planning is Your Secret Weapon

For a smooth transition to story-centric workflows, you first need story-centric, multiplatform planning capabilities rather than just linear rundown planning. Secondly, you need seamless, instant access to content and archived resources. Many newsrooms have adopted separate MAMs or PAMs as they developed their operation and created digital teams. However, siloing asset management as a separate platform, away from your NPS and NRCS, contributes to siloed workflows and damages collaboration.

Aaron Kroger, Product Marketing Lead at Dalet, explains, “The challenge newsrooms face today is finding ways to make their digital teams take the lead for their own stories, working collaboratively with broadcast teams, all within the same newsroom media asset management platform”.

By combining your NPS and MAM capabilities into one solution, you gain a central platform for both access and collaboration. This enhances your ability to carry out centralized planning—allowing digital teams to cover stories as they break and for linear teams to utilise the efforts put in by the digital teams as well.

On top of enabling digital-first news storytelling, centralized planning also helps with:

• Collaborative production: By centralizing resources, teams can bridge traditional workflows with digital-first approaches and collaborate more effectively on each story—breaking down silos between digital and linear teams.
• Digital workflow organization: With centralized planning, it’s easier to manage, display, and sort your stories across teams and channels.
• Multi-channel distribution: Centralized planning simplifies distribution by accommodating multiple versions of the story for different audiences and formats. With a unified system that integrates with your Content Management System (CMS), you can push content to reach audiences wherever they consume news.
• Personalized content: With access to a unified system, teams can leverage existing assets to tailor content for various audience segments, helping expand your newsroom’s reach and impact. For example, repurposing content to vertical video for delivery to social platforms.
• Improved production processes: A centralized hub provides visibility into task statuses, deadlines, and delivery requirements, improving communication and workflow processes across the production chain.

As with any major shift, embracing a story-centric workflow requires a change in both technology and process. To accommodate the scale and pace of online content needed in the digital space, you need a story-centric approach that untethers content from specific output channels and modernizes news operations with several unified planning, production and distribution tools for both linear and digital teams. This will provide your digital teams with tools to access media archives and produce content to schedule across multiple channels. Not only this, but you need to shift your planning process to center around a single story regardless of distribution channel, ensuring digital teams can cover breaking stories without being restricted by linear broadcast planning.

The best way of embracing this change? You need a unified news workflow environment, where your teams can produce, manage, and distribute content remotely, collaboratively, and seamlessly across all delivery platforms, maximizing both efficiency and impact. And that’s where we can help.

Suggested reading: For more context on the development of newsroom technology, check out our recent industry report – The Future of Newsroom Workflows: How the World’s Leading News Organizations are Redesigning Operations and Technology to Survive and Thrive

Change The Way You Tell Stories With Dalet

Our centralized solution Dalet Pyramid combines your NPS, NRCS, PAM, and MAM into a single, story-centric platform that effortlessly integrates with your CMS to distribute content across multiple channels. Through our market-leading MAM and workflow automation capabilities, we eliminate the challenge of complex technology stacks and bridge the gap between linear and digital teams—ensuring you can break news as it happens but maintain a consistent narrative.

Equip your teams with our centralized solution and adopt a story-centric approach at your own pace. Request a demo today and get the modern scoop on storytelling!

The post How Story-Centric Workflows Optimize News Production  appeared first on Dalet.

As a result, we have developed three solutions, powered by Dalet Pyramid, to expand the power of newsrooms running Dalet Galaxy. They’re all “plug-and-play”, which means that the software is ready to use without reconfiguration, making it easy to pick one, two, or all three solutions. The integration is seamless, bringing to life a combination of robustness and agility, with the power of collaborative, cloud-native, and web-based tools for remote and digital teams.

Let me share more details about these solutions.

Centralized Planning

One of the biggest challenges news organizations face today is visualizing and orchestrating work. This challenge is especially acute for:

• large media organizations with multiple TV stations
• news organizations with distinct teams for broadcast and digital
• newsrooms with remote and field journalists

In some cases, we see a combination of all these.

Dalet Pyramid’s Centralized Planning is a direct response to that challenge. It allows news organizations to visualize, manage, and assign stories at the corporate level using a powerful, yet user-friendly tool for multi-site, multi-team, calendar-based news planning.

Let’s dive in…

The planner solution is intuitive and easy to learn. The assignment desk can see stories across teams, newsrooms and multiple locations worldwide. This helps chief editors assess what stories to choose and prioritize while increasing multisite collaboration and effective decision-making.

Chief editors — whether part of the assignment team or producers — can also appoint stories to field journalists. The assignment desk can share links from Dalet Galaxy or any video-hosting website and communicate with remote journalists using the integrated chat tool. On the other hand, journalists can share their work progress and keep all teams up to date.

Being a cloud-native solution, Dalet Pyramid allows the assignment editor to work remotely. They can access scripts and rundowns stored in the existing Dalet Galaxy platform directly from a browser. This capability brings a new level of agility to teams, removing the constraints of physical locations.

But the Centralized Planning solution not only improves visibility between multisite teams and allows them to work remotely; it actually solves a bigger issue. It gives storytellers the ability to plan and craft stories from a planner rather than from a rundown. Why is that beneficial? Amongst other aspects, because it allows news organizations to simultaneously approach linear (TV and radio) and non-linear (OTT, social media, digital outlets, …) platforms. No need to wait for the TV story to be finalized to repurpose the content for digital platforms. Your digital team can cover an important story as soon as it breaks. This is a significant evolution from how newsrooms traditionally work.

Last but not least, rundown-centric workflows are fully compatible with planning-centric workflows. Newsrooms can evolve at their own pace. You can read more about our centralized planning approach in this article.

Remote Editing

Visualizing is crucial to planning and choosing what stories to cover, produce, and publish. But how can we actually produce content remotely, faster and more collaboratively?

Journalists often don’t have the luxury of time. They need to edit video while in the field, so how to access source materials, edit multimedia content, work with colleagues, and get approvals quickly and securely?

With Dalet Pyramid, we are bringing a state-of-the-art Remote Editing solution to our users. Our web-based editing software — Pyramid Cut — is more than just a tool, it is a fully collaborative ecosystem to produce and distribute content for all media types. In addition, creative teams can use Dalet Xtend to integrate Adobe Premiere© Pro© within the Dalet ecosystem. Video editors, producers, and journalists can simultaneously create and publish stories on digital outlets and/or TV, regardless of their location.

Let’s dive in…

A producer assigns stories to a field journalist — from the newsroom or anywhere else. Using the script editor within Dalet Pyramid, the journalist collaboratively writes scripts and can share video assets with the producer, video editor, or any other user that might be part of the project.

With Dalet Pyramid Cut the field journalist can upload rushes, access source content, edit a video version and collaborate with the team to create other angles or improve the final piece.

Then, the field journalist can get approvals and even publish the content directly on digital media, while different video angles are being edited to be placed in the newscast or published to other platforms. Meanwhile, a video editor can use Dalet Xtend to open the initial cut within Adobe Premiere Pro and enhance or repurpose for additional outlets.

Dalet Pyramid Cut, is a blazing fast, online multimedia editor that has been designed to produce TV, digital and radio news content quickly from anywhere. It is your perfect storytelling companion, from rough cuts to project creation, leveraging the MediaBin for collaborative workflows.

Digital Production

This solution addresses the needs of any news organization with digital production requirements. It combines the power of assignments, production, and distribution in one solution.

The challenge newsrooms face today is finding ways to make their digital teams take the lead for their own stories, working collaboratively with broadcast teams, all within the same newsroom media asset management platform.

The Dalet Pyramid-powered Digital Production solution allows news organizations to address these challenges. Your digital team, including remote staff and contributors, can access Dalet Galaxy’s content library and use existing assets to produce stories in each digital and social platform’s native format. This allows your organization to address the multiple expectations of your different audience segments.

Let’s dive in…

The user-friendly, Kanban-like planning interface helps digital teams to keep track of their work and have visibility across all projects. The progress of the story and the planning of each stage of the production process is also mapped out. The whole digital team is aware of what stories are being produced and which are in the queue.

Dalet Pyramid Cut provides a robust, web-based video editing tool designed for digital-first and remote content production. You can write your script, edit content, manipulate captions, record your narration, adjust aspect ratios, add digital graphics and publish your story, all without leaving the production environment!

Your digital team will also be able to pre-configure the solution to publish to different social and digital media outlets. They can also templatize graphics for different video requirements based on the platform, and even render the footage in Dalet Galaxy on-premises while editing from anywhere — using Dalet Pyramid Cut in the cloud.

This is just the beginning!

We have designed these next-gen news workflow solutions, powered by Dalet Pyramid, to provide a natural progression for newsrooms running Dalet Galaxy, expanding their workflow with new, value-added capabilities.

Available as subscription, these solutions will bring you smooth, regular updates as well as top-notch security, world-class support, and full scalability for you to meet the needs of tomorrow’s news operations, today.

Protecting your investment, preserving your flexibility, and investing in your future! What is not to like?

We cannot wait to start collaborating! Contact us to know more about how Dalet Pyramid solutions can help you to take your Dalet Galaxy newsroom to the next level.

The post Introducing Dalet Pyramid Solutions appeared first on Dalet.

While the rundown approach has reigned supreme for decades in news broadcasting, it does not always meet today’s digital-first, multi-outlet, and Storytelling 360 requirements in terms of work organization and planning. And that’s exactly what we are helping our customers solve with the Dalet Pyramid solution for centralized planning – a modern approach to news planning that is also compatible with a rundown-centric workflow, so newsrooms can evolve at their own pace.

Remembering Your Roots:
The Rundown’s Reign

When Newsroom Computer Systems (NRCS) emerged, workflows were centered around the “rundown”, also called running order in some newsrooms. With digital distribution (i.e. non-linear distribution) taking increased importance that requires an efficient news planning solution, the newscast is no longer the key and final product – we don’t see entire newscasts published on the Internet. Impactful stories are now the final products, and they need to be published on multiple, varied platforms to maximize audience potential.

For this reason, the notion of “story-centric” was introduced in the early 2000s. The idea was to manage stories individually within the NRCS, and to be able to redeploy stories across multiple platforms. In reality this has remained mostly a theoretical concept because most newsrooms are still organized around the rundown. Stories are, still, TV stories first, later repurposed on different platforms.

There are many limitations to this workflow: with such approach digital-first news storytelling is hard to attain. Digital teams mostly inherit a TV story edit, specifically created for television – and difficult to transform into a richer and more interactive digital format.

Hello Brave New World!
Bringing your news organization the Centralized Planning Superpower

Changing directions and strategies with familiar workflows can be a touch unsettling. This is why at Dalet we are offering integrated news planning solutions as a bridge between long-standing newsroom workflows and a gradual digital transformation to storytelling.

We have translated the idea of a story-centric approach into action through the concept of news planning-centric workflows powered by Dalet Pyramid. This concept allows our users to simultaneously approach linear (TV and radio) and non-linear (OTT, social media, digital outlets, ..) platforms. No need to wait for the TV story to be finalized to repurpose the content for digital platforms. Your digital team can also cover an important story as soon as it breaks.

Let’s take a look at the benefits of news planning-based workflows:

• Facilitate digital workflows. The planning-centric workflow becomes the primary organizational tool for digital production teams. They can assign stories, set deadlines, add tasks, and share editorial status while increasing visibility, collaboration, and maximizing outcomes. The news planning solution tool becomes the main organizational device for story creation; it facilitates the entire digital production workflow, making it more collaborative and visible than ever before, through assignments, deadlines, tasks, and editorial status.

• Go digital-first. As we mentioned before, there is no need to wait for the TV story to be broadcast to repurpose the content for digital platforms. The digital team can take the lead and cover the story before it is broadcast on TV.

• Address multiple platforms for any given story. The notion of the story is radically transformed in a planning-centric workflow. The same story now hosts all its different versions for other platforms with their specific needs. For instance, the script and the VO are different on a TV story than on YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter.

• Personalize content for multiple audiences. The centralized news planning solution allows you to always keep the source media and related projects under the same umbrella. It is therefore easy to reuse existing media and projects to further develop a story in a longer format for digital media. With the latter approach, audiences can consume news on different media and have different story versions: shorter or longer, and with the right amount of graphic engagement.

• Foster collaboration. Our solution offers a fantastic collaboration toolset that enables teams to be organized around important stories for actual collaborative production.

• Streamline production workflows. Enable real visibility on who does what, deadlines, why and by when the delivery must be done, what is the next assignment, and with whom you will collaborate. This is a solution designed for communication and intuitive interaction between team members.

But there’s more… Dalet Pyramid’s centralized planning enables newsrooms running Dalet Galaxy to visualize, manage, and assign stories at the corporate level, using multi-platform and multi-site intuitive news planning. Having a centralized planning solution running on a Dalet Galaxy system will give visibility on all of the other Dalet Galaxy systems a broadcaster owns globally. No matter where the “news” is, you will be able to assign tasks in real-time and communicate with your journalists in and out of the field in a wholly intertwined user experience.

Adopting change: How Broadcasting Workflows Evolve

Many of our users come to us with the question: are rundown-centric workflows compatible with planning-centric workflows? The answer is yes!

We designed Dalet Pyramid’s centralized news planning solution to start a story from anywhere: rundown, planning or digital. A story is created in the rundown for the newscast while it’s already on air. Meanwhile, your digital team can create a digital version of that same story, all managed through Dalet Pyramid’s centralized planning.

The goal is to make it quick and easy for news storytellers get their news to audiences everywhere and anywhere, anytime!

Dalet Pyramid’s centralized planning also provides a natural progression for newsrooms running Dalet Galaxy, expanding their workflow with next-gen capabilities. Available as subscription, the “plug and play” solution meets the needs of multi-platform and multi-site news operations.

Dalet has been in the news industry for more than two decades. We have understood and created tools to solve difficult newsroom problems and to keep your audiences informed. With Dalet Pyramid we aim to help our users thrive on their news storytelling journey. The centralized planning solution is just the tip of the iceberg of what Dalet-powered newsrooms can accomplish.

To learn more and understand how Dalet’s news planning solution can benefit your operation, book a demo or contact us.

The post Journalism 2.0: Implementing Centralized News Planning appeared first on Dalet.