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 Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to advance, detecting the authenticity of digital content is increasingly difficult. With deepfake scams growing more sophisticated, the role of content provenance is critical to prevent misinformation. Sure it’s probably not a big deal if your nephew uses AI to doctor a photo so he appears to now proudly drive a Ferrari. But for the news media and the viewers that they serve, AI-powered misinformation has serious consequences.

Take the example of the 2022 video showing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seemingly urging his soldiers to surrender to Russian forces. The video was quickly revealed as a fake, but not before rapidly spreading across social media. AI provenance could have identified the video’s origins so platforms could flag it as inauthentic. This would have immediately reduced its impact. That is the role of AI provenance – to provide transparency about content’s origins, enabling fast and more effective countermeasures against misinformation.

Well-established digital rights management methods exist to prevent legitimate media from being distributed by illicit channels or reaching unauthorized users. The added challenge is how to prevent illegitimate media from being unwittingly distributed by legitimate channels. How do we do this? By validating the content’s sources of origin. That is where media provenance adds real value.

It Takes a Village: The Teamwork Behind Provenance

With the digital transformation of information sharing, the ability to trace the provenance of media has become critical. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) addresses this issue at scale for publishers, creators and consumers. Over 130 media and technology companies, including Dalet, are collaborating to address the prevalence of misleading online information by developing technical standards to certify the provenance of media content. The mission is to develop an end-to-end open technical standard.

The C2PA process provides a secure foundation for news ecosystems. With C2PA, the recipient of a digital file or stream can be confident that:

• The content comes from the source that signed it.
• The media has not been altered since it left the sender.
• The meta-data manifest is attached to the proper media file.

In addition, for media that is produced over a number of processes, or that contains multiple media elements, the history and composition of the file is recorded and retained by all C2PA compliant processes involved in the production.

Trust is core to the work of the news media. Our audiences decide who to trust and why. These choices are often based on their history with the brand and signals they associate with a particular piece of content from the brand.

Well-established brand identities are hard earned and can be hijacked to provide false confidence or amplify malicious sources of misinformation. Providing cryptographic protection to the provenance is a defense against this form of attack. Brand values technology must support, and not supplant the long-established trust relationships between media brands and their audiences. The responsibility for the veracity of content as a basis for continued trust in the brand is a journalistic and marketing responsibility. This is unchanged. However, the emergence of AI-generated media requires two additional technical foundation layers – Validated Identity and Tamper-Evident File Integrity.

The Digital Passport: Validated Identity

Cryptographic signing certificates can be used to prove that a brand is who it says it is. A certificate will be issued to authorized staff at branded publications after confirming an organizational identity and role. This allows the publisher’s signing key to be recognized by downstream validation systems.

To facilitate adoption of media provenance techniques, the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) is building the infrastructure to issue signing certificates and manage the Origin Validated Publisher list. This will ensure that the identities of established news organizations are protected from imposters. The certificates confirm identity but do not make any judgment on editorial position. This work started in April 2024 and is actively welcoming new members to participate in developing governance rules and sharing best practices. Liaison agreements with other groups in the media ecosystem will be used to accelerate the distribution of certificates.

Camera manufacturers and software vendors are already beginning to incorporate the C2PA standard into their products. Once these implementations are validated for compliance to the specification, vendors will be issued signing certificates that will allow them to create C2PA manifests on the creation of each new file version produced. The manifest will provide a provenance history of the asset.

Digital Fortresses: Building Trust with Tamper-Evident File Systems

The technical security of the underlying digital file or stream provides the final level of assured media provenance. The addition of a tamper evident, cryptographically sealed manifest provides assurance of the identities of the publisher and vendors, that there have been no undocumented changes to the file post publication, and that the manifest is attached to the intended file.

Other technologies such as watermarking and fingerprinting of digital media can reinforce the robustness of the manifest by detecting the absence, and potentially recovering, manifests that should be present but have been removed.

When fully implemented, the C2PA standard can securely document the path of media from the camera lens to the audience’s display screen. Well before then, individual links in the distribution chain will be enhanced with secure, tamper evident, metadata that will allow more efficient and automated assessments of the technical integrity of a media file.

Three Newsroom Use Cases

• VALIDATION – Know your source

The job of validating content ingested into the news workflow has become more complex with the widespread availability of GenAI tools that can create almost undetectable fake photos and videos. The presence or absence of a secure C2PA manifest can provide a trained journalist with valuable clues or assurances. First, trusted sources can be confirmed by their signing identity. Second, media created by prominent GenAI platforms can include markings and a manifest to identify their origins. Third, the presence or absence of secure manifests can be an indicator that increased analysis might be required before trusting the submitted media.

None of these methods are foolproof against determined misinformation attacks by knowledgeable parties. However, taken together, they greatly increase the chances of leaving tell-tail clues. These systems will be able to triage incoming media and allow increased focus on material that is not signed or shows evidence of tampering.

• ARCHIVE RESTORE – Preserve History

Newsroom archives preserve a validated record of history. This is becoming increasingly valuable as AI tools that can alter photographic or video records of past events grow even more widely used. The archivist who restores material from a newsroom repository can cryptographically sign the material as a true copy of what is in the newsroom archives. Thus acting as the proxy witness to past events.

In addition, this validated media library, with professional metadata records, is becoming increasingly valuable for use as training data for AI systems. AI needs training data from authentic and real-world sources. Training systems on datasets that include undisclosed synthetic data can cause damage to valuable AI models. The ability to attest to the provenance of training data will enhance the negotiating power of the owners of news libraries.

• PUBLICATION – Protect your brand, sign your work.

The addition of C2PA manifests to a news story, signed by the publisher, is a signal to the audience that the story is authentic. The publisher has attached their brand reputation to the material in a way that cannot be impersonated. This will be increasingly important to maintain the trust of consumers who are becoming sensitized to AI manipulated media.

Newsrooms are busy places with limited manpower. Adding secure media provenance information is critical to the future of responsible digital media creation, publication and sharing.

This is a technical effort, but when set up properly, it should not create too big of a burden to the day-to-day efforts by journalists.

The Fourth Estate Meets AI: Your Role in Provenance

Regulators worldwide are beginning to plan for the use of media provenance as a high-potential defense against disinformation. Whether you are a content creator, a hardware or software vendor, a broadcaster, publisher, or a digital distribution partner, media provenance solutions should become part of your workflow.

CBC, BBC, NYT and Microsoft have a collaboration agreement to work on media provenance together, with a focus on News. We joined with Adobe to found the C2PA, a Linux Foundation project. C2PA is applicable in many different industries. Project Origin continues to exist but has been moved to the IPTC to allow other companies to join in to work on C2PA in a news environment.   

The post The Provenance Principle: How C2PA Combats Media Manipulation to Shape AI’s Future appeared first on Dalet.

The news industry has been through significant changes over the past century. The dominance of television news has been undeniable in the last 65 years; no other mass communication medium has effectively challenged the power of watching news on a TV screen… until recently.

In 2020, a study indicated that, for the first time in history, people were consuming more content on the internet through laptops, tablets, and phones than on a TV screen. This was reiterated in a 2023 study which concluded that people spend almost double the time on digital media compared with traditional media.

A massive shift

The shifts in consumption and hybrid work dramatically affected how news content needs to be produced. Traditionally, storytelling revolved around the rundown for the TV newscast. Digital teams would have to wait until the TV packages were assembled before preparing the stories slated for social media and digital platforms.

This can no longer be.

Digital and specifically social media is typically where audiences go first for their news update. Storytelling for digital platforms demands its own style, format and tone, with an immediacy that will not wait for the TV newscast. Tying the newsroom to the rundown is not a viable strategy. Digital news workflows need to be story-centric and require modern, digital-native tools that empower journalists to deliver impactful stories quickly across all platforms.

Let’s get digital!

Using the right tools for digital-first thinking has become essential for any news organization to not only survive, but to thrive.

With decades of experience serving the needs of the news production industry, we designed Dalet Pyramid which combines the power of story dashboards, assignments, production and distribution tools in a single environment. This highly collaborative platform allows journalists to produce digital-native content for their specific audiences. Digital teams can access source content, plan, produce and publish stories specifically for each digital and social media platform, never having to wait for the TV newscast.

The Dalet Pyramid Planner brings deep collaboration between digital and broadcast teams: digital producers and social media specialists can access stories, rundowns and assets across all the teams and locations. This level of visibility allows digital teams to maximize resources, avoid duplications and increase productivity. You can learn more about Dalet Pyramid’s Centralized Planning in this Quick Cuts episode.

Bring your story to life

After planning and enriching the future story, news creators will use Dalet Cut, our cloud-native, web-based video editing tool, seamlessly integrated within Dalet Pyramid. It provides all the capabilities reporters, producers and editors need to create content-rich video stories, fast!

In addition to transitions, effects, digital graphics, text-on-screen, automatic caption generation, and multiplatform delivery features, Dalet Cut enables users to access scripts, story angles, and media directly from within, making the editing workflow highly efficient. Dalet Cut also offers seamless third-party integrations, for example with the live graphics platform Singular.live.

The tool leverages the rest of the Dalet newsroom ecosystem, including AI service platform Dalet Media Cortex which delivers automatic metadata indexing, speech-to-text transcription, object recognition, and more. This makes Dalet Cut a unique media editor for collaboration, quick turnaround, and compelling video creation for all audiences on all platforms.

Newsrooms using Adobe® Premiere® Pro will benefit from Dalet Xtend, which enables editors to access all of the same content in Dalet Cut within Premiere Pro, including proxy editing and rendering in the cloud.

Find out more about Dalet Cut in this blog post, and how it won Product of the Year Award at NAB 2023.

Release your story!

So your story is produced, edited and ready to hit the (digital) press… Dalet Pyramid provides out-of-the-box, intuitive integration with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more. Content Management Systems (CMS) can also be integrated via the API, so you can package and publish to every platform natively.

Easy!

Ready?

The pressure is on to deliver news stories to digital outlets first, while still looking after your TV audiences. You now need to deliver that same story in different formats and flavors to meet the needs of each consumption platform. With Dalet Pyramid, you can empower digital teams to produce their content from the moment the story breaks while collaborating with the broadcast team.

Request a demo and learn more about how Dalet Pyramid can transform your newsroom production workflows.

The post News production in the digital era appeared first on Dalet.

With more channels and formats to tell stories, communicate and engage with audiences than ever, how are news operations keeping up? Through the interrogation of technology architectures and business models, the DPP’s Tomorrow’s News reports detail what future news operations need if they wish to stay successful in this new era.

A first-of-its-kind, community-guided research project in which Dalet was an expert sponsor and contributor, this is a must-read report for stakeholders in news technology.

What’s the News?

Understanding the context in which news organizations operate is essential in figuring out the major trends in news consumption, who is consuming it, where, and what that could mean for the industry.

As seen in the “What’s the News” report, new opportunities, challenges, disruptions and transformations are taking place in the news industry: “It’s an exciting time for news operations. One filled with new opportunities to help audiences navigate our world on a much broader and deeper level. It is also filled with some challenges,” says DPP.

Download the report here.

Watch the recording on the DPP website:

The News Business

While this is a powerful time for news operations, players in the industry are facing roadblocks. In the still-recent past, the impact of digital outlets, specifically social media, was not even close to that of broadcast TV. Now, there is no singular dominant medium. As mentioned in “The News Business” report, “the competition is now anybody with a smartphone.”

News is now not just controlled by media organizations, but by audiences themselves. To adapt, newsrooms need to rethink how news is made and what news is being covered, while journalists must become a jack of all trades to produce stories across different platforms. In the report, Robin Kirchhoffer, CMO of Dalet, says “bringing broadcast and digital news teams together is necessary to create the agility media companies need to adapt to changing markets and distribution platforms.”

Download the report here.

Making the News

More than other content types, news is experiencing an exponential amount of disruption in formats and outputs. As the DPP says, “News organisations are going through the same transitions as the wider media industry: the shift of viewers online, the transition from hardware to software, the move of infrastructure to the cloud.”

This movement, with the adoption of technology and workflow changes, is crucial in bringing your news organization into this new era of news.

Download the report here.

At Dalet, we’ve been working over the last three decades to pioneer innovation to enable news organizations to thrive in times of change. Today, we provide news organizations a bridge to the cloud with highly collaborative, digital-first news workflows and powerful Storytelling 360.

For more insights, ideas, and improvements to succeed in this new era of news, read the DPP’s Tomorrow’s News reports below. Or, connect with us to bring your news organization to the future, together.

The post Tomorrow’s News: breaking down the road to success in a digital era appeared first on Dalet.