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.

In recent months, I’ve had the privilege of seeing firsthand the intricate process behind news production and dissemination. It is an ecosystem brimming with passion, yet hindered by financial and operational challenges.

With increasingly fragmented audiences and the rise of highly-biased and even fake news, maintaining the integrity of journalism is more crucial than ever. This is why at Dalet, we are on a mission to empower storytellers with innovative technology solutions, so they can overcome the challenges of delivering news in the 2020s.

This mission is also deeply personal to me – let me tell you why.

Storytelling as a Passion

Since becoming part of Dalet six months ago, I’ve been struck by the deep passion that permeates every level of the news industry. Whether it’s the journalist on the frontlines or the producer ensuring seamless delivery, each person plays a crucial role in the storytelling process. This dedication is not just about relaying facts, it’s about weaving narratives that connect people globally, fostering understanding and purpose.

Storytelling is an ancient craft. From prehistoric caves to digital newsrooms, stories have been the heartbeat of human communication, guiding us through survival, growth, and transformation. The role of storytellers today is more critical than ever, helping us make sense of an increasingly complex world. As I shared when I joined Dalet, my passion for news began early – I started reading The Economist at age thirteen. I’ve always been acutely aware of the difficulties news outlets face in adapting to rapidly changing digital landscapes, consumer demands, and new forms of competition.

Empowering news professionals and storytellers is truly an honor for me.

Addressing the Financial Realities

The economic landscape for news media is fraught with tension. While audiences might not perceive a crisis, companies grapple with profound financial challenges behind the scenes. Society must recognize the value of a healthy, diverse media ecosystem that counters thought manipulation and promotes a spectrum of perspectives.

Dalet recently partnered with Caretta Research to carry out a comprehensive research project into the future of news operations. The findings echoed concerns we’ve heard from our customers: over half of newsrooms have experienced budget cuts in the past year and are expected to do more with less. On top of that, 45% of news operations experience significant challenges with legacy systems. Specifically, outdated tools and fragmented workflows that limit access to content from the field and require users to jump between multiple systems to complete tasks. The full report is available for download here.

At Dalet, we have worked for over three decades to protect the future of newsrooms. Our solutions aim to bring operational value to newsrooms and transform business models, ensuring sustainability and integrity. Our recently launched Competitive Upgrade Program is designed to do exactly that: provide an efficient and financially-attractive path to modern news operations so they not only survive, but thrive in the future.

The Complexity of Real-Time News

Inside the newsroom, the challenge of delivering accurate news in real time is immense. The expectations are high – consumers demand immediate updates, often valuing speed over depth. This shift is driven by younger generations who live in an era of constant connectivity, where platforms like “BeReal” encourage real-time sharing, putting 24/7 pressure on news storytellers.

The transition from hour-based updates to second-by-second coverage has placed unprecedented pressure on media outlets. Despite these challenges, the industry remains at a crossroads — balancing the demand for rapid information with the depth and context that foster informed decision-making.

It is no surprise that Caretta’s research found that social media platforms as gatekeepers pose the greatest external threat to newsrooms, surpassing worries about declining revenues and audiences.

Safeguarding the Integrity of News in the Age of AI

The advent of AI presents both opportunities and threats to the integrity of news. Generative AI promises to enhance speed and reach, but also raises concerns about misinformation. At Dalet, we are actively working with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) to develop solutions that ensure data provenance and trustworthiness. We are committed to integrating C2PA standards into our products, providing tools for news organizations to maintain their credibility in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

In addition, we leverage AI to help news organizations tell their stories more efficiently with AI-driven features such as wire summarization. Our tools also help reporters address the complexities of multilingual requirements with AI-driven translation for captions, graphics, voiceovers, and more.

Our goal is to harness AI responsibly, maintaining the delicate balance between innovation and integrity.

Why I Am Optimistic About The Future

The future of news storytelling lies in personalization and data integrity. Consumers will demand tailored content delivered through trusted channels. We must balance this with the need for diverse perspectives, ensuring that news remains a tool for enlightenment, not reinforcement of biases. Media companies must continue to challenge audiences with diverse viewpoints, fostering critical thinking and informed discourse.

Our vision at Dalet is clear—to help transform newsrooms into agile, future-ready entities in a world where news remains a vital force for good. We are executing this vision through strategic partnerships, innovative technologies, and a commitment to ethical standards. I’m encouraged to see that Caretta’s newsroom research found enormous optimism among the sixty leading news organizations it surveyed.

If you are a news storyteller or work in a newsroom today, I would be delighted to discuss how Dalet can enhance newsroom operations, safeguarding both integrity and accessibility for generations to come.

The post The Transformative Power of News  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.

Let me tell you a bit more about the four SaaS solutions, underpinned by the proven Dalet Flex Media Logistics Platform and Dalet Pyramid News modules.

Faster News Production and Delivery

Despite constant changes, one aspect of broadcasting news has never changed: the need to keep your audience watching, wherever they are. And in today’s competitive landscape you need to effectively track viewer engagement for the best possible advertising and/or subscription metrics.

News production and distribution used to be primarily focused on TV broadcasts. Today, with a new social media platform emerging and trending every other week, there’s no single premier medium for audiences to consume news content. Global connectivity and mobile access enable news to spread at breakneck speed, so you need to produce and distribute platform- and device-agnostic news content every minute!

This is not only a technology challenge, but news delivery needs to also take into account the context around who’s consuming your news, where and how. Above all, news organizations need to understand that they don’t control newscasting anymore – the audience does. Anyone holding a smartphone is now a potential newscaster, so it is time to rethink how news is made, with journalists being able to produce content that works across all platforms – sometimes through, or together with, their audience.

With Dalet’s cloud-native and Storytelling 360 ethos, delivered through our newsroom solution, Dalet Pyramid, all that programming, integration and metrics design has been done for you. News professionals can work anytime, anywhere, with an intuitive web-based user interface that manages all aspects of your story from a single screen, including mobile devices: ingest, news gathering, archive mining, story assignments, rough cuts and voice over – all while collaborating with other team members. Dalet Pyramid empowers you to break down the newsroom’s walls and deliver to audiences everywhere quickly and efficiently, leveraging cloud-native, scalable and elastic infrastructure.

Streamlined Production Asset Management

The days where production teams, and their Production Asset Management (PAM) tools, were totally separate from the enterprise Media asset Management (MAM) solution, should be long gone. Running separate technology and work streams for production and other content teams is highly inefficient and time consuming. And yet, this model is still deeply rooted across media companies and teams.

Issues around file compatibility, transfer bottlenecks, metadata errors and more, slow down your ability to deliver content quickly and efficiently to multiple platforms. It’s time to implement a smarter way to arrange your production and sharing environment.

Dalet Flex provides a robust solution that integrates and orchestrates production and media asset management, from content acquisition to post-production and distribution, including archive. Creative teams can access content from anywhere through the web, their preferred NLE or mobile application. Storage is greatly optimized – eliminating the need to duplicate assets – and costs can be monitored across multiple projects​. All this with a wide range of 3rd party integrations that remove the barriers between production and the rest of your operation.

Powerful media supply chain packaging and distribution

The Media & Entertainment industry today is all about revenue and cost of operations – only the most profitable will survive. Clearly understanding your media supply chain, including cost-per-asset, has become essential. For example, packaging a show or movie has a fixed cost, but if you have to create 300 versions for global distribution, your profit can very quickly vaporize. What was once a very intangible value needs to now be clearly quantified for individual line items.

These are just some of the elements that are required to run a superior media supply chain operation, which Dalet Flex can enable. From its inception, the platform was designed to easily break down and track each step within a production and distribution workflow, down to the asset level. It is easy to report on production, post-production and distribution costs and, thanks to its cloud-native architecture, internal stakeholders and external partners can access specific functions, given the correct access rights. You can now increase the agility of your operations and meet growing demands while reducing costs with Dalet’s Media Supply Chain solution.

Modern Archive Management and Monetization

If your organization has been in the media business for some time, it’s likely that a number of workflows and systems are still shackled to the legacies of the analog TV era. Assets stored on hard drives and removable discs made for operating systems that don’t exist anymore, in many cases still on magnetic videotape and 35mm film!

Repurposing and monetizing content by letting partners easily access and use it can sometimes cost more money than it’s worth.This is often due to siloed operations and disparate standards, both internally and between partner companies. Even after implementing cloud computing, migrating archived content to the cloud has been a hit-and-miss proposition. What’s more, simply sending huge media files to sit on a cloud computing service can potentially cost as much or more than just leaving them on a server in the corner of your production office.

And with the need to reduce business costs, scaling down operations, including storage, makes financial sense. How do you cost-effectively store media assets in the cloud? How do you identify the specific assets you need to share? How do you repurpose old content for a new language or the hearing-impaired?

At Dalet we believe we have the answers: make your production, storage and distribution hubs one and the same. Let the flexibility and smart management of the cloud store only what you need as business fluctuates. Dalet Flex for Archives and Monetization delivers all that and more.

With Dalet’s Archiving solutions, you’ll be able to migrate all your disparate archives into a single, intelligent, centralized media library​. Find, reuse and monetize years of existing library material and reduce costs through operational efficiencies.

Missed NAB? Would you like to review key trends and innovations from the show? Join us on a virtual post-NAB event to learn more about how Dalet’s solutions and expertise can help your business thrive in today’s competitive M&E landscape.

The post Need Efficient Workflows? We Have a Solution for That appeared first on Dalet.

The World We Knew

It is just another day at work, newsrooms are trying to produce stories as fast as possible. News breaks, the producer assigns a story, and the journalist hits the road. Once in the field, the journalist shoots footage, assembles a rough cut, and heads back to the newsroom. After getting content from the on-premises system and working with the video editor, the news professional gets approvals and finally send the story to the rundown. Does it sound familiar?

To produce a story, the journalist had to meet several people and depend on a physical newsroom. At that time, we could travel and meet anyone anywhere. Going back and forth to the newsroom was not a big deal, until our circumstances changed. We had to be spread apart and confined in our own spaces. The ability to produce news was jeopardized, and the newsroom dynamic as we knew it was gone.

A New Wave in (Remote) News Production

There is something we learnt from the pandemic: things will never be the same. Even if most lockdowns were lifted, remote and hybrid work is not going anywhere. Newsrooms must adjust and implement different strategies to produce stories in this new context.

At Dalet, we designed collaborative tools for news professionals to thrive in any environment. We recently introduced The Dalet Pyramid Remote Editing solution, a platform that extends the power of newsroom systems outside their physical location, having no need for the producer or any journalist to be in the newsroom. Our vision is to make news creators — producers, editors, journalists, etc. — feel that all are in the same space, collaborating and crafting news together, even when they are miles apart.

The remote-native solution is a platform to produce and edit news stories. Journalists have access to assignments, the newsroom’s content, and production tools in real- time, allowing the team to have an immersive experience.

The “plug and play” Remote Editing solution is offered in subscription to allow customers to use what they need, when they need it, and scale as they grow.

New Tools for News Production

Pyramid Cut: Web-Based, Fast-Paced Media Editor

Pyramid Cut, our browser-based multimedia editor, was specifically designed for modern news storytelling. The cloud-native solution was built around the journalist’s needs when producing and editing video stories. We conveyed all aspects of news story editing in an intuitive format for professional and non-professional editors.

Pyramid Cut is more than a media editing tool, it is an entire collaborative ecosystem for news creators. Besides offering the expected transitions, graphic generation, and voice over recording, it allows journalists access to media, scripts, and assignments — features shared with Dalet Pyramid’s Centralized Planning solution. This fluid exchange of information between Pyramid Cut and Pyramid planner, substantially improves productivity and quality when creating news stories.

One of the most significant features of Pyramid Cut is the ability to work with growing files, allowing the journalist to start editing without having to wait for the live streaming to be over. The journalist or editor can access the video files from the cloud and edit a preview for a digital team or the rundown.

Pyramid Xtend: Native Plug-In for Adobe Premiere Pro

Pyramid Xtend gives journalists seamless integration between Dalet Pyramid, and Adobe Premiere Pro. Pyramid Xtend allows Premiere Pro users to access media, scripts, even edit on the cloud using remote rendering through Adobe Media Encoder. This major improvement enables Adobe Premiere users to fully join the newsroom’s operation.

For newsrooms using Dalet Galaxy, video editors not only access media, scripts, and assignments inside Pyramid Cut or Pyramid Xtend; they also have access to the newsroom content inside Dalet Galaxy. These elements are fully integrated to produce rich and collaborative experiences for journalists and editors when creating stories.

Let’s get into more detail about how the media, scripts and assignments are orchestrated in Dalet Pyramid to enable a true collaborative workflow.

Media Bin

The Media Bin is a bucket where all the digital assets concerning a specific news story are gathered. Those assets could be video and audio files, pictures, graphics, PDFs, social posts, wires, external links, etc. The Media Bin also includes rushes, and the final versions for different angles: TV, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

The Media Bin encourages a new level of collaboration. Its content can be accessed by broadcast or digital teams working on the same story. Even a broadcast crew in another facility can access the Media Bin. So, what’s the benefit? It allows Digital and broadcast teams — in any location — to use, not only source materials to craft their own stories, but to repurpose each other’s stories. This collaborative method reduces duplication of work, maximizes productivity and improves publication time.

Script Editor

The Script editor is the section where journalists write the story that will be played from the production control room. The journalist can, in real-time, collaboratively write the script with another journalist. The Script Editor connects to the teleprompter, allowing the newscaster to read directly during the broadcast.

Within Pyramid Cut, the editor also has access to the assignment view — right next to the Media Bin and Script editor. The editor sees the assignments and the track of the story.

With these elements, seamlessly designed in Pyramid Cut, we are giving full visibility and enhancing productivity for news creators.

The Best of Both Worlds

There are certain benefits for newsrooms using both media editors. Pyramid Cut can be the go-to for journalists in the field or in the newsrooms, while Pyramid Xtend, for Adobe Premiere Pro editors, can be used for more advanced editing jobs and long-form content.

Both, Pyramid Cut and Adobe Premier Pro — are fully immersed in the Dalet ecosystem, having access to the Media Bin, Script Editor, assignments, and Dalet Galaxy’s content. The editors can also access the Dalet Pyramid planner, Dalet AmberFin, Dalet Media Cortex, and other tools of the Dalet ecosystem.

Let’s Do it Together!

What once was an unviable idea became a vital solution for millions of broadcasters and companies worldwide to thrive in our new reality. Incorporating Dalet’s remote Editing solutions into your newsroom is not a matter of improving processes but about belonging to a new norm.

Contact us to discover the Dalet Pyramid Remote Editing solution. We will show you how it can extend your news production capabilities to tell and share news stories.

The post How to Produce News Content Remotely appeared first on Dalet.

Looking at the trends

What we saw at NAB was aligned with the trends identified by Caretta Research ahead of the show and what we have seen since the beginning of the year. The first trend we saw is that investment in media technology is now driven by problem solving. While new technology, prototypes, and product reveals still make the headlines, the NAB Show has now clearly taken the trajectory of a business show. Business, editorial, and creative decision makers are looking for solutions to the problems they encounter along the media value chain, especially around remote production and collaboration, scale and automation, as well as digital-native content operations.

A second trend noticeable at the event is the desire for flexible deployments and the demand for modular technologies. Media-rich organizations want to “future-proof” their operations and to enhance the management of components’ lifespan. Open platforms and “operating systems”, seamlessly integrated into the wider ecosystem, are becoming the focal point of media production, management, and distribution workflows, often with marketplace models.

The third major trend is about cloud-native architectures and how they enable products that are faster, more reliable, and more affordable. SaaS offerings with a lower cost of entry are being brought to market, thanks to multi-tenanted architectures that enable economies of scale. With the elasticity of the cloud at their fingertips, media organizations can quickly scale resources as required with control over budgets.

We at Dalet are embracing these trends to always bring more value to our customers with transformative products. The launch of Dalet Flex for teams, a SaaS solution that provides professional-grade media logistics tools to smaller crews and organizations, is the perfect reflection of that.

Making time to talk

Communication is important with our customers. We truly believe we work better as a team. Open communication is at our core, and co-innovation is a mantra. We’ve discussed countless number of times with our customers and partners how agility has become so important. The ability to deploy solutions easily and to be extremely fast in launching new initiatives has become paramount. SaaS is a key ally in this endeavor.

Achieving scale through automation and workflow orchestration is still very high on the list for our customers, and our products have been making a difference in that area for many years. In addition, and together with smart, AI-powered tools, media-rich organizations are now putting much more focus on UI and UX, a big shift in our industry. These discussions with customers are becoming more common, as well as more advanced in terms of the strategies they deploy to distribute the right content to the right audiences on the right platforms. Helping customers scale and streamline their operations is a major focus.

Conversations around onboarding, training, user experience, and customer success are also much more common. These are very much valued by all stakeholders. Dalet is a customer-centric company; and we are building the teams and the structure around customer success. We help media-rich organizations maximize ROI and outcomes on their investment and overall satisfaction with a simple philosophy: their success is our success.

So, book a meeting with us sometime. It’s great to talk!

An interview with IABM TV on industry trends, the latest releases from Dalet, and what is coming in the future (Click here to watch the interview)

Showcasing Dalet latest innovations

In the same mindset of remaining customer-centric, Dalet’s leadership team and media workflow specialists were at the event, showcasing our latest innovations in content workflow solutions, cloud-native technology, and user experience.

Attendees stopping by the Dalet booth were able to discover two offerings for the first time, Dalet Flex for teams offered as-a-service for all teams with digital media management and multiplatform delivery requirements, and Dalet Pyramid solutions to enable modern storytelling and news production practices with centralized planning, remote editing, and digital-native production capabilities.

The industry recognition we received for these new offerings was a proud moment for the #DaletTeam. While Dalet Pyramid won NewscastStudio’s Broadcast Production Award for “Best New Product or Service – Production”, Dalet Flex for teams was awarded “Best in Show” from TVTech.

As a key technology partner and their chosen Media Asset Management partner, Dalet was also present at the AWS booth. Both Dalet Flex as-a-service and Dalet Pyramid running on AWS infrastructure were on display and received a warm welcome. Dalet and AWS power some of the most advanced cloud-native and hybrid media workflows.

Dalet Flex for teams was a featured demo at the AWS booth on the 2022 NAB show floor

What comes next? Focus.

The question we find ourselves often asking is “What comes next?”

For us at Dalet, we keep our attention on the value we provide through state-of-the-art media workflows – the life’s blood of any newsroom, sports coverage, content owner, or media production facility. This is what we do, and we focus on it. Today, our customers not only evaluate products but also roadmaps, development priorities, and company culture. They buy from companies they want to work with. We are more than software.

With that in mind, I’ll conclude this article with a quote from Dalet’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Stephane Guez:

“We’re thrilled to reconnect in person with our partners and customers to share our latest innovations for digital media workflows. We’ve been hard at work investing in and developing modern technologies to meet the demands of today’s media rich organizations. To support this, we have expanded the Dalet Team with media, cloud, and security experts whose focus is to enable wider market adoption of Dalet solutions beyond the traditional borders of broadcast. These investments coupled with our intense R&D and project management efforts have enabled us to deliver an NAB showcase that we’re incredibly proud of: budget-friendly pre-configured, convenient, yet secure workflow cloud-based offerings with state-of-the-art UX and UI experiences customers expect.”

We are part of an industry and a world in a state of permanent change. Mature and stable like a large corporation, yet agile and growing like a start-up, we continue to shape the future of media production, management and distribution workflows. Join us!

The post What Happened in Vegas – NAB 2022 in Review 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.

With the onset of COVID-19, moving towards a virtual newsroom was no longer regarded as an ambitious step, but a step for survival. Journalists and film crews found themselves adapting to a remote model, a completely cloud-based newsroom with its own unique set of workflows.

The Virtual Newsroom: Create Anywhere, Together

Now is the perfect time for the adoption of the cloud-based newsroom as we have more ways to cover news. As a result, more events can be included, especially as events happen faster, instantly delivered social media like Twitter and 24-hour news coverage itself.

The traditional news operation strategy — creating stories using a linear approach to programming — grows increasingly less relevant to today’s news consumption. Instead, news organizations take a “story-centric” approach where all resources are focused on creating a story. By following a story-centric approach, the story itself is at the top and everything else is subordinate to it. Tasks like ingest, scripting, audio and video editing, as well as digital versioning and graphics, are all centered around the story.

The Storytelling 360 approach becomes the foundation for the cloud-based newsroom, especially when you look at the ways that news is distributed today. 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. 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.

Reaping the Benefits of a Virtual Newsroom

What is truly amazing, if not a bit reassuring, about the transition to the virtual newsroom is that it starts with all the resources of a traditional newsroom:

• Newsroom Computer Systems (NRCS)
• News Production System (NPS)

Another benefit, by design, of the virtual newsroom is its ability to be mobile. 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 incredible agility:

• Smoother operations
  • Regular and transparent upgrades with new features
  • Less to maintain because this is part of the overall service
• React to new business needs
  • Elasticity of the platform means that you can scale up and down according to demand
  • Continuous development
  • Faster deployment of new systems

All of this culminates in a unified user interface, 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. It is important to understand that Dalet Pyramid is not a software you put in a newsroom, but it is the newsroom itself, where planning, news production, asset and resource management, playout and multiplatform distribution have been combined into a unified system, capable of conventional news production as well as more mainstream formats like current affairs shows.

Welcome to a World without Borders, a Newsroom that Exists where the Story Happens

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. 

The virtual newsroom is that new paradigm. It is completely native to the cloud and inherits the cloud’s beneficial characteristics. In addition the virtual newsroom brings a unified interface, tightly integrated collaboration and new models for newsroom production like digital-first, story-centric workflows and Storytelling 360.

Cloud-based newsrooms represent as big a change as the transition to file-based workflows twenty years ago. But one thing is constant: newsrooms are for telling compelling stories that inform audiences and stir their emotions. That requires human talent and creativity, and that works best in a collaborative environment; and with the cloud-based newsroom, collaboration is the foundation for successful journalism and engaging storytelling.

Now begins the challenge of taking those first steps. What is the obstacle that you need to clear in transitioning to the cloud? Let us offer you options in making this transition effortless. We invite you to take a closer look at cloud-based newsrooms in our white paper, with a look at new technologies dedicated to cloud-first operations and editing suites, to innovative models redefining the news business and operations.

The post The Virtual Newsroom: From Concept to Commonplace appeared first on Dalet.

So how can Dalet Galaxy five newsrooms looking to renew their news production platform plan their journey to Dalet Pyramid?

To answer this, we have to first look at what kind of platform Dalet Pyramid is. After this, we’ll see how there is a natural and progressive approach to manage migration onto the new platform, without disruption to everyday workflows.

Dalet Pyramid offers configurable workspaces

Embracing change

Considering what’s been happening in the last few years, not many would be brave enough to bet against similar rates of change in the future. Disruptive change is here to stay and it makes sense to plan for it, be ready for it, and embrace it.

Fortunately, technology has changed too, and is in exactly the position it needs to be to facilitate the change that’s needed. Much of this has been driven by the diversity in sources of news, but also in the way it is delivered. There has never been a time when news reaches its audience in so many ways.

Viewers’ expectations have changed too, with timeliness and appropriateness for a given digital medium foremost in maximizing audience engagement and satisfaction – and hence loyalty.

Dalet Pyramid is the nexus where all these threads of change converge. As all the trends point towards the cloud, Dalet Pyramid is there to meet them.

It makes financial sense

Investing in the future actually saves money. Our estimate is that you’ll save on average 30% on your infrastructure costs over five years. In addition to the immediate benefits to the balance sheet, Dalet Pyramid comes with a massive increase in business agility. With Dalet Pyramid’s approach to news production, it’s very easy to incorporate new aspects to your business. New digital outlets, sponsors, and the ability to add hundreds of new users almost instantly.

Overall, you can expect as much as a 50% productivity boost from Dalet Pyramid. That’s because from its multi-platform web-based interface, you’ll have instant access to all the source material you need to make optimized content for every digital platform at a marginal additional cost.

Agility, mobility, flexibility

Dalet Pyramid’s resilient software-defined infrastructure is a powerful enabler for workflows and applications like Adobe Premiere Pro^Ⓡ that removes the constraints imposed by a physical infrastructure and geographical location, enabling advanced remote workflows from anywhere and the elasticity to scale on the fly.

Just like all other Dalet offerings, Dalet Pyramid is a cloud-agnostic solution that works with a range of cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services. It can also run on virtualized environments, bringing in the flexibility needed to adapt to multiple existing infrastructure scenarios.

Dalet Pyramid mobile application helps news storytellers to work anywhere

Bringing in the digital teams

Dalet Galaxy five customers are already familiar with Dalet’s core philosophy: that managing digital content is the key to successful production. Dalet Pyramid adds to this by managing stories and their associated digital files with the same level of accomplishment. With the story at the center of a production, it becomes much easier to create multiple versions of news content fully optimized for the increasingly divergent ways to view it.

To help with the change, we are introducing a number of functional packages that allow for a progressive transition, where it is possible to run the two systems in parallel until everyone is confident to make the switch. These packages bring in new functionality for Planning, Digital Production, Remote editing, Remote Contribution and Artificial Intelligence.

With this incremental approach, the new Dalet Pyramid functionality brings in additional value to your Dalet newsroom solution, while protecting your existing investment. Transitioning this way ensures that the only difference audiences will notice is more timely news production that is more specific to their mode of consumption.

It’s an easy choice financially too. When you choose Dalet Pyramid, the subscription includes the costs of migration, and all the necessary licenses are included. Start with a basic implementation and move as fast as you want to evolve the architecture of the platform while you’re in full production.

As you implement Dalet Pyramid, you’ll be able to consolidate teams and departments to form a fully coherent, cohesive news operation that’s able to breathe like a living organism. And if you do need to add users quickly, it’s simple to spin off a sandboxed training environment to give the full Dalet Pyramid experience to newcomers without risking your main production workflow.

Dalet Pyramid brings in additional planning capabilities to your Dalet Galaxy five newsroom

Upgrade to the “new normal”

We’ve made it as easy as possible for Dalet Galaxy five users to migrate to Dalet Pyramid. Our Customer Success team will be with you on every step of the journey, and with your Dalet Pyramid subscription you can opt to outsource your infrastructure to us. That means it’s always ready, always working and there for you when the story of the year breaks.

With lower operating costs, more productivity, and a managed, smooth transition into the new platform, there’s a lot to like. Talk to us about how to get started.

The post Dalet Pyramid – A Natural Evolution for Dalet Galaxy five Newsrooms appeared first on Dalet.

Back in The Days: A Brief History of Broadcast Journalism

Traditional journalism — and what we define as “traditional” is newsgathering and reporting pre-dating digital storytelling, in this case — is an in-depth look at a story. A single perspective is thoroughly explored with optional viewpoints offered, if interest in the story is warranted. Of course, this is before the age of the 24-hour news cycle. Instead of one hour for news, and the occasional hour-length news shows such as Hard Talk (BBC) or 60 Minutes (CBS), news coverage needed to be continuous. This new approach to news reporting gave birth to the story-centric approach, well understood and adopted by a majority of today’s newsrooms and technology providers.

The story-centric approach looks at multiple angles of the same story, all resources related to the story itself creating a full, comprehensive study of the subject matter. So, for example, tasks like ingest, scripting, audio and video editing, as well as digital versioning and graphics, are all centered around the story. This is a core foundation of Dalet Galaxy five, which has helped journalists worldwide adopt a story-centric approach to news storytelling for over a decade.

Change on the Air: The 24-Hour News Cycle Arrives

Adjusting to the 24-hour news cycle was something of a challenge, but now we see journalism changing again through the adoption of new channels for digital storytelling. Just look at the ways that news is distributed today. Apps, aggregators, social media, websites, broadcast networks, and streaming media such as podcasts, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and other platforms. Different digital providers often require specific versions of a story, whether it is for a platform’s format (horizontal or vertical presentation, for example) or for the audience demographic native to the platform. By having all sources, assets, and tools clustered around specific subject matter — in this case, the story — it is easier to produce multimedia journalism through multiple, platform-optimized versions when everything is within reach. Without this approach, producing multiple versions would be more expensive and far less efficient.

Digital Storytelling Tools: The Introduction of Storytelling 360

At Dalet, we are defining this new approach to multimedia journalism as Storytelling 360. This is a new approach to covering a subject matter, but Storytelling 360 goes well beyond the platforms that each of these segments are optimized for. Storytelling 360, introduced with Dalet Pyramid, effectively makes the dream of a virtual newsroom possible by combining four main aspects:

• Accommodating multiple story angles for multiple platforms
• Giving access to all relevant objects of the story (videos, pictures, audio, wires, relevant stories, etc.) and production objects (EDLs, scripts, automation events), and graphic objects in a secure cloud environment
• Producing directly from the story into the story (whereas traditionally, ingest was done in a different place than editing, scripting, and so on)
• Driving and organizing collaboration around the story

What makes Storytelling 360 particularly impactful comes from its collaboration trait as it defines digital storytelling directly at the story level:

• Who is responsible for editing, field shooting, graphics, TV editing, digital packaging, and so on?
• What are the deadlines for the various platforms and angles?
• What is the editorial progress of each story stemming from the original story?

Complementing the virtual newsroom, Storytelling 360 also accommodates the functionalities of a virtual office with the ability to:

• Chat, brainstorm digital storytelling angles, and call for meetings directly from the core story, particularly important for major stories
• Share stories, versions and angles, as well as any multimedia assets
• Instantly comment and react to story angles, story objects or projects, or, of course, to the core story itself (like on social media, for example)

At Dalet, we designed Dalet Pyramid to transition news gathering teams into the Storytelling 360 approach. With Dalet Pyramid, reporters, producers, and editors can collaborate closely and efficiently before sending their final segments to a variety of platforms, both digital and linear. Taking advantage of cloud technology, Storytelling 360 is possible anytime, anywhere, much like the journalism landscape and how it has evolved.

Journalism with Storytelling 360: Covering All Angles

Storytelling 360 is a radically new approach to news: it drastically changes the definition of the story and provides increased in-depth editorial, organizational and business perspective. It solves the editorial challenges created from breakthroughs in cloud technologies, improving digital storytelling and overall news operations. Storytelling 360 brings in a true operational perspective by organizing collaboration around the story and providing business insights on resource efforts and production costs.

Our philosophy of news production offers more modern workflows and a new approach to covering subject matters. If you are curious how Dalet Pyramid sets the standards in Storytelling 360, find out more from this blog post and book a demo with us.

Welcome to the virtual newsroom offering your audience multimedia journalism on a wide variety of platforms. Welcome to Storytelling 360.

The post Storytelling 360: How Journalism Has Evolved into Digital Storytelling appeared first on Dalet.

That’s no surprise, since the need to ramp-up digital news production is growing exponentially even as newsroom budgets continue to shrink.

The early, linear, days

When dedicated newsroom computer systems first came out in the early 90s, they were designed purely for the linear broadcast – mainly TV. Ever since, unfortunately, the rundown has been the centre of attention.

Planning was introduced pretty early in NRCSs, and newsrooms started to implement story-centric workflows in the late 2000s. But planning and rundowns are often disconnected. In most cases, the rundown comes really early in the workflow, and digital workflows come second – once TV production is completed. Once you fall into this pattern, there is no easy way to go digital-first, no way to run an efficient digital newsroom.

Set the script free

Let’s look at another key aspect: the story script. A story is almost always tightly associated with a TV (or radio) script. Until very recently, I had hardly ever seen (I am tempted to say never) a digital script or CMS script in a newsroom! There is this 1:1 relation between a story and a TV script. This is a real issue — you need to dissociate the two early in the process if want to have the same story go to digital and TV (or radio).

So how can a NRCS provide clever, integrated digital production workflows? Or can an NRCS be primarily a digital newsroom?

This really is one of the biggest challenges of our time, and we constantly work to overcome it with Dalet Pyramid.

Dalet Pyramid brings you angles and queues, creating a true digital newsroom

In Dalet Pyramid, a story is not just a TV (or a radio) script. It has this built-in notion of story angles. These story angles can be multiple instances of TV, radio and digital angles. For example, say I want 2 versions of my story, one for the headlines, and another for a package. I also want to script my video for distribution on social media networks and my CMS. That’s potentially 4 different angles! (and each might have its own assignments and production needs).

Complicating matters, you need to distribute these story angles in a non-linear way — you need a “non-linear rundown.” Sounds like a contradiction in terms, right? In Dalet Pyramid, we handle this with Digital Queues. Digital Queues take care of all the logic around multiplatform distribution so that users have the real-time editorial control they need.

Empower your teams

Dalet Pyramid opens up new opportunities for your digital newsroom:

• You can now go digital-first: empower your digital teams to take the lead on a story
• You can give these digital capabilities to any user and onboard the digital team with the rest of the digital newsroom
• You can provide your newsroom staff with the digital newsroom tools to increase collaboration at the story level and move away from rundown-centric workflows
• You gain the capability in the NRCS to write digital scripts (top slides, narration script or TOS, CMS script, etc)
• You can streamline digital workflows and make them part of the mainstream production process
• And of course, you can run Dalet Pyramid as a digital newsroom.

Digital production capabilities and digital-first workflows are at the core of Dalet Pyramid. Sometime soon, I will post a follow-up blog that explains how Dalet Pyramid lets you connect the NRCS with digital newsroom production and editing tools to accelerate newsroom workflows.

Intrigued? Let’s talk about it. Reach out to me and get your demo of Dalet Pyramid so you can better understand what digital production in NRCS is all about.

The post Does your NRCS ‘get’ digital-first? appeared first on Dalet.

But every person on our product team knows you don’t go very far without getting CTOs on board. Technology managers want to keep the newsroom happy and humming along smoothly. They appreciate a modern, holistic design approach.

But let’s face it, they are shopping, so above all, they are looking for value.

That’s why we made sure the flexibility and agility that Dalet is building into Dalet Pyramid goes deep, as well as wide. We built this system from the ground up to lower the total cost of ownership.

Flexibility Across the Board

Dalet Pyramid is cloud-native, which optimizes costs and increases agility and scalability. We’re moving to a containerized architecture, with Linux Docker as the deployment unit, Kubernetes as the container’s orchestrator and Rancher as the cluster controller. All this makes modular upgrades possible with minimal interruption, helping to future-proof the investment.

Flexibility is our watchword when it comes to deployment: we can install on-premises, to a private data centre; in a public cloud, or with a hybrid cloud set-up.

We’ve learned over the past couple of decades that media companies need to have elastic business models, so our service model is flexible. CTOs can choose anything from a regular support contract to a fully managed SaaS solution.

Ever Evolving

Dalet’s product teams are going all in on agility. Dalet Pyramid’s back-end allows for much shorter release cycles and transparent upgrades. We will be able to take one of our ideas — or a customer’s idea — and turn it into a working feature in a matter of weeks instead of months.

Oh, and for the worriers out there, rollbacks are a snap, too.

We know the digital revolution is not slowing down. With Dalet Pyramid, our customers will feel confident, and ready to ride the peaks and troughs to come. Join the news revolution!

The post Convince your CTO: Flexibility + Agility = Value appeared first on Dalet.

At the turn of the century, everything seemed technology-driven, as the web and other digital technologies began to set consumer behavior off on different paths. Traditional Media, and traditional business models, struggled to put together the right formula of speed, innovation and quality. Consumers were not sure what they wanted, but if it came to them over the Internet, they wanted it to be free.

Newsrooms transformed themselves to meet this challenge. Often, this transformation was about facilitating the cost-effective, one-person team. The digital know-it-all who could do it all: shooting, interviews, editing, writing the story script, putting together graphics, the interviews, and so on.

Now, 15 or 20 years later, digital news consumers do know what they want, but the problem is they all want different things. There are so many ways to consume news now: apps, websites, aggregators, social media, broadcast, podcasts and other audio, YouTube, TikTok and much more. The increase in the number of digital players and platforms has made an already pressurized landscape even more competitive.

Storytelling 360

The digital one-person show is over for larger news media outfits. But so is today’s typical broadcast workflow. Many newsrooms are still producing mainly for TV. Once production is over, the digital team steps in and repurposes that content. Most of the time, the production team and the digital team are separate, and they use separate tools.

Dalet has risen to the top of its sector by making newsrooms more efficient, so we are in a position to see change coming.

We believe there absolutely has to be more collaboration around stories now because meeting all these consumer tastes requires quality, speed and efficiency, and a variety of formats. Whatever their size, news organizations need to focus on collaborative work practices, with different profiles working concurrently on the same story — often from different places.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic made WFH the norm, we were working to make Pyramid into a collaboration-focused tool that would suit distributed teams.

At Dalet, we are driving a set of tools and a data model that is fully integrated and that fosters this collaboration at the story level — what we call storytelling 360. Pyramid opens plenty of opportunities to rethink and improve production.

The concept of Unified News Operations has always been at the core of Dalet’s news solutions — it has been crucial to our success.

A modern, web-based UX

With Pyramid, we’re going much further. The Dalet Pyramid front-end is completely  web-based, including audio and video editing.

The first thing users notice is that the interface is modern and easy to learn. It employs all the best practices you would expect from a modern web platform. If you use Facebook, Slack, or Trello, you already know enough to get going on Pyramid.

With storytelling 360, all the tools, all the content you need is now available in one place. In the past, ingest was done and stored in one place. The editing happened in another place. The script was linked to the video with a MOS ID — everything was spread across multiple tools and storage areas.

With Pyramid, you can manage all aspects of your story on one screen: ingests, news gathering, archive mining… You can do rough cuts and narrations right from the same screen, or even create a chat room dedicated to the story and connect it to Slack or MS Teams.

One person can create subtitles while two teammates work simultaneously on a script. You can set work-orders and assignments, define what you need for a story and who is going to be assigned which tasks.

Just imagine, every aspect of the story, the operations, the production, the distribution is on the same screen that we call “story editor”. That’s what lays the foundation for much better collaboration and increased efficiency at the story level.

The last (but not least) piece of good news for our users is they won’t have to do much to convince their CTOs that Pyramid is worth looking into — CTOs will have their own very good reasons to be interested…

The post Dalet Pyramid: Stay ahead of the digital news revolution appeared first on Dalet.