As the world of broadcast TV news moves into the AI era, station groups like Scripps are using the technology not only to help improve news coverage and viewer engagement, but also to reform and enhance how reporters and anchors spend their days—focusing on new workflows and adapting to how consumers stay informed.

That was the impetus behind Scripps Media’s announcement several weeks ago that it would adopt a “digital-first” approach to news coverage, in which it would prioritize streaming breaking news rather than waiting for scheduled daily newscasts. This approach reflects the reality of how consumers get their news—a development that is long overdue, according to Dean Littleton. Littleton recently became president of media for Scripps, combining leadership of the company’s enterprise television and broadcast operations in a newly created role.

The company plans to roll out its new process to a dozen of its smaller markets, with plans to increase deployment to all markets over time.

'We've Got to Change Our Business'
The changes were revealed at the same time the station group announced that 268 positions across the company were being eliminated. Littleton says Scripps had to make these changes, noting that core revenue across its approximately 60 local broadcast TV stations in more than 40 markets and 22 states is down 30%–50% from 20 years ago. The station group announced a nearly 5.4% drop in core revenue in its latest fiscal quarter, compared to the same quarter a year ago.

“A year ago we sat down and said, ‘We've got to change our business,’” Littleton told TV Tech. “So we took a step back and said, ‘What is our true north?’ And our true north is journalism. It's the journalism that will sustain us.

“So we looked at all of our processes and completely set about reinventing all of them with a focus on the consumer and how they consume content across broadcast, digital, streaming, and social platforms.”

Littleton says today’s news production process isn’t all that different than what it was 30 years ago and that, despite past promises to focus more on digital and streaming, broadcasters were not moving forward fast enough.

“I remember sitting in these meetings talking about strategy, and as much as we would walk out of those meetings and all say, ‘We're digital-first,’ we'd go right back to working on our 5:00, 6:00, or 10:00 newscast,” he said. “Meanwhile, the consumer left the party in large part, and that's been a mistake. I think we lost sight of the consumer.”

Littleton also wanted to move beyond the walled garden of a station news “app,” calling that approach “overly simplistic.”

He says Scripps needs to go where consumers are when it comes to news—giving them access to “journalism that's delivered on the platforms of their choosing, in formats native to that platform, and delivered on a schedule that fits the consumer's schedule.”

Littleton emphasizes that Scripps is increasing its focus on local news despite the recent layoffs by tapping into new AI processes that automate more of the production process.

“We are essentially reallocating resources from the production of newscasts to the development of journalism,” he said. “[We’re] moving resources from the process of creating the traditional newscast, and then investing in resources to create original reporting in our markets.”

Littleton says he wants to increase the number of reporters in local markets and believes Scripps will expand its local coverage rather than reduce it, as some critics have claimed.

“We'll see more reporters and MMJs, not fewer, with them having geographic beats so that they build expertise, and their stories are told with relevance and context in the communities that they serve,” he said. “And these communities that they're serving often are communities that have been 'news deserts' up until the point that we assigned a reporter.”

“At the end of this process, we'll have more MMJs and reporters overall than what we have today,” Littleton added.

Scripps has developed a new workflow to support its digital-first approach, according to Littleton.

“We've invented a whole new process for operating our newsrooms, where a story gets completed, and the story immediately goes into the live stream,” he said. “The technology that we've built constantly ‘stacks’ and ‘restacks’ the shows on the live stream, and the stories are prioritized based on tags that human beings assign to those stories, so the technology knows how to prioritize the content.

“Therefore, my experience as a consumer watching that live stream at 2:00 in the afternoon is different than it would have been at 1:00, because as new content has moved into the stream, the technology ‘restacked’ it based on priorities that human beings gave it,” Littleton added.

New Role: 'Executive Reporter'
Along with more automated production processes, Littleton also says the management of how news is handled is changing, with the creation of a new “executive reporter” role in each newsroom.

“This person leads the reporting resources inside each newsroom, they have a reporting background, and so their goal is to help improve the storytelling and the journalism, and their focus is on that all day long,” he said. “So we've had to rethink how management works in our newsrooms to support what is an entirely new workflow and process inside our buildings.”

To put the power of AI behind its new news workflow, Scripps developed its own news production platform called "Stacker," according to Christina Hartman, vice president of emerging technology operations at Scripps.

Producers working with Stacker create templates based on their focus—whether it be news, weather, business, or sports—and connects those subjects to local community concerns so news reports better reflect local issues.

“Stacker is the platform we built that is responsive to a template that a producer builds, as a reflection of the content strategy of the newsroom, whether it’s heavy on weather, leading with community connection stories, etc.,” she said. “The producer sets the template, and then Stacker as a platform will read what stories we have available and meet the criteria for slotting in the platform, and then it produces a draft or suggested rundown based on that daypart's template.

“It allows the producer to intuitively move stories around if they don't like the suggested order, or if they want to change some of the timing content, they could do that really easily through the platform,” Hartman added.

Better Use of Time
Hartman reiterated Littleton’s assessment of the need to use AI to free up a reporter’s time during the day.

“The amount of time that our reporters have been able to spend being in the field versus doing the shooting, editing, and versioning for social media and the web—the time spent actually with news gathering has shrunk, and the day has gotten longer,” she said. “We remind people that more and more of your day is going to things that aren't why you got into this business.”

Given the level of automation now involved in news production, Hartman stressed that everything aired is still approved by humans.

“Nothing is published or goes to air without human review and affirmative approval, and everything that we publish or take to air is originally reported, substantively written, and reviewed and approved by a human journalist,” she said. “What we have brought AI in to assist with are really the production components: the versioning, the metadata tagging, the sort of rough-cut edit, and the layout of the rundown in a suggested capacity. So from a guardrails point of view, it's structurally built into the process.”

As Scripp’s chief advocate for AI development within the company, Hartman shares her initial skepticism about AI, noting that when ChatGPT was launched nearly three years ago, her first thought was, ‘how do I keep this as far away from our newsroom as possible?’

“It's why I proposed forming AI governance,” she said. “So we started from sort of a ‘protective condition.’” she said. “What I found though is that if I was writing the guardrail and the rules around use of AI, I better know what I'm doing and be using it so that I can understand what the traps and the and the pitfalls were.”

Hartman responded to criticisms that Scripps is using AI as an easy way out to justify downsizing its news staffs.

“If this were purely a financial exercise, there are many other models that that I will tell you candidly would have been so much easier to pursue,” she said. “We could have dripped down to five-minute newscasts. We could have killed reporting and reporting roles, and maintained the facade of a newscast where you have talent that isn't even local, putting on the appearance of a local broadcast. But none of those alternatives would be true to Scripps’ value and Scripps’ promise to its communities.”

With a digital-first approach, a news story is not a finished product, but rather an evolving element that Littleton believes can help make viewers part of the narrative.

“What we are now seeing our newsrooms do with this process where you create a story and you immediately upload it and it goes into the stream, that happens throughout the day so viewers get to go along with the reporter as they develop a story,” he said. “[As the reporter] walks out of the newsroom, they record video that explains what their story is for the day, and as that story gets updated, those videos are created, and they go into the stream also. So the person watching at home gets to go along with the reporter as the story develops throughout the day.”

The fact that news workflow is being built around AI is not new, but technical changes are just one factor in the decision to the shift, according to Hartman, who characterized the new direction as “as much cultural as it is technological.”

The ability to mix live, tape-delayed, pre-recorded and “feels live” content into a seamless and cohesive 24x7 channel experience has been a recipe for differentiated success in traditional linear cable and broadcast TV. But news channels have an additional obligation: to be prepared to cover breaking news events that have a major health, safety, economic or social impact on their audience. 

In a pre-cloud era, “lighting up” a control room was no small feat. Even today, most master control rooms are built around baseband facilities and studios that have been foundational to television for the past few decades. But in today’s work-from-anywhere environment, cloud production, master control and playout make it much simpler to “go live” at any moment. That capability to light up a virtual control room with little effort has an impact on when and how newsrooms decide to break into existing programming for updates.

Competition for viewers’ attention is fiercer than ever, and the need for live talent and breaking-news coverage is critical. This requires additional investment to be sure. But how much live content do channels actually need to create an engaging 24/7 feed? To what extent can real-time graphics or generative AI fill the gaps between those live on-air hours?  

The truth is, we don’t yet have the answers to these questions. We don’t know how news content will evolve nor how viewer tastes will react. After all, free linear streaming on connected TVs is still in its infancy. But it is clear that CTV advertising is growing and maturing, making it easier to efficiently monetize narrower audiences. So, the answer? Experimentation. We can cross the gaps above with a strategy that lives on the content innovation vector.

Using purpose-built tools, news channels can experiment creatively and watch real-time metrics of streaming TV — including both concurrent viewership and viewer reach across time — to understand what’s working and what’s not. From there, it’s a matter of iteration and execution, building on wins and moving swiftly past the losses.

This “test and learn” programming strategy can be executed by exploiting three trends:

• The explosion of cloud production, AI and creative tools for producers, journalists and editors that have already broadened and deepened the canvas for newsrooms. The movement toward cloud and remote production architectures has been in progress for a decade. But COVID-19 proved cloud tools and remote production work well, and are only getting better.
  
• The rising potential for content exchanges, press-pool feeds, and other forms of shared or licensed content to help fill a range of gaps in the programming wheel. Video marketplaces are popping up to enable companies like Nexstar, CNN, Reuters, the AP and others to help not only cover breaking events anywhere in the world, but also with regular and customized daily clips, such as weather updates.
  
• The “creator economy” talent pool. For better or worse, social media is here to stay and it has dramatically boosted the available talent pool for news content creation globally. One analysis estimated there may be as many as 24,000 YouTube channels with over 1 million subscribers. Today we see a second (or third?) generation of digital natives hitting their adult years — a labor force that’s expert at creating engaging videos using nothing but a mobile phone or browser. On top of this, they’ve trained today’s audiences to expect more authenticity and humanity in their on-air companions. High quality is still paramount, but the definition of that metric has changed in the minds of many consumers.

There are also notable extensions of live content that can help channels fill the content pipe. These involve workflows whereby time-delayed content, recent clips and data-driven graphic feeds can deliver fresh and updated content without being truly live.

Indeed, it’s quite common for newscasts that may feel live to be “tape-delayed.” Complexities across time zones in the United States, for example, may mean abbreviated content programming might be needed for certain geographies. In other cases, news shows are designed to make use of fast-turn editing innovations in so-called “story-centric” newsrooms where content is made from the get-go to be pre-purposed for 10 or more downstream outlets at the same time. These are powerful workflows that make “nearly live” content easier to produce without much degradation in the timeliness of the story.

Finally, as we fill the 24/7 programming wheel with content that may be re-aired from previous slots, there are further possibilities of refreshing that content utilizing data-driven cloud graphics. This might include lower-thirds or perhaps a simple real-time ticker at the bottom of the screen that is logically associated with certain playlist assets previously aired. 

In this way, we can provide story-specific updates to news content that might have been recorded earlier in the day, providing a viewer with a clear orientation to the story they may have missed, while also providing a timely update to the story since it aired.

Finding success in today’s competitive news programming environment isn’t easy. News channels have to be able to go live at any moment on top of a baseline of file-based content. They have to experiment on a wide range of content innovation vectors and get immediate, high-fidelity data to process success or failure using concurrent and unique viewership metrics and even interactive components. 

Finally, they need to employ near-live and live-to-VOD programming strategies to enhance existing assets — whether aired last hour or last week — to make them feel to the viewer as if live and fresh. Deftly weaving in these three strategies will help ensure news brands build the best 24/7 streaming news channels available, satisfying both distributors and viewers alike.

Dalet, a leading provider of solutions and services for broadcasters and content professionals, extends the Interoperable Master Format (IMF) capabilities and collaborative workflows within the new Dalet Galaxy five solution. Shown at NAB 2018 on booth SL8010, the Dalet Galaxy five component-based approach to IMF provides an exceptional user experience for maximum efficiency – simplifying IMF production and delivery workflows with visually intuitive graphical tools and automation.

“The overall change in moving from traditional workflow to Dalet’s IMF component-based approach is more than a technical uplift, it's a change in the business value model,” states Matthieu Fasani, product manager, Dalet. “All too often a facility can be perceived as a provider of tapes and files that satisfy individual creative projects, but the real goal here is to move into a position of being able to fulfil a continuous business need by providing a technical back office and, potentially, a store-front for fulfilling the national and international distribution requirements. Dalet enables this by demystifying the complexity of IMF, industrializing the process with a component-based approach that is incredibly flexible and quick to adopt across organizations.”

Dalet has been pioneering component-based workflows and the IMF workflow industrialization with Dalet Galaxy, its flagship MAM and Workflow Orchestration platform, creating real business opportunities for global distribution. “In a traditional workflow you need to re-render your entire project several times throughout its lifecycle including every version you need to distribute,” explains Arnaud Elnecave, vice president, marketing, Dalet. “The Dalet Galaxy five data model and toolset supports comprehensive component-based workflows. This means you never render, you change only the specific elements that need to be modified or added supplements within a project or collection, eliminating the need to duplicate media files. This is a much more flexible approach that offers significant savings on time and resources for production and delivery. This will become more and more critical for efficient program versioning and distribution workflows where various essences are produced, transformed, arranged, packaged and exchanged repeatedly between media properties.”

NAB attendees can book a private briefing here to learn more about Dalet Galaxy five IMF and other component-based workflows.

New IMF Workflow Features of Dalet Galaxy five

New features, introduced with Dalet Galaxy five and shown at NAB 2018, include native IMF support and a Video Timeline view to speed approvals and production:

• Native support for IMF assets, such as the Composition Play List (CPL) and the Output Profile List (OPL), comes as default alongside objects like video, audio or images when you open Dalet Galaxy
  
• Generating proxies for preview of track files and CPLs in Dalet WebSpace
  
• Visualizing asset relationships (between track files and CPLs, CPLs and OPLs, and between CPLs belonging to the same title)
  
• Automating the creation of new versions by leveraging the Workflow Orchestration platform capabilities
  
• Automatically connecting CPLs using EIDR (Entertainment Identifier Registry) and ISAN (International Standard Audiovisual Number) identifiers
  
• Orchestrating the rendering of compositions and the generation of new IMPs manually or automatically based on configurable business rules

A Great User Experience

“The IMF standard brings huge benefits at several key steps of the media supply and distribution chain but at the cost of some complexity. In order for users to leverage all of its benefits, IMF workflows need to be intuitive and easy to manage,” adds Fasani. “That’s exactly what Dalet Galaxy five is introducing. The way the Dalet user experience exposes IMF assets for manipulation is so unique, it will change the way people perceive and understand IMF. In just one or two days you can set up sophisticated workflows to receive IMF packages, review the content, trigger export to Netflix or any distributor you wish, and simplify end-to-end IMF workflows for all of your team. We are replacing complexity with usability.”

Dalet Galaxy five introduces a new set of tools within Dalet WebSpace specifically designed for preview, review and approval of all objects of an IMF package, including the CPL, with a glance at the Video Timeline available on any web client. There is no need for an extensive mastering tool. Simply import the package content into Galaxy, automatically generate proxies and extend collaborative review and approval workflows.

The Bundle Object groups all the components that belong to the same title under one umbrella. Inside the Bundle Editor, users will find the lifecycle of component-based workflows presented in a simple, visual layout:

• The Media Tab lists all the component track files (video, audio, subtitles/captions
  
• The Production Tab lists all the CPLs/OPLs, which describe how components have been assembled and should be transformed to an output deliverable
  
• The Version Tab exposes the renderings of CPLs/OPLs into final deliverables for consumption by end-users (AS-11 for linear playout, HLS/DASH for OTT distribution)
  
• The Packages Tab tracks how individual components have been received/delivered and allows to generate new packages by simple drag-and-drop operations.
  

Extensive Third-Party Integration

Dalet works with the IMF eco-system of vendors (mastering tools from Marquise Technologies, Rohde & Schwarz and ColorFront; QC tools from Netflix Photon, Interra Systems and IRT) to ensure robust end-to-end IMF workflows, including receiving IMF packages, referencing IMF assets in a central repository and leveraging IMF metadata, both technical and editorial, to automate processes at scale and expose the relevant information to the appropriate users.

Learn more about IMF and Dalet Component-Based Workflows

Click here to visit the dedicated webpage.

Learn More About IMF and Dalet component-based workflows at Dalet Pulse

Join 250+ media and technology executives at Dalet Pulse to discover latest innovations from Dalet and technology partners. Dalet Pulse will take place on April 8th at the SLS Hotel in Las Vegas. To register, please click here.

Schedule a Private Press Briefing with Dalet at NAB 2018

Members of the NAB registered press are invited to request a private press briefing with Dalet at NAB 2018. For more information, please contact Alex Molina at alex@zazilmediagroup.com.

About Dalet Digital Media Systems

Dalet solutions and services enable media organizations to create, manage and distribute content faster and more efficiently, fully maximizing the value of assets. Dalet products are built on three distinct platforms that, when combined, form versatile business solutions that power end-to-end workflows for news, sports, program preparation, production, archive and radio. Individually, Dalet platforms and products offer targeted applications with key capabilities to address critical media workflow functions such as ingest, QC, edit, transcode and multiplatform distribution.

The foundation for Dalet productivity-enhancing workflow solutions, Dalet Galaxy is the enterprise Media Asset Management (MAM) & Orchestration platform that unifies the content chain by managing assets, metadata, workflows and processes across multiple and diverse production and distribution systems. Specially tailored for news and media workflows, this unique technology platform helps broadcasters and media professionals increase productivity while providing operational and business visibility.

Dalet AmberFin is the high-quality, scalable transcoding platform with fully integrated ingest, mastering, QC and review functionalities, enabling facilities to make great pictures in a scalable, reliable and interoperable way. Addressing the demanding needs of studio production, multi-camera ingest, sports logging and highlights production, the innovative Dalet Brio video server platform combines density and cost-effectiveness with high reliability. Adopted by leading broadcasters, Dalet Cube is a suite of applications to create, manage and deliver graphics in a newsroom scenario.

Dalet supports customers from the initial planning stages to well beyond project execution. Our global presence includes 17 offices strategically located throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, North America and South America, and a network of more than 60 professional partners serving 87 countries worldwide. This collective experience and knowledge enables our customers to realize potential increases in productivity, efficiency and value of their assets.

The comprehensive Dalet Care program ensures deployments remain up and running with 24/7 support 365 days a year.

Dalet systems are used around the world by many thousands of individual users at hundreds of TV and Radio content producers, including public broadcasters (ABS-CBN, BBC, CBC, DR, FMM, France TV, RAI, RFI, Russia Today, RT Malaysia, VOA), commercial networks and operators (Canal+, FOX, eTV, MBC Dubai, MediaCorp, Mediaset, Orange, Time Warner Cable, Warner Bros, Sirius XM Radio), and government organizations (Canadian House of Commons, Australian Parliament and UK Parliament).

Dalet is traded on the NYSE-EURONEXT stock exchange (Eurolist C): ISIN: FR0011026749, Bloomberg DLT:FP, Reuters: DALE.PA.

Dalet® is a registered trademark of Dalet Digital Media Systems. All other products and trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

PARIS, FRANCE—Dalet announced today that “a leading U.S. news broadcaster has signed a large-scale, multi-site deal to migrate all of its regional news stations to the Dalet Unified News Operations workflow powered by Dalet Galaxy.”

The platform offers a centralized content repository natively accessible by a suite of production and distribution tools. The connected, friction-free Unified News Operations workflow will provide faster and better content production and uncomplicated distribution for broadcast, web and social outlets alike. Once this first phase is completed, all sites will be standardized on the same technology platform, setting a robust and open foundation for future multi-site federation and collaboration.

“This latest win comes on the heels of several sizeable U.S., European and Asia Pacific deals, confirming that the Dalet Unified News Operations workflow is meeting and exceeding the expectations of some of the most demanding news broadcasters around world,” Arnaud Elnecave, vice president of marketing for Dalet, said.

Replacing a legacy system built on three separate platforms, Dalet’s end-to-end, story-centric approach to news production and one-click social media distribution help tackle new business challenges.

Breaking down silos, Dalet solutions for unified news operations will connect the broadcaster’s disparate regional bureaus, bringing field journalists into the virtual newsroom through robust web and mobile apps. The interconnected toolset will support a ubiquitous multimedia content workflow that elevates collaboration and content sharing across the entire operation.

The large-scale installation will include Dalet’s Galaxy platform, which encompasses the fully integrated media asset management, newsroom computer system, Dalet Brio for ingest and playout, Dalet WebSpace and Dalet On-the-Go for remote news production, Dalet OneCut multimedia editor and Dalet Social Media tools for native social media curation and distribution.