What story-centric means for your organisation and audience
In the last five years, we have witnessed dramatic changes in the technology available to newsrooms and a change in workflow requirements. Broadcasters are, of course, aware of the fact that audiences are flocking to the Internet, but are they adapting to this new reality quickly enough? Or are they stuck in old, expensive workflows preventing them from adapting to the new reality?
New Zealand’s state broadcaster TVNZ talked with 7Mountains' partner and reseller, Stem Media, this summer about their digital strategy and changing their organisation to adapt to story-centric. See the video below.
But first, what does story-centric mean?
Story-centric means true multi-platform workflows. The content’s destination is less important in a story-centric newsroom, while how the story is crafted and covered across all mediums matters more. We are moving towards newsroom structures with no hierarchy based on publishing endpoints. Linear TV is only one piece of the publishing puzzle. Newsroom technology needs to echo this reorganisation. Story-centric is an extension of the efficiencies we have already seen to allow journalists to work across multiple shows and platforms.
Read more about the Story-centric newsroom in the ebook “The principles of story-centric workflows” (click to download) written by Emily Watson, Managing Director Stem Media and Mads Grønbæk, CTO 7Mountains.
TVNZ's strategy to go story-centric
As a major broadcaster in New Zealand, TVNZ delivers news, sports and entertainment across traditional linear channels and digital platforms. When deciding that their newsroom workflows required modernisation, they did this exactly the right way. They analysed what and where their target audience is, and they built a strategy for their future as a broadcaster with the story-centric newsroom as a central piece of the puzzle.
In the video interview, Chief Product and Information Officer TVNZ, Kym Niblock, says:
"We made a decision a long time ago to look at what audiences were doing across the business, not just in news. What we are aware of is that audiences are migrating to the Internet, that's just the fact, and we're a broadcaster. So what did that mean for us? So the piece around story-centric strategy was actually part of a more holistic piece of strategy, which was what is our future? How do we view ourselves over the 5 to 7-year period?"
When the TVNZ project was announced earlier this year, InBroadcast spoke to GM Story Production and Operations TVNZ, Andrew Fernie, about their ongoing project of moving their newsroom to the cloud with story-centric newsroom tool Dina, the workflow requirements and expectations (read the full interview on the 7Mountains website here). Fernie said:
Some of TVNZ’s news production processes haven’t changed in 25 years. Given their age, they can be difficult to change, adapt or integrate and are primarily designed to deliver broadcast outputs. We want to simplify the workflows for our editorial teams. With the solution from 7Mountains, we will deploy a single system that covers planning and deployment, editing and production to multiple publication points – both linear and digital.
In the video interview with TVNZ, Fernie said:
"It's really successful for the news teams to work in a silo-based format for that show, but not for the wider business. We're trying really hard to expand our output into our digital platforms. The only way we could do that was by enabling them to see what the other teams are doing."
Watch the video case from TVNZ, filmed at their headquarters in Auckland, New Zealand.
To watch the video with captions, go to the 7Mountains LinkedIn page here.
TVNZ went live with Dina in early 2022, with significant changes to how journalists and production staff work to cover news across their publishing platforms. These projects represent a modern and innovative approach to news and storytelling that plug straight into the concept of story-centric journalism and workflows.
