One of the things that has struck me over my 20-plus years at Dalet is that nobody here has ever assumed that the digital revolution is slowing down for media companies. This realization shapes our corporate strategy and has driven the development of Dalet Pyramid.

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…