Change was evident once the 24-hour news cycle became the standard by which journalists reported events. Today’s cycle includes news consumption over mobile apps, social media, podcasts, streaming media, and so much more. This demand driven by digital platforms calls for a new kind of approach to journalism and content production.

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.