Dalet Senior Vice President of Product Innovation, Marcy Lefkovicz, finally got to flip the script on Michael Depp, Editor of TVNewsCheck and Chief Content Officer at NewsCheckMedia. Usually on the asking end of NewCheckMedia’s daily publication, newsletters, and industry events, Depp sat down with Marcy to unpack where journalism meets technology right now.
A trust problem that’s really a literacy problem
News has converged into a single, hyper-fragmented lane. Low barriers to entry have brought a welcome plurality of voices, but many arrive without the disciplines and guardrails that define journalism as a practice. On social and mobile, audiences are flooded with “news” they can’t easily contextualize. The result: confusion and erosion of trust. “Anyone can claim to be a journalist now,” Depp notes. In medicine, you can’t simply declare yourself a dentist and start pulling teeth; news shouldn’t be any different.
Institutions aren’t perfect, nor are they obsolete
Journalism’s conventions evolve and should. However, the rise of performative, hyper-partisan news and broader institutional content has muddied the waters for even conscientious consumers. That backdrop makes the core principles of verification, accountability, and corrections more critical than ever.
What changes (and what doesn’t)
There’s massive opportunity in finding a new vocabulary for news: a tone and visual grammar that meets younger audiences where they are, paired with transparency about the process of “show your work” like a math problem. Aesthetic rules are changing, too. The social-native embrace of jump cuts and raw field immediacy can coexist with studio polish. In breaking contexts, speed beats polish as long as standards stay intact.
Label the source
Provenance tooling and standards consortia help legitimize material in an era of synthetic media. But they’re racing a deluge of fakes accelerated by AI. Newsrooms can’t outsource literacy: they should explain verification and sourcing in scripts, tags, and live reads so audiences learn how truth is assembled, and what happens when it goes wrong.
Efficiency is the watchword
As IP and cloud transitions continue, buyers demand near-term ROI and tangible efficiency, this year, not eventually. That pressure is reshaping vendor conversations across the industry.
From story to “atomic unit”
Depp sees newsrooms finally embracing story-centric workflows that publish once and adapt everywhere. AI will intensify that shift, pushing personalization by format, voice, and duration (“give me this story as a 10-minute podcast in a female voice”) and forcing a fresh question: What is the atomic unit of journalism?
Where Dalet connects
This conversation is the sweet spot for Dalet, whose systems enable an end-to-end newsroom platform designed to drive the efficiencies of newsroom-wide collaboration and story-centric models. Depp’s bottom line is a useful compass: if it doesn’t connect, it doesn’t matter. The work ahead, clear provenance, visible standards, and adaptive formats that make connections more likely.
