Where did Story-Centric News Production Come From?

The story-centric approach developed out of a combination of significant changes over the last twenty years and as we approach 2025, is fast becoming the mission-critical, central hub of modern news production and storytelling.

The first big change in news production came with the arrival of cable television. The evening news was replaced with always-on, 24-hour news channels. The Internet then kicked things up a notch as platforms like YouTube and Twitter quickly gained momentum. With smartphones and social media, audiences were able to follow news stories as and when they happened.

While broadcasters raced to keep up, they not only had to change the way they produced the news but also keep up with how audiences consumed these stories. And, in a nutshell, this is how the story-centric approach started to take shape.

What is Story-Centric & How Can It Help?

So, what exactly does story-centric mean? And how does it differ from traditional news production? 

First, it’s time for a quick pop quiz!

Q1. Do you sometimes feel like your linear and digital teams are competing against each other?

Q2. Have you ever had to ingest or restore the same content multiple times?

If you’ve answered ‘Yes’ to either question, and especially if it was a ‘Yes’ to both, keep on reading (and maybe clear 15 minutes in your diary for a demo this week!)

Story-centric news production represents a transformative shift in how news organizations approach storytelling. It redefines the concept of the “story,” offering a deeper editorial, organizational, and business perspective. Story-centric  leverages the collaborative and centralized advantages of cloud technology advancements, and the evolving demands of digital storytelling to enable more dynamic and streamlined news operations. 

At its core, story-centric production prioritizes narratives and audience engagement across multiple channels. Unlike the static, point-in-time focus of traditional broadcasting, this approach emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and continuity. The goal is not just to tell stories but to create cohesive narratives that resonate with audiences wherever they consume content. 

Story-centric news production is particularly well-suited to today’s media environment. It enables newsrooms to break stories quickly, often starting with social media, rather than waiting for traditional broadcast slots like the 10 o’clock news. By ensuring collaboration between broadcast and digital teams, the story-centric model maximizes consistency, efficiency, and reach across platforms.

“A story-centric approach accommodates multiple angles on a story, for all the different platforms,” explains Robin Kirchhoffer, Chief Marketing Officer at Dalet. “It’s about giving access to all the objects and media around the story, making sure it’s all properly referenced, properly indexed. Anything that’s being gathered by the team can be shared and used for all the different versions of the story,” he said in the “Making the News” report, part of the DPP’s Tomorrow’s News series. 

Traditional linear news production has long revolved around the Rundown. The Rundown has been the beating heart and organizational principle of news broadcasting, coordinating work within newsrooms and ensuring smooth live broadcasts and delivery, but can now be seen as increasingly limited in a media landscape where agility and adaptability are paramount.

Historically, digital news workflows were completely disconnected from the traditional linear news production workflow. This often meant duplication of content, tasks, files and effort and potentially (and embarrassingly) two differing points of view on one story.

In contrast, the story-centric approach acts as a modern equivalent for multiplatform delivery. It bridges the gap by bringing both workflows under one umbrella and shifts the focus from managing individual broadcasts to managing the story itself, creating a centralized, shareable hub for all assets related to a narrative. From videos and scripts to social media posts and metadata, everything is interconnected and optimized for use across formats and channels.

What Rundown is to traditional linear news production delivery is what Story-Centric is to multiplatform delivery.

Ultimately, story-centric news production isn’t just about telling stories differently; it’s about revolutionizing how they’re created, shared, and experienced. It reflects the growing need for newsrooms to innovate and adapt, ensuring their stories reach audiences wherever they are, and however they prefer to engage.

How story-centric impacts workflows

In story-centric news production, collaboration between digital, social, marketing, operational, broadcast teams and freelancers, both on-premise and remote across geographies and even partner stations, is streamlined by focusing on a “story” that serves as the central container for all content creation. Digital, TV, and other teams can contribute their materials—like interviews or footage—into a shared system, allowing everyone to access and repurpose content for different platforms. This approach ensures that the work done by digital teams can easily be used for TV broadcasts, and vice versa, reducing redundancy and enhancing efficiency in real-time, cross-platform news production.

Traditional news production often involves siloed teams and segmented tasks. It also leans towards more standardized formats with less audience input and engagement. Scheduled updates triumph over continuous feeds with a singular platform focus.

Right now, a News team in Chicago is using the story-centric approach to work on a breaking story for a linear broadcast later tonight and collaborating on the same files, video assets and scripts with colleagues in the Seattle Digital & Social Media team, enriching the story, staying on-brand and narratively consistent whilst getting the story to their audience fast, effectively and where the audience wants to consume it (and before competing stations!).

Here’s a summary of how the two compare side by side:

Story-Centric New Production	Traditional News Production
Multiple Distribution platforms	Singular distribution platform
As and when news happens	Scheduled programming
Real-time audience interaction	Limited or no interaction
Audience engagement	Limited or no engagement
Integrated teamwork	Siloed departments
Ongoing and evolving story lifecycle	Story has a definitive beginning and end

The Benefits of Story-Centric Production

Now that we’ve covered what story-centric production is, let’s explore some of the obvious advantages broadcasters can achieve when adapting to this new way of storytelling:

• Seamless collaboration across teams: A story-centric approach enables complete visibility allowing teams to work together efficiently, creating content for multiple distribution platforms without waiting on one another. Broadcast, digital, and social media teams can all access a single source of truth – The Story – and contribute to the same story assets, ensuring synchronized output across channels.
• Tailored content for each platform: By pooling resources and sharing story materials, teams can quickly create tailored versions of a story for TV, web, social media, and mobile. This ensures that content is optimized for each audience and platform, without duplicating effort.
• Streamlined workflows for greater efficiency: Integrated workflows allow teams to contribute to a central story container, reducing redundant tasks and improving coordination. This makes it easier to repurpose content and ensures that everyone is working from the same, up-to-date material.
• Maximized resource management: Story-centric production reduces silos, allowing teams to share resources and reduce duplication of effort. This collaborative approach fosters more efficient use of time, talent, and technology, ultimately lowering production costs.
• Increased content consistency: By centralizing all media assets, story-centric production ensures that teams can maintain consistency across platforms. This not only enhances the viewer experience but also strengthens a broadcaster’s brand by delivering unified messaging.

News organizations are already delivering digital content, it’s just, in many instances, a slow and inefficient process using traditional workflows designed for broadcast operations.

New channels and digital news coverage have added complexity to newsroom operations. A story-centric approach is about simplifying how you engage with digital audiences and maximizing the impact of the work you’re doing already. The right technology will ensure a smooth transition and allow everyone to evolve their ways of working to engage in collaboration across teams. 

Adopting to a Story-Centric News Production Approach

Switching to a story-centric approach involves both a mindset and technology shift. While producers need to shake off more traditional and ingrained methods of delivering a news story, broadcasters will also need to embrace the power of technology (more on that below). On top of this, here are a few more things to consider:

1. Access to extensive resources: Story-centric productions require access to a treasure trove of reliable and accountable resources. What’s more, these resources need to be available around the clock to meet evolving production demands.
2. Integrated team dynamic and story lifecycle: Instead of working in more traditional department silos, everyone from reporters and producers to videographers and social media managers, across offices and partner stations in different cities and even continents need to work together throughout a story’s lifespan.
3. Ongoing training: On top of investing in tools and software, staff will also need ongoing training on how to operate, manage, and optimize these tools.
4. Build & grow new audiences: While traditional viewership is one thing, in order for new platforms to reach new audiences, broadcasters will need to build and grow a loyal following across all relevant distribution platforms.
5. Flexible & collaborative workflows: Production teams will need to implement and streamline workflows that allow for continuous updates and adaptability as stories unfold. 

Story-centric is driven by a planning and mindset shift. However, it needs to be supported with the right technology. 

Newsrooms have long deployed newsroom computer systems (NRCS) and integrated news production systems (NPS) to manage production, planning, scheduling and workflows. Expansion to digital channels and digital teams brought in new and sometimes separate systems including different media asset management (MAM) and production asset management (PAM) tools into the mix.

Not every newsroom is the same, but it’s common for different teams to use these different, non-integrated platforms. This damages collaboration, leads to duplicate storage, effort and technical resources and does not support a story-centric approach. 

Regardless of the naming conventions, newsrooms need a single platform that can deliver broadcast production workflows, simple access to archived material, and scheduling. This allows for effective coordination between teams and sharing of assets and material to ensure rapid, accurate and efficient coverage of stories across broadcast, social media and more. 

A truly story-centric newsroom is one where technology and strategy work hand in hand to unify efforts across all platforms. By consolidating tools and workflows into a single, integrated platform, newsrooms can break down silos, eliminate technical redundancies, and enable seamless collaboration. This not only streamlines operations but also empowers teams throughout the story lifecycle to focus on storytelling rather than navigating fragmented systems When speed, accuracy, and adaptability are critical, adopting a story-centric approach supported by the right technology is no longer optional; it’s essential for staying relevant and competitive

Is Story-Centric News Production the Future?

According to the 2024 Industry Report ‘The Future of Newsroom Workflows’, digital platforms are increasing becoming more mainstream:

“Websites are the platform most commonly served by the newsrooms in our research, with 73% delivering news content to a website linked to a broadcast (TV or radio) brand, and 18% operating a standalone website. That’s ahead even of TV news shows and bulletins (served by 71% of newsrooms), indicating that while broadcast outlets are found in many forms, the majority of newsrooms are serving up digital content.

“News operations are investing in their digital offer with 70% saying their newsroom now has dedicated digital teams producing content specifically for online and social media audiences. But that means nearly 30% of newsrooms are relying on their existing broadcast teams to produce online content.”

Traditional rundowns still have a place in newsroom workflows, and it’s critical that you’re able to preserve the core functionality of traditional live show production. Story-centric incorporates this planning into a system that untethers content from specific output channels to allow linear and digital teams to collaborate using unified planning, production and distribution tools to maximize coverage and delivery. 

Pete Cashmore, founder of mashable.com, says, “We’re living at a time when attention is the new currency. Those who insert themselves into as many channels as possible look set to capture the most value.”

While not every digital distribution channel may be entirely relevant for every news organization, from this perspective, a story-centric approach is necessary to stay relevant. It’s what will allow you to cover stories at speed across platforms while becoming more efficient at the same time. But story-centric doesn’t stand in opposition to traditional new production. It’s how to adapt what you’ve done historically to the current context of multi-platform news coverage.

Team Up With Dalet

In a time where audience expectations and delivery platforms are constantly evolving, Dalet empowers news organizations to meet those demands with agility and precision. With a cloud-native, unified news solution like Dalet Pyramid, your teams can produce, manage, and distribute content remotely, collaboratively, and seamlessly across all delivery platforms, maximizing both efficiency and impact. Whether you’re breaking a story on social media, producing for broadcast, or curating content for digital audiences, Dalet provides the tools you need to stay ahead. 

Ready to revolutionize your workflows and lead the story-centric future? Let’s talk about how to transform your newsroom into a powerhouse of collaborative, multi-platform storytelling. See Dalet Pyramid for yourself today to get started!