The term ‘story-centric’ represents a fundamental shift in news production. Simply put, story-centric centers planning around the story itself, departing from traditional, linear news production that focuses planning on broadcast time slots and rundowns.

A story-centric approach still includes linear news production, but subsumes it into a wider framework that’s also able to accommodate online, on-demand news production. Critically, this allows digital teams to start covering a story as it breaks, rather than waiting for the ‘10 o’clock news’. We’ve gone into more detail on these differences in our previous blog post: ‘Story-Centric Vs. Traditional News Production’.

Raoul Cospen of Dalet shared that “Today broadcasters are focused on telling the story as richly as it can be told on the platform it’s being published to“. As a story-centric workflow integrates all aspects of news production around a single narrative, this naturally fosters a more seamless and collaborative workflow—ideal for today’s fast-paced, multi-channel newsrooms.

In this blog, we explore how story-centric workflows not only support digital-first storytelling, but also incorporate traditional news production to create a unified, collaborative model for news teams.

How Story-Centric Workflows Optimize News Production

Let’s face it, news production can get a bit messy. The weight of accuracy and urgency can make for a multifaceted, complex, and volatile work environment. The good news? From small, niche operations to large, international news producers, story-centric workflows are leveling up the game in the following ways:

1. Covering the story when it happens

To keep up with ‘breaking news’ industry standards, digital teams need to be able to start covering a story as soon as it happens. Before story-centric planning, news cycles were often limited to planning around rundowns and linear workflows with the NPS and NRCS. Centered around a single story rather than an end point, story-centric planning includes linear news production while also empowering online news production so digital teams can share news as soon as it’s ready outside of broadcast news slots.

2. Driving collaboration and productivity

When the story is the common goal, linear and digital teams are more synchronized, tasks are streamlined, and collaboration and productivity rise. By focusing on a single story, a story-centric model enables teams to start covering a story through a preferred channel and coordinate coverage across channels, rather than having to wait for news production slots and repurposing the content after. This results in better time management where teams can update stories in real time—keeping pace with breaking news and effectively handling stories across multiple channels.

3. Reducing costs

Of course, a boost in overall productivity and efficiency paired with better time-frames can lead to significant cost savings for news organizations. Better collaboration leads to improved internal communication, and story-centric workflows help minimize errors and revisions required. What’s more, with a centralized platform, digital and linear teams can access the same content from the cloud—removing the need for file duplication and therefore minimizing media storage costs.

4. Enabling consistency and personalization

By bringing teams and resources together around a single story, a story-centric model allows for richer, more consistent narratives across channels. By centralizing planning, teams can maintain the story’s message but optimize the format and editorial content of the story for delivery to a given channel e.g. TV, radio, social media, and digital outlets. Creating consistent, quality content in this way translates to a coherent experience for audiences wherever they choose to engage.

Centralized Planning is Your Secret Weapon

For a smooth transition to story-centric workflows, you first need story-centric, multiplatform planning capabilities rather than just linear rundown planning. Secondly, you need seamless, instant access to content and archived resources. Many newsrooms have adopted separate MAMs or PAMs as they developed their operation and created digital teams. However, siloing asset management as a separate platform, away from your NPS and NRCS, contributes to siloed workflows and damages collaboration.

Aaron Kroger, Product Marketing Lead at Dalet, explains, “The challenge newsrooms face today is finding ways to make their digital teams take the lead for their own stories, working collaboratively with broadcast teams, all within the same newsroom media asset management platform”.

By combining your NPS and MAM capabilities into one solution, you gain a central platform for both access and collaboration. This enhances your ability to carry out centralized planning—allowing digital teams to cover stories as they break and for linear teams to utilise the efforts put in by the digital teams as well.

On top of enabling digital-first news storytelling, centralized planning also helps with:

• Collaborative production: By centralizing resources, teams can bridge traditional workflows with digital-first approaches and collaborate more effectively on each story—breaking down silos between digital and linear teams.
• Digital workflow organization: With centralized planning, it’s easier to manage, display, and sort your stories across teams and channels.
• Multi-channel distribution: Centralized planning simplifies distribution by accommodating multiple versions of the story for different audiences and formats. With a unified system that integrates with your Content Management System (CMS), you can push content to reach audiences wherever they consume news.
• Personalized content: With access to a unified system, teams can leverage existing assets to tailor content for various audience segments, helping expand your newsroom’s reach and impact. For example, repurposing content to vertical video for delivery to social platforms.
• Improved production processes: A centralized hub provides visibility into task statuses, deadlines, and delivery requirements, improving communication and workflow processes across the production chain.

As with any major shift, embracing a story-centric workflow requires a change in both technology and process. To accommodate the scale and pace of online content needed in the digital space, you need a story-centric approach that untethers content from specific output channels and modernizes news operations with several unified planning, production and distribution tools for both linear and digital teams. This will provide your digital teams with tools to access media archives and produce content to schedule across multiple channels. Not only this, but you need to shift your planning process to center around a single story regardless of distribution channel, ensuring digital teams can cover breaking stories without being restricted by linear broadcast planning.

The best way of embracing this change? You need a unified news workflow environment, where your teams can produce, manage, and distribute content remotely, collaboratively, and seamlessly across all delivery platforms, maximizing both efficiency and impact. And that’s where we can help.

Suggested reading: For more context on the development of newsroom technology, check out our recent industry report – The Future of Newsroom Workflows: How the World’s Leading News Organizations are Redesigning Operations and Technology to Survive and Thrive

Change The Way You Tell Stories With Dalet

Our centralized solution Dalet Pyramid combines your NPS, NRCS, PAM, and MAM into a single, story-centric platform that effortlessly integrates with your CMS to distribute content across multiple channels. Through our market-leading MAM and workflow automation capabilities, we eliminate the challenge of complex technology stacks and bridge the gap between linear and digital teams—ensuring you can break news as it happens but maintain a consistent narrative.

Equip your teams with our centralized solution and adopt a story-centric approach at your own pace. Request a demo today and get the modern scoop on storytelling!