Please explain what your Accelerator project is in as much detail as possible.
Smart Stories is building a shared way for newsroom tools to understand what the ongoing context of a story is, as it breaks and develops.
The technical core is SOM, the Story Object Model—a common format any tool can publish to and read from, so the newsroom’s understanding of a story lives in one place instead of in five systems and one producer’s head.
The model itself is simple: a story, the asets that belong to it, and a record of every telling—meaning each time that story is cut and sent out on different platforms.
Electric Sheep is one of the vendor agents in the ecosystem, bringing the broader narrative context to breaking stories. We plugged in a system which listens to the shared story feed, converts those assets into an assembled edit draft, reframes it for socials and makes it ready to be tweaked by the humans, then publishes that back to the bus.
Everything is fully editable, so anything we create gets a human-in-the-loop step to review and tweak before render.
Who is involved in the project?
Smart Stories is championed by ITN, BBC, NBCUniversal, Associated Press, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Channel 4, Sky, ITV, the EBU and SMPTE, with Jon Roberts at ITN, Morag McIntosh at BBC, Alex Bassett at NBCUniversal and Brian Hopman at AP leading it.
Electric Sheep sits in the ecosystem as a Tier 3 autonomous vendor agent.
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Why do you believe the project is important to the media industry?
Every part and tool in the newsroom is working on a version of the story which doesn’t sync when there are changes. The archive knows what footage exists, the rundown knows what’s going out, the edit suite knows about the cut, but none are syncing upstream, and downstream updates live.
So the producer ends up being the one who remembers, and when something shifts, they’ve got to go and tell everybody by hand and update all the tools manually.
On film sets it’s the same thing—there’s always someone whose entire job is knowing where everything’s up to and stopping people wandering off with an old version.
Software has never had one of those. Smart Stories is facilitating closing that gap by connecting the tools together—one shared understanding of the story that keeps itself up to date as the story moves.
Once the tools know what the story is, they can build on that sync and context. A draft can be building while the story’s still developing. A rights flag raised at the desk can reach an edit that’s already been cut.
That’s the end of it we work at. Electric Sheep reads the material as it lands, works out what’s in it and who’s saying what, and hands that straight back upstream. We’re rolled out in over 60 newsrooms doing just that.
What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced as part of your project?
The hardest problem wasn’t technical; it was editorial. When the rights desk flags a story we’ve already cut, or some foundational factual elements about the story change, you can’t just delete or change the offending clip.
You’ve got to teach an agent to properly unpick the story context, and make more nuanced judgements on what else that affects in the story, and whether the whole piece needs a re-edit.
Why did you want to be part of this year’s IBC Accelerator programme?
Given the agentic wave, the Accelerator felt like a place where we can connect to this new layer of intelligence between all of the tools.
We always believed that editing was the heartbeat of the narrative and often the bottleneck, which is why Electric Sheep exists to fix that, but an editor is only as good as the context it’s handed, and that context lives in other people’s systems.
The Accelerator is the place where broadcasters, agencies and vendors come together to design something in public and then test it against real content.
What can IBC Show attendees expect to see from you in Amsterdam?
Our team has stood up a marvellous workflow, pulling a live clip from the bus on a breaking news update, ingesting it and handing back a draft cut. Along with actioning updates like rights flags from the bus. The suggestion then lands in the shared dashboard for a human to review, approve, reject, or tweak. Five minutes from the live story to the first draft.
See all of this year’s projects at the IBC Accelerator Zone in Hall 14.
