As part of TVBEurope’s webinar on maximising newsroom efficiency, Liz Corbin, director of news at the European Broadcasting Union, discussed how automation can help journalists and producers improve their broadcasts.
Corbin was joined by Tom Crocker, director of business development – production workflow, Ross Video on the panel, with TVBEurope’s content director Jenny Priestley hosting the webinar.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Jenny Priestley: Tom, for the purpose of this discussion, can you explain what we mean by automation in the newsroom and what it is for?
Tom Crocker: Automation in the newsroom can mean a number of different things to a number of different people. There are a couple of key planks when we talk about automation. Typically, it would be about organisational efficiency using what resources you have in the best possible way, but also about complexity, being able to make very advanced things that would take a lot more people than maybe you have to produce, as well as efficiency, complexity and repeatability—making sure that what you do is identical every single time, and not interrupting a viewer experience. Fundamentally, it’s about making sure that people do what people do best and machines do what machines do best.
JP: Liz, as a journalist, how does automation help you do your job?
Liz Corbin: It’s great to be here on the webinar discussing this, because it really makes me think about automation. Once automation is embedded in your workflow, you actually forget it’s there at all, which is the best kind of automation. There are many things that we do in newsrooms now that previously would have had to be done manually. This is something that’s increasing all the time, and where I think we’re seeing a rapid development in the types of tools that we can start using.
Journalism is, and should be, to a point, a very manual job in terms of the actual journalism itself going out, finding out what happened, asking the right questions, having the unique and original thoughts about whatever story you’re covering. But after that point, that’s where automation can come in, everything from the pictures or the audio that you’re gathering through to the processing of it, through to the delivery of it and the distribution of it. That’s where you know automation can really help improve your product, help you reach more people, and really help the viewers and consumers to interact more with your content.
So automation is actually critical. It’s where you can make scale, and that’s where you can make quality in terms of your audience experience. It’s the types of things that you forget, down to computing systems that decades ago we didn’t have. It’s been critical.
JP: What does automation enable journalists and producers to do instead?
LC: Have a little bit more have time to actually work out what the story is, and be able to produce a story in a way that will be the best way of presenting it to the audience you’re dealing with. Time is not on our side. The rolling news cycle, the speed at which news comes into you, and the speed with which you have to put it back out again in a consumable, understandable form. We need some help with that. You could do it with hundreds and thousands of people, but actually some of these repetitive tasks are best done by machines.
The full webinar is available to watch here.
