The Challenges of Adapting News Production to the New Reality

Abstract

The world has changed. Technologies have evolved. People don't consume news content as they used to.-The way many media companies are organized is not suitable for the needs that today's fast-paced news consumption habits impose. Media organizations tried to address this problem by creating a separate digital media department, but with the rise in relevance of social media and other digital outlets this way of working is not the best approach anymore.-In this paper, we will cover the challenges that news organizations are facing to adapt their workflows and processes to this new world where the time to air, or rather the time to online, is the most important factor;how the roles and tasks have changed and how the old news production logic needs to evolve to address these new priorities.-We will describe how a story centric approach to news production, supported by emerging networking AI and ML technologies, can help journalists expand their roles and work more efficiently.-We will discuss how the needs to work from anywhere and the adoption of a mobile journalism paradigm are more important than ever, and how the Covid-19 pandemic only accelerated a trend that was already unstoppable.-We will explore the ways that news consumption has changed and how it will drive the way news is produced, and how that is driving the way the production tools are designed and used. From our POV, needs define workflows, and workflows define tools-not the other way around. © 2020 Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Inc.