In newsrooms and editorial teams, holistic exchange and story-centered editorial planning are important – whether it is in journalistic newsrooms or for brand communication. However, as digitization advances, there are more and more sources of information, channels and touchpoints. In addition, the media product is not just a newspaper or a television broadcast anymore and cross-media publishing is needed. Manually planning, keeping silos or working with Excel sheets are no longer efficient enough. That is why the role of tech platforms in news, like newsroom computer systems, becomes more and more important. Media organizations need newsroom software to cope with the flood of information and channels. It helps journalists to automate research and monitoring tasks and to simplify content production and distribution. You don’t know if newsroom software is the tool your are looking for? Don’t worry: You’ll find everything you need to know about newsroom computer systems on this page.
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What is newsroom software?
Newsroom software or newsdesk software is a tech platform for journalists and news production that enables editors to efficiently manage the entire editorial process – from researching and planning topics, preparing and producing content in the form of text, video and audio files, to publishing them. All while making sure that teams and desks can work collaboratively. With the right newsroom computer system, content production can therefore be better organized both strategically and operationally – not just for newsroom staff, but also for editorial teams and content departments in general. That is why it can also be called a CMS solution for journalists and newspapers as well. The result: Media organizations are able to prepare content more efficiently and in a way that it can be distributed across different channels and touchpoints. This means that newsroom software is indispensable for successful integrated communication and cross-media production, as is required in media houses but also in the corporate newsroom.
Why use a newsroom computer system?
News agencies, research networks, press representatives, event platforms, public authorities, personal contacts, the research of your own editors, social media posts – there are many sources of information. And the number is growing all the time. Newsroom staff – whether in media groups, national dailies, local weeklies, agencies or companies – all face the same challenge: They have to maintain an overview in the dense information jungle and include those topics in their editorial planning that are relevant to their intended target group. But how exactly does newsroom software help? How does a computer system for journalists work?
Newsroom software or CMS solution ideally monitors countless streams, pre-sorts the incoming reports and groups them into topic clusters. It makes no difference whether the source of information is a news ticker, the website of a media company or Twitter feeds. Within a few milliseconds, the newsroom tool calculates the proximity between topics and displays similar messages – clearly sorted – in a dashboard. Employees in the newsroom benefit from this in several ways. They can
- get an overview of the current topics and news situation very quickly and create a targeted editorial plan.
- search through various topic clusters in a systematic manner and tag relevant news stories.
- decide, as the situation demands, which topics and aspects they consider relevant for later articles or video contributions.
- add tweets or other multimedia content from the archive to their collection of topics.
- add agency and press releases as well as social media posts to their topic collection.
- link all objects within the topic collection with each other and in this way reflect the complex world events in the editorial topic planning adequately.
- plan articles cross-medially for all channels and platforms connected to the tool.
- create and implement media-specific editorial articles based on the topic list.
- use integrators to process articles on social media platforms and internal production systems to publish them in the desired publication medium.
Which software for news channels is best?
The right newsroom software always depends on the individual newsroom or company. For PR and corporate communications, there are already some well-known newsroom tools. However, media companies with many different formats and many channels to be covered need software that is ideally suited to journalistic processes and multichannel publishing – for example, Newsmind Stories.
So which category should it be? These questions can help you make an initial selection, making it easier to compare newsroom software:
- Am I looking for a newsroom computer system that simplifies corporate communications or organizes entire media houses across editorial departments?
- Which channels do I want to integrate?
- How many editors need to work with the software?
- Do I have major configuration needs?
- Can I adapt my workflows or should the tool adapt to us?
- Do I also need integrated digital asset management for media such as images and videos or archive material for content creation?
- Should the newsroom software be in the cloud so I can work location-independently?
- What kind of support do I want from the provider?
Only when the basic category questions have been clarified can the various newsroom system providers be compared with each other.
What is important to consider when choosing newsroom software?
When editorial departments decide on a newsdesk software, it is advisable to also have aspects in mind that go beyond pure functionality:
Built to integrate
In times of Big Data, it is crucial to use all available data. That’s why it should be possible to connect any number of data sources to the newsroom software.
Built for teamwork
Collaboration should be encouraged. Let editorial teams come together digitally to discuss, plan and implement stories. Look for a story-centric approach and features such as integrated chat functionality and collaborative editing so that employees can easily interact in the newsroom.
Built to be customizable
Needs of newsrooms and teams are changing all the time: Editors and managers need workflows and individual views that they can customize and create to suit their personal preferences. Since every newsroom works differently, newsroom software must allow flexibility and adapt to existing processes – and not the other way around.
Built to be clear
A modern, intuitive user interface (UI) ensures that users do not lose track of all the information and enjoy working with the newsroom tool (good user experience, UX).
How modern newsroom software uses AI
What features further simplify the work in the newsroom and create a productive, efficient editorial environment? Modern newsroom computer systems use artificial intelligence to accelerate and automate news production. One example: Newsroom software like Newsmind Stories goes one step further than conventional editorial systems. One example: Newsroom software like Newsmind Stories goes one step further than conventional editorial systems. In addition to enabling story-centric news production, the newsroom system is also equipped with an AI engine for newsroom automation. It supports journalists and makes monitoring channels and researching even easier. Suitable news items and topics are automatically spotted and suggested. And it autocompletes tags and metadata. The focus here is on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and generative AI. NLP is an AI-supported technology that automatically processes natural language on the basis of algorithms. But how does NLP work in the context of newsroom software?
- The AI examines existing texts, messages and posts with regard to features such as people, places, institutions and facts.
- Based on Named Entity Recognition, it extracts relevant information, uncovers content-related connections and derives further meaningful information from the texts about the features already disclosed.
- By then conceptually unambiguating the features (entities) found via a knowledge network (disambiguation), she can define an entity such as “Angela Merkel” and ascribe a meaning to it, such as “former German Chancellor.”
- At the same time, it uses disambiguation to generate helpful additional information and add it to the entity, for example, “woman,” “physicist,” “Bundestag,” “Berlin,” “CDU.”
- After the AI has converted the features into vectors, it compares the features of different texts from different sources and calculates how similar the content expressions are (embedding).
- Finally, it creates a list of matching messages and information.
What are the advantages of innovative newsroom computer systems?
A newsroom computer system not only noticeably simplifies the daily work and processes in the newsroom, it also increases the efficiency – as well as its output. In addition, there are three other important advantages:
Collaboration
Newsroom software enables true collaboration. The newsroom tool not only transparently displays which colleagues are working on a topic in which way, but also who is planning to publish which topic in which format in which channel. This is particularly beneficial for large media companies and corporate newsrooms. They can make better use of the resources of their employees: either they work together on a multi-layered topic, or different aspects of a complex topic are examined from different perspectives.
Monitoring the competition
Newsrooms are well advised to keep an eye on their competitors at all times. Newsroom software is very helpful in this regard. The newsroom tool examines thematically related news as well as contributions from competing editorial teams and creates individual real-time streams that are fed from selected news channels like Twitter feeds. Employees benefit from this in several ways: They can keep an eye on relevant publications in their peer group – depending on the medium, topic, channel and regional or local environment. This allows editors to consciously set their articles apart from the competition, to take a different angle or to pick up on an aspect and expand on it. It is also essential for effective SEO measures to know the publications of the competition in order to successively improve one’s own ranking in organic hit lists.
Keywords and tagging
Newsroom software also shows its advantages when it comes to tagging. Editors know it from their daily work: In order to find material that has already been produced, it must be clearly indexed. To determine which aspects they want to highlight in a later article or TV report, they select the relevant content from various sources and suitable keywords from an automatically generated input list, add them to their collection of topics, and assign meaningful keywords accordingly. Precise tagging is essential so that editors can also search the archive – both for their own previous publications and for suitable image, video and audio material. The Newsroom software provides suggestions matching a search term within seconds by analyzing the AI-based extracted metadata for their similarity to the search term.
Online Newsroom Example – Software in practice
The German public broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk is successfully using a newsroom software solution. Thanks to Plan.R, which is based on Newsmind Stories, WDR employees benefit from the advantages of cross-media editorial planning and story-centric news production as well as the timely distribution of articles in the respective medium.
Success Story
Request the extended Success Story as a PDF:
Newsroom software – our conclusion
A newsroom that wants to communicate in an efficient, integrated and cross-media manner cannot do without an AI-based newsroom computer system. Such a newsroom software enables editorial staff to centrally bundle any information sources, to summarize content-related information and to easily and quickly plan and publish all kinds of articles – from texts to videos and audios to social media posts. This makes newsroom software an indispensable tool in a competitive newsroom.
