WDR/Plan.R

Plan.R: WDR chooses central newsroom software for planning and distribution

As a public service broadcaster, Westdeutscher Rundfunk focuses on the quality and topicality of its programs. To meet this demand in today’s media landscape, editorial teams and newsrooms must above all be able to work efficiently and collaboratively across all media. This goal is not always easy to achieve for editorial departments, given the rapidly growing number of information sources and the many channels that need to be covered. Content production is becoming increasingly complex.

How can the WDR …

• handle the flood of information effectively,
• check the relevance of the incoming news,
• publish across all media and
• keep track of everything despite remote work and globally distributed teams?

By going digital and simplifying its editorial processes: With the Newsmind Stories editorial system (WDR Plan.R), WDR uses our AI-based tool to holistically optimize its media processes and centrally manage topics, stories and events. This combines planning for TV, radio, web and social media in a single tool for the first time.

Research: Plan.R supports topic research by using AI-supported and real-time monitoring of news from agencies, appointments, press articles, social networks and automatically offering them as a stream for WDR. This way, editors no longer miss any news – not even the contributions of competing media houses or Twitter feeds. In addition to external information sources, it also provides search in internal databases. Additional content from the archive (previous publications, image, video and audio contributions) as well as the user’s own research and ideas are thus incorporated into the intuitive tool for cross-media topic planning.

Topics and stories: Information that is related can be easily grouped into a topic. In dynamic topic teams, these can then be further planned, developed and controlled independently of target platforms. It is at the story level that editing becomes platform-specific: editors develop the various stories from a single topic and define, plan, edit and distribute platform-specific offerings as text, video, audio or even social media contributions.

Distribution: WDR sets new standards in the integration of different distribution channels. With just a few clicks, stories can be published on various channels: either directly from the editorial software, or by exporting the content to connected distribution systems.

Clear dashboards: In a form of Kanban boards and streams, teams have an overview of all messages and also planned releases at any time. They always see on which platform which content is planned for a topic. This saves communication and coordination effort.

Asset management: Newsmind Stories’ own asset management enables WDR to consolidate data and assets centrally and store them in a media-neutral manner. Editorial teams can work with and publish content easily across all media.