44 ROUND TABLE The New Newsroom
issues related to power outages without any hindrance on quality.
METROVILLE NEWS: Can we leverage AI technologies to help us accomplish more with limited personnel? MARK BLAIR: Most of the useful applications I’ve seen with AI are text based. It’s about writing and tuning stories based on all sorts of data feeds. There’s less work that I’ve seen where it’s actually being used around video. There are the beginnings of it with tools that analyse video content for sentiment analysis and metadata, but I haven’t seen good tools that pull together disparate video into cohesive edited stories. I’ve seen some major publishers who are starting to use it with text, but for video it’s still early days. ALEX FERRIS: We’ve been having conversations about AI and where it’s actually ready for live deployment, simply because many are describing automated technologies as being AI- enabled. In this instance, several tools that would be useful to a budget-limited news organisation would be automated functionalities rather than artificially intelligent. If you’re using Internet-delivered services, you’ll need to make sure media is in the right format for multiple platforms. Creating specific versions of each piece of content can be done easily with automation technologies. It’s the smarter aspects – like automatically reframing videos for a square aspect ratio – that require an element of AI if they’re to be done without human interaction. Within the asset management parts of a news workflow, AI is useful for things like auto-subtitling, which makes media more inclusive, and image recognition that can automatically add metadata during ingest to make search functions easier – all things that save the deployment of any additional expensive resources.
the field to edit and deliver content back to the newsroom from any off-site remote location, and providing access to the server with an Internet-enabled device (laptop, phone or tablet), saves valuable time and enables stories to be turned around more rapidly. Even with a lack of electricity, battery packs can be used to recharge laptops and mobile devices on the go – so this is an effective way to keep the news stories coming in, even in a conflict zone. Journalists can also do live inserts from anywhere, enabling news teams to make use of mobile devices to get around any
will deliver the fastest programming in the highest quality possible. CHUCK GARFIELD: In areas where electricity may not be running, mobile networks often remain operational, so making use of mobile connectivity is an effective way to deliver stories from conflict areas. As well as being able to deliver their stories back to base, enabling reporters in
CHUCK GARFIELD: This is where we see the real value of cloud-based
TASKS THAT USED TO TAKE BROADCAST FACILITIES HOURS CAN BE HANDLED WITHIN SECONDS IN THE CLOUD
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