With newsroom staffing and workflows changing rapidly, newsroom systems are evolving to keep pace.
 
A range of companies displayed their latest radio products at the Darling Harbour Hard Rock Café in Sydney this week. One of those was Burli, which has been supplying Newsroom software for over 20 years.
 
Burli’s Ian Gunn explained to radioinfo how his company’s newsroom system is evolving to keep pace with changes to newsroom workflow.
 
“Not everyone is working in a single newsroom any more… Increasingly journos are taking their laptops and working from a small bureau or a home office [so] our system has also expanded the way Burli works on low bandwidth connections, it is friendlier now for those environments.”
 
There is also an increasing need to integrate social media feeds into the newsroom system input cue because journalists are now getting tips and story quotes from social media feeds of politicians and prominent people.
 
Journos who are filing to social media from the field also want to be able to access their own posts and post from colleagues through their news system
 
“We are also increasing access to social media feeds… if a reporter posts a live video to their social media account Burli can extract that video, strip out the audio and make it available to all the news team as part of the digital workflow.”
 
Gunn says Burli has the ability to ingest many social media platforms, but interestingly, since the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the probe into foreign interference in the US elections, Facebook has removed access for external companies to ingest data feeds from its platform. Gunn expects that the social media giant will eventually find a way to allow access to its feeds for bona fide companies such as news organizations. Meanwhile, Twitter continues to yield rich content and news leads to journalists, and is available in Burli.
 
Facebook groups have become an important local news sharing platform for country towns, according to Gunn, who says he has seen examples of local journalists monitoring local groups and community pages for emerging news stories.
 
Many media companies are no longer spending large sums of money to buy services from big news wire agencies. Instead they are ditching syndicated news services and replacing them with more social media monitoring and increased sharing of resources within their own networks, but of course this requires more monitoring and editing than just publishing a completed report from a newswire service.
 
“Sharing news is becoming a big part of news workflows. News systems have been sharing content for many years, but there is so much, it becomes hard to scan everything… now our system makes it really practical to link stations and give them an internal news wire for sharing content that they have generated within their own group of stations.”
 
Some stations in Canada and America use the Burli system in this way, linking groups of community stations within the NPR network, or in other cases allowing independent small commercial stations to share news with other independent stations.
 
Steve Ahern discussed the implications of changing news workflows with Ian Gunn.
 


 
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Burli is distributed in Australia and NZ by AVC.