I saw the story yesterday about how the iHeart Podcast Australia and ARN’s new release podcast Your News Now was “the most technically advanced” show of its type.
To be honest, I snorted to myself, then moved on.
After reading a LinkedIn post by Stephanie Coombes, who has managed this project for two years (!), I’ve given it a listen and gained a far greater appreciation for both the technology and what it offers the daily news cycle.
To the generic news podcast listener, they will think the audio (which on first sight looks like it is 1 minute long but in actual fact plays around 2:30) is three people pre-recorded. First a current temperature, then two different voices rotating news stories, an ad in the mix, then at the end a localised, short weather bulletin voiced by the same first reader. Behind all the above a sting up front then an innocuous (and not too loud) music bed.
In the bulletin I listened to, a story by one of the news readers about a drowning was followed by the second reader saying, “that’s sad”, which was absolutely the right response, connected the readers and us in real time, and felt authentic.
As a listener I would think that the weather, which is a hugely changeable wildebeest at the best of times, must have had someone at ARN who each hour rattles off a generic blurb for each state, territory and major city, the current temp each hour, who then saves all of the files uniquely before uploading them.
No. The weather was the most complex aspect.
Coombes said,
“The weather isn’t part of the audio file. It’s actually delivered by a dynamic ad, through the third-party platform called AMA or A Million Ads.
To wildly oversimplify it, AMA is a platform which patches together pre-recorded audio, based on real-time conditions, and then delivers that audio to the listener via dynamic ad.
In the case of Your News Now, it takes the listener’s location and looks at the current weather conditions (which it finds on a Google sheet that’s updated via an API) and then patches together a formulaic bulletin.”
The first news bulletin I listened to said it was 30 degrees in Canberra (not 13, I did go back and check). It most certainly isn’t, so there’s still going to be errors from time to time, but that happens in real life, like some Christmas tape audio I have of an announcer saying it was 22 degrees when it was 2, and then humorously and vividly explaining just how they know it was 2 in the studio.
Coombes, producer Alex Tighe and audio engineer Ryan Pemberton had to become weather people and find definitive, binary answers to complex conditions for AMA, while also allowing that one day it might snow in the Northern Territory or rain fish in Tasmania.
The next part, that we in the industry would be aware of, is the time constraints of ARN news readers who want to be on top of any breaking news stories. This is making more work for them across the day, and also the immensely busy station audio engineer and/or imaging producer.
Coombes said,
“(I took) the advice of Alex and Ryan to implement Reaper (not ProTools as I was convinced) as our department’s DAW.
This meant that Ryan was able to create an automated template for the news readers that added music, mixed and mastered the audio, and then exported the file with the correct naming conventions.
From a technical standpoint, all the journalists have to do is record their part on Riverside and then drop the files into the template.”
Each day has two bulletins, with only three in total on the podcast page at any one time to keep the news current and relevant. Even if you listen to the oldest of the three, you will get the latest weather. If unable to work out your location, it will give you the major capital cities.
The team are also responsive. In the time I took to write this piece, action had been taken on the Canberra 30 degrees glitch.
Your News Now is ambitious, innovative and has been a lot of hard work. It won’t be long before other radio networks, here and overseas, see the benefit of a current news and weather podcast like Your News Now and follow suit.
