Field Report: Building a Converged Newsroom Environment
University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Previously, Annenberg’s curriculum utilized closed-system software in separate news environments. The main goal of the Media Center was to get them all playing together in one sandbox. The solution proved to be a Primestream FORK production suite.
The Media Center now relies on cloud-capable system software to drive its content management, pushing Primestream FORK production suite to integrate other production components into effective workflows. On the content creation side, FORK Craft Editor Integration and File Ingest HD software allow students to import and finish their assignments with Adobe Creative Cloud software products such as Premiere, Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects, and Acrobat, as well as open source software such as Audacity.
Faculty members utilize Xchange to assign projects and deliver media to their courses. Students can then browse and download media for remote news package creation and approval. Once completed, final edits are uploaded to the newsroom via Xchange or sent from the Premiere edit bays using the embedded FORK panel. Media ready for air is registered to the newsroom and is played back directly from central storage. Assets are archived for long-term storage and future repurposing using the FORK Archive Gateway.
Annenberg TV News is a daily news show, which the students produce.
Approved projects are delivered to the school’s student run media outlets: Annenberg TV News, a nightly news broadcast and weekly sports magazine show, Annenberg Radio News, a 30-minute NPR parallel, Neon Tommy, an online news website, Impact, a polished 60-minute news magazine production, and Ampersand, an arts & culture podcast part of the MSJ (Media School of Journalism) program. Some content is even syndicated into the national market.
Faculty members utilize Xchange to assign projects and deliver media to their courses. Students can then browse and download media to create news packages.
Via Xchange, this is how 80 percent of the Annenberg students will interact with the newsroom workflows,” says Xchange Product Manager, Alan Dabul.
The Primestream production suite interfaces with other on-site broadcast production products including a NetTek production switcher a Ross Overdrive automated production control system and a Miranda router.
The Media Center’s ingest environment pulls content from satellite, local studio, and VTR sources through an HD Miranda router onto video servers. From there it’s transcoded into a universally recognized file format (XDCAM) and then distributed across a GigE local area network to the central storage and tape archive.
“We also added NewTek TriCaster compatibility to Xchange, and now everything that’s recorded live in Studio A gets sent to the server as well,” Dabul remarks.
Students work from a central assignment desk in the Media Center’s main broadcast control area, but the cloud-capable nature of its converged newsroom means that work can be done remotely from almost anywhere with an Internet connection.
On site, a Ross Overdrive with Live Assist control manages content playout with automated action scripts, triggering the iNews rundown events working with the suite's proxy server, transcode manager, and the Mobile2Air Gateway.
Because of the high quality and realistic training Anneberg School for Communication and Journalism students receive, they will be well accepted into the professional world of broadcast.
LOOKING AHEAD
“Whatever they’re doing, we’re giving students a location to store content, to access it within our environment, outside of our environment, share it with others, collaborate with others and then publish it,” says Peyton. “The curriculum will continue to push us, especially while the field of journalism is always changing, always growing, always adapting to stay relevant.”
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