Newsroom Innovation: Sourcefabric’s Real-time News Coverage Tool Gets a ‘Boost’

The Stars4Media news innovation programme’s BOOST phase is coming to an end soon. Over the past few months, Sourcefabric and the Finnish news agency, STT, have partnered to develop and implement a real-time planning tool to give customers of news agency content a direct window into the new agency’s planning schedule.

It was a project rooted in collaboration. STT provided the news planning expertise and vision. Sourcefabric contributed the technical expertise. External consultants and coaches offered the spark. Among the goals of the boost phase was piloting new newsroom workflows to help showcase content plans as they are made, in turn giving STT’s customers longer lead times to help them plan their own news packages.

One of the highlights of the BOOST phase was a workshop held in Prague in February.

“The support from Stars4Media allowed us to meet and work in person together and have someone to guide us through the conceptual approach,” said Gideon Lehmann, a project manager at Sourcefabric.

The workshop focused on understanding the workflows and the planning editor used by STT, while presenting the system of Sourcefabric and identifying the problems and how those could be solved with software. The result was a mock-up drafted to showcase a planning widget helping the journalists to keep an overview on all news items being produced for a daily topic.

The biggest achievement of the boost phase was integrating STT’s editorial workflows into the news agency’s tech stack, which was facilitated by Sourcefabric’s open-source headless CMS Superdesk and its shopping window for news - Newshub. The open source software is supporting this change by being flexible to adjust workflows to the needs of editors, facilitating a smoother adoption to them.

While the Stars4Media project is wrapping up, STT and Sourcefabric will continue collaborating, collecting user insights to improve the quality of their real-time planning. Once completed, other newsrooms that use Superdesk will benefit from the updates.

“One of the main takeaways from this phase was that with the help of the external consultant we learnt how we could manage the processes better of coming from a customer need to a concept that would get implemented into actual code into our open-source application,” said Lehmann.

At the end of May, participants will have the chance to attend WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in Copenhagen to showcase how Stars4Media facilitated their cooperation in media innovation and cross-border coverage.

What can Superdesk do for your news organisation? Request a demo today.