A video camera. A microphone. A stills camera. A notebook. A teleprompter. A diary with reminders and notifications. A message board. And more, much more. All in the palm of your hand. We like to call it the newsroom in your pocket. For today’s journalists, mobile isn’t just helpful. It’s essential.
Journalists have always been mobile. Not just foreign correspondents worldwide, but also reporters covering beats are almost always out of the office gathering facts or going live from the scene of the latest breaking news.
The mobile device is more than a lifeline. It’s the newsroom itself, offering a smarter, smoother way to report, update, shoot, script, and sync with your team. Yes, a laptop can do a lot but try pulling that out in a moving vehicle or during a street-side live hit. Your phone is faster, lighter, and always within reach.
At Avid, we’ve long supported mobile news workflows. For example, our MediaCentral | Cloud UX app enables reporters in the field to write directly into their rundowns in MediaCentral | Newsroom Management, securely from any location. Now, we’re taking mobile capability even further.
We have added two new apps to the family to take things up a notch.
Meet the award-winning Wolftech Go app
The first is Wolftech Go, the mobile app for the story-centric powerhouse application Wolftech News.
The app—available on both iOS and Android devices—has almost all of the functionality of the web-based application, meaning that journalists in the field have the same experience as their colleagues back at the office. No longer do reporters on location have to worry that they have a second-class user experience compared to their desk-bound partners in the newsroom.
Communication can be handled with ease with integrated messaging at every stage of the production process. Reporters can be notified about new jobs, or changes to stories. They can use the map application to easily view where they need to be, or to see where other colleagues are working. They can provide material for stories for any platform.
And if the production team is working remotely too, then they have full access to the booking and resource management capabilities of Wolftech News, meaning that they can be fully productive on their mobile device at all times, without the need to get their laptops out of their bags.
The Wolftech Go mobile app impressed the judges at NAB so much, it won the TV Tech Best in Show Award for its capabilities to drive efficient, collaborative workflows for teams on location.
Wolftech Go is also part of a bigger ecosystem. A standalone application with integration to third-party NRCS and asset management systems, Wolftech News is now available as an app inside the web-based MediaCentral | Cloud UX for the most compelling end-to-end, story-centric news workflows on the market.
Wolftech News now has web editing capabilities through a partnership with CuttingRoom, and this is where the second new app comes in.
The Avid Reporter app: A field production hub
The Avid Reporter app—available on iOS—brings the world of filming, uploads and mobile teleprompting to life. And it can be triggered from Wolftech Go. Journalists working on a story in Wolftech Go can upload media directly to their story media board, including livestreaming with the Avid Reporter app. The media streams into an S3 bucket from where it can be edited in CuttingRoom within Wolftech News. Media can also be recorded, then uploaded after review.
CuttingRoom includes advanced web editing features with voiceover recording, animated and templated graphics, effects, audio manipulation and more, and finished sequences can be posted directly to social media.
Back in the Avid Reporter app, journalists in the field can also use it as a portable teleprompter device, linked to the text in their story in Wolftech News. An AI service is even used to scroll the text based on the reporter’s own reading speed, and of course the video can be livestreamed back to base or have multiple takes recorded locally before uploading the best.
Connected, collaborative, story-centric
Mobile applications now play a crucial part in the life of any journalist, particularly with the growing demand to deliver more stories for more platforms, and the need for teams to collaborate in the most efficient way possible. Story-centric working is the acknowledged way forward for the industry to address these requirements and to empower their journalistic teams to deliver high quality news from any location.
Explore how Avid and Wolftech are redefining mobile workflows and driving the future of story-centric news production.