The Impacts of Integrated Media Systems and Social Media in News

2
The impacts of integrated media systems

and social media in news
Introduction
Integrated media systems in large networked news media organisations have al-
tered journalism methods and practices in recent years. These systems have levels
of connectivity to other digital and mobile systems used by news teams from
journalists and editors to camera crews and network managers. The systems en-
able interoperability between studio hubs and remote recording devices used by
journalists and integrate social media into editing workflows before publishing
online. The systems are hubs and conduits for refining and tagging stories for
potential search terms, down to fragments of stories. They are also used to filter
social media and can be used to extract analytics on published stories, amongst
other features. The affordances of these systems have spawned new models for
news production and journalism.
Contemporary news and journalism are shaped by developments in data and
a range of business partnerships, notably between traditional media moguls and
social media entrepreneurs. The partnerships traverse verification, search, ana-
lytics, and social media, as well as IT companies with proximity to big data. They
have impacted on journalism processes, for example, the focus on analytics and
audience behaviours across platforms has preoccupied news media, at the cost
of journalism. The systems and tools can filter data results according to devices,
locations, referrals, frequency, and visits, amongst other filters. The popularity
of stories by a particular journalist has also influenced traditional values of cov-
erage and balance, but analytics should also be seen in context of cloud servers
and big data. A starting point for understanding global perspectives on data in
news begins with tagging stories and story elements in the editing phase of news
production.
Towards the end of the 20th century, multiplatform digital content was intro-
duced and national broadcasters “transformed their structures with a focus
on news” (ABC, 2014, p.53). Within a decade, broadcast systems could inte-
grate content and formats from social media via content management systems
(CMS). These systems allowed journalists and editors to create and manage
the development of stories, but the systems were not fully integrated. They
Digital Journalism, Drones, and Automation. Cate Dowd, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190655860.001.0001
14 Digital Journalism, Drones, and Automation
enabled sub-editing with tools for audio grabs for radio and online, as well as
video editing, and sub-systems for managing workflow. They included inputs
for keywords that fed into search systems to improve online traffic. However, by
2018 integrated media systems put social media at the fingertips of editing sys-
tems and storage moved to remote cloud servers—news was entering the world
of big data.
Metadata and tags are used in a variety of ways by journalists, for example, for
the verification of images and video. However, tags can also be used to link data
on remote cloud servers, and so they go beyond serving simple search functions.
Rather, the backend processes exploit data and play a part in monetising data,
which includes computations performed on data for traffic referrals1 such as
referrals from news sites. The transactions are invisible to most but are part of
recent online business models, which include competition for accelerated pro-
cessing. Integrated broadcast media systems also enable the connectivity to
these remote processing hubs. Media storage for news is also generally no longer
localised but managed via remote cloud servers, where data is also shared in
backend partnerships.
Cloud servers house software that can be accessed online by journalists to
edit or publish stories whilst still mobile. Stories can be uploaded from the field,
rather than returning to a studio with recordings and handing video clips to
someone to upload. Cloud servers are abstract spaces not only utilised by dig-
ital journalists but also by data scientists and cloud operations engineers, albeit
for different purposes. They are sites for sorting and extracting data in what may
be best described as the new metaphoric warehouses. They are hubs for linked
data and semantic search that drive search optimisation, referrals between sites,
and where computations and language converge in AI applied to big data. Cloud
servers have been a lure for media moguls who saw the value in large volumes
of data necessary for deep knowledge of online behaviours, but ‘big data’ was
mostly in the hands of social media.
Storyful started as a social media news agency and was a new kind of story-
verification business. It was an agency between social media and news to help
verify news stories, undertaking tasks normally done by journalists. The busi-
ness model had potential for ethical approaches to journalism, but not long after
Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of Storyful, the business put more focus on brands
and advertising. The model shifted to analytics of online behaviours to build
brands, including news audiences as distinct markets. This presented an opening
for social media to also tap into news markets through partnerships. At the time,
1 Traffic referrals relate to visits to an online site that come from other sites, and advertisers pay a
commission based on referrals, in particular those referrals that come via Facebook and Google.
Impacts of integrated media and social media on news 15
Murdoch appeared to be in pursuit of linked data and access to big data in social
media –the fragmentation of journalism was clearly yesterday’s news!
The value of online traffic and knowledge of online behaviours derived from
tags and AI processes continues to feed the monetisation of data with impacts
for media producers. Yet, few understand how linked data2 and semantic models
work amongst other methods at the backend of data. However, during the second
decade of the 21st century, the big media and social media players saw the value
in linked data, AI via cloud servers, and automated advertising. The news media
ecosystem was soon shrouded in new kinds of partnerships and data-sharing
agreements alongside cuts in journalism3 on a global scale. A closer look at emer-
ging business models provides new insights into corporate strategies and helps
to explain further the fragmentation of journalism. One example is verification
of stories for news, traditionally a process within journalism tasks as a whole, but
then performed as a separate business mixed with branding interests, it became
a business front for other purposes. In that process journalism was exploited for
all the wrong reasons.
Some initial scholarly research on workplace changes in journalism (Hanusch,
2015 and changes in participation with news (Reuters, 2014) are informative, but
there is a need to also look at relatively new roles intersecting with journalism, as
well as integrated media systems with connectivity to social media, search sys-
tems, and IT hubs. The integrated systems help to source, discover, analyse, write
and verify stories, amongst other tasks, and so have generated various new roles.
For some time, news editors have had to enter keywords for stories that also feed
into the closed world of automated advertising. This is done with tagging sys-
tems, like Open Calais (Reuters), and is essential for linked data and semantic
search via cloud servers, but cloud servers do more than just locate stories.
This chapter unpacks integrated media systems as CMS in networked media
organisations and highlights various changing roles and influences of data and
social media impacting on journalism practices.
2.1 Digital media systems in broadcasting and new roles

for journalists
Since the early 21st century, large broadcast media networks have used inte-
grated media systems for newsgathering and news production. By 2015 studio
2 Linked data is a way of sharing data between companies and organisations but is not transparent
like Linked Open Data (LOD) which may include sharing data across government agencies. See
https://www.w3.org/TR/ld-bp/.
3 Journalism cuts in Australia was somewhat typical of global trends—“Since 2012 around 2500
journalists in Australia had lost their jobs (Scott, 2015)” (Zion et al., 2016, p. 117).
and newsroom content management systems also enabled the integration of so-
cial media into workflows. Software products and CMS, such as iNews4, were
common in newsgathering processes and news production, but these systems
would gradually become obsolete. Some key features of CMS allow data assets to
be retrieved efficiently from different data sources, and for data to be edited and
integrated within a media system. A typical CMS provides storage and classifi-
cation solutions for still images, video clips, audio recordings, text and graphics,
and other features used in the development of media stories. Multimedia data
can also be archived and easy to locate at a later date, but sooner or later the ca-
pacity for local storage and other issues emerged with earlier systems, and so
cloud servers began to provide new solutions, but they also raised new issues.
The mobility of journalists and the ways that social media were being used
in news meant that there was a need for customisation of content management
systems, and cloud servers would allow journalists to upload data from a tablet
or laptop without returning to the studio. The benefits of these systems are evi-
dent in the BBC’s introduction of a new CMS in 2015, called CPS Vivo. This is an
online system for journalists publishing stories in the field and in real time, and
as a cloud server application it included features for verification of social media
stories. The system is data centric in so far as it allows data to be tagged without
the limits of different tagging rules that might otherwise be at work in a globally
distributed organisation. The system provides uniformity in tagging and supports
mobile editing and publishing as a cloud server system that is accessible online.
The principle software engineer at the BBC responsible for the CPS Vivo
streams explains other grounds for integrated systems, noting that “Changing
editorial requirements have prompted a move towards streams of tag-driven
content over the traditional long-form article. For example, BBC Live pages,
Election pages, mobile app topic pages, storylines, live blogging, listicles”
(Taylor, 2015). However, this focus on short-form media captures a new focus in
news that coincides with the atomisation of online news. The universal features
of tagging may be beneficial for a global, networked media organisation, but
short-form media has also created a style shift for journalists, which is worthy
of debate. This seems to be a focus that just fits with the affordances of digital
technology, rather than the affordances of journalism, and may be limiting the
depths of journalism.
Journalists in the future may need to explore the balances between online sys-
tems and the work that they do, and indeed the functions of news, which should
be able to contribute depth to stories. Affordances are not always a justification
for pursuing a particular vision for the future. For instance, a nice white wall is an
4 iNews is a media system developed as an Avid™ product.

affordance for an artist, because it is essentially a blank canvas, but not all artists
take to white walls with paint brushes. Surely editorial requirements should not
be dumbing down or erasing the benefits of slow and long-form journalism.
Some international media organisations are late adopters of integrated dig-
ital media systems, including print media organisations. HT media in India,
which is an established national print and radio news producer, integrated their
systems in 2015, creating yet another convergent media environment for news.
Again, the steps towards convergent newsrooms continue to redefine the roles
and work of journalists, reflected in the language of Nic Dawes, head content of-
ficer at HT: “In 2015, HT hired its first team of ‘editorial engineers’—developers
working on journalism, and not on website or app maintenance—to produce
ground-breaking new digital content” (Olstad, 2016). It appears that some
journalists may be changing their toolkit and overalls for the day and that they
are now engineers, but at least not mechanics. Perhaps they are also on track to
become ontology engineers.
The integration of social media and news media systems has led to new roles
and tasks within news media organisations, as well as jobs within social media
news agencies. However, the newsgathering methods are not necessarily wid-
ening democratic voices when they draw on popular content from social media
as a source for news. Tracking and analytics tools are used primarily to boost
audiences, online engagement, and satisfy advertising, and they began shaping
the culture of journalism several years ago. At the BBC in 2015 various methods
were used to “drive culture change and empower BBC journalists to be able to
look at the insights that come from dashboards and data, and take actions based
on that” (Cherubini & Nielsen, 2016, p. 16). This was a shift in focus for a media
organisation that at one time had a public broadcasting charter to serve public
purposes such as “promoting citizenship and civil society, and promoting educa-
tion and learning” (BBC Trust, 2006). In making changes to public broadcasting
codes and charters there is a need to consider carefully the issues that arise from
data analytics and online traffic so that they do not dominate a necessary focus
on serving public purposes.
In recent years, numerous job advertisements have included the need for
skills and knowledge of social media, online trends, data, and analytics. The
impact of social media on news was especially evident in journalism vacancies
during 2016, including roles at Storyful. This Dublin-based company was “ac-
quired by News Corp in December 2013, and was the company’s first acquisition
following the split of News Corporation into two publicly traded companies”
(News Corp, 2014). That split paved the way for one of Murdoch’s “data centric”
business models, which emerged via Storyful, as an agent for news, drawing
on social media. Several advertised positions at Storyful were indicators of se-
rious changes in news and journalism, such as an advertisement for a viral video
journalist based in New York, which was a job for someone “with a background
in journalism who knows how to apply those skills to user-created content.”5 The
criteria may not appear odd, but the suitable person also had to be “someone
who can pick out the one baby video out of a million that has ‘it’ ” (Storyful).
These qualities, if journalism at all, narrow the tasks of a journalist and might
be better advertised as: we are seeking a person who knows how to apply limited
news values to stories, such as novelty, and is outstanding at crafting a shallow
human-interest story.
Another advertised role at Storyful in 2016 was for a trends journalist,
described as “the kind of person who spots every meme first, is obsessed with
being the first to share the buzziest videos, knows which moment an event is
going to take over social conversations and how to sort the best material on
social media from the noise.”6 For many years the mix of social media in news
was described by some journalists as ‘noise’7 and problematic for journalists
who had to filter the noise of social media. Other jobs in news media that have
emerged in recent years include data and cloud management roles, discussed in
more detail shortly. Many of these roles are validating norms for a new genera-
tion of journalists with different skill sets and methods than their predecessors.
However, it may be a time to reflect on the traditions of journalism, even cherish
and celebrate, traditional journalists, driven by passion, emotions, and intelli-
gence in the pursuit of truth. These qualities and traits could be fading but are
indeed worthy considerations for understanding an essence of journalism.
It seems ironic that a social media news agency in 2016 was seeking tradi-
tional journalism skills, amongst desirable skills in using social media. The real-
isation that traditional journalism skills are still needed for crafting credible
and quality news emerges even in job advertisements for viral video journalists
and trends journalists. One advertisement stated, “the ideal candidate is a well-
rounded journalist who holds old-school journalism values and can apply those
skills to social journalism. The candidate will be working with the News and
Trends teams, with a particular focus on sourcing and verifying content from
Australia.”8 This call for old-school journalism skills is hardly a revolving door
for journalists who never even got the opportunity to begin working in conver-
gent and integrated media environments.
5 This job was advertised online in July 2016 via Storyful.com/jobs, but the URL is no longer used
by Storyful.
6 This job for a trends journalist was advertised on July 1, 2016, but the URL is no longer used by
Storyful.
7 A drawing of online noise done by a journalist is presented in section 8.1.
8 This job was advertised online in August 2016 via Storyful.com/jobs, but the URL is no longer
used by Storyful.
The realisation that traditional journalism skills are still valued is evident at other
levels. For example, in journalism training. Storyful once again appeared to want
a lot from journalists. The news editor, Mandy Jenkins, commented that organi-
zations like hers find that it’s sometimes easier to train journalists on technology
than it is to “find tech people who have the journalism. It’s way harder to make a
non-journalist think like a journalist [, and] it’s much harder to train someone to
ask a good question and bring a critical eye to content” (Stencel & Perry, 2014).
There may be merit in these points, but Storyful has possibly had more job vacan-
cies for a different generation of journalists than anyone else on the planet. Rupert
Murdoch’s expanded digital empire didn’t stop there, but the ventures with social
media entrepreneurs were under way.
The shifts in journalism and global networked news reveals the power of dig-
ital configurability and backend connectivity, and although they are mostly invisible
abstractions, they are also disruptive technologies. Automation continues to impact
news media with limited or narrow knowledge of the values and processes of jour-
nalism. This is a good reason for journalists to take some control of advances in
automated systems. That may be even be achieved by scrutiny and contributions
to vocabulary and new models for the domain, as explored later in this book. The
traits, language, and attributes of journalists in the first decade of the 21st century
is transitional knowledge, between a core of journalism knowledge and values and
online methods. It will not necessarily come from those already using digital tools,
and many knowledge gaps across journalism will need to be explored for the design
of new systems that benefit journalism.
It will be important for future news and journalism systems to be based on do-
main knowledge and various considerations, that include ethics in journalism, be-
fore higher levels of reasoning and automation are integrated into algorithms for
the very systems that will be used by journalists. Ontological models of news and
journalism are essential for the design of data and systems, especially for structured
and linked data, but journalists can’t leave the job entirely to ontology engineers.
Journalism is likely to utilise more than linked data for future online systems, but
these methods are already used across news, social media, search, and advertising.
Even modest levels of automation for journalism will require complex modelling
and sound knowledge of intersecting domains, as discussed further in later chapters.
At an operational level, linked data involves cross-referencing data in terms
of categorised content, online user profiles, and advertising. The contempo-
rary focus on data is typified in yet another vacancy via Storyful for a digital
marketing coordinator, described in an advertisement as “a rockstar versed in
essentials of social and digital marketing . . . and knowledge of how content and
data work together.”9 Other data centric roles, circa 2015–2016, included a cloud
9 This job for a digital marketing coordinator at Storyful was advertised on July 7, 2016 via this
operations engineer,10 which was a vacancy for a media company that “runs in
the cloud.” This position may have been filled by someone working alongside
a lead happiness engineer, which was yet another job title via Storyful. Despite
the colourful descriptions, the vacancies highlight the dominance of data and
remote servers in an emerging media ecosystem, torn between the credibility of
news and the frail web of advertising and fast partnerships.
2.2 News verification and analytics in the era of social media
Fact-checking and verifying information are ongoing principles of newsgath-

ering and perhaps more important in the second decade of the 21st century than
ever. Sources and methods of information have changed in many ways, for ex-
ample, social media sites have “shortened the distance to breaking news events”
(Brandtzaeg, Luders, Spangenberg, Rath-Wiggins, & Folstod, 2015). Social
media is clearly more informative in real time for particular events than a printed
press release. Journalists in the online world work within global networked
communities, and networks of journalists also rely upon peers to verify stories.
Traditional techniques such as interviews, checking documents, sharing infor-
mation, and online tools are also used to source and verify information. Short-
form media, such as disposable and looping video clips or tweets, are not just
sources of information, they can also be published in near real time by embed-
ding these elements into news sites. Journalists engage in a wide range of visual
and social streams of information, and although these tasks are quite different
from the traditional “leg work” of journalism, many of the new methods work for
some areas of journalism.
Journalists know the issues of using social media and other online sources for
news, including the potential for spreading stories that are not true. However,
rather than take all the steps to verify stories, some news media organisations,
especially in collaboration with social media, are instead investing in stories that
fit one news value, such as novelty stories or celebrities. This low-risk approach
is at the expense of well-researched stories that could be in the public interest
and benefit society. There is little doubt that images of cuddly dogs and viral
news stories are changing the values and agendas of news, in a shift that satisfies
URL http://storyful.com/jobs/digital-marketing-coordinator/, but this URL no longer works.
10 A cloud operations engineer may design datasets that pair tagged objects across stories and
other resources and set up algorithms for tracking data transactions. This is partly achieved from
cookies placed on a user’s computer that reveal data objects that have been viewed, amongst other
techniques. The cloud operations engineer position at Storyful was advertised via http://storyful.
com/jobs/cloud-operations-engineer/, but this URL no longer works.
popular culture. It is easier than generating investigative and salient stories,

and the various new roles in journalism, already discussed, reflect the focus of
partnerships across news media and social media. These trends suggest that so-
cial media news agencies, like Storyful, have invested interests in redefining the
parameters of news verification, for the mutual benefits of those partnerships, as
well as for third-party advertisers, discussed further in chapter 5.
As noted earlier, journalists have understood for more than a decade that on-
line “noise” is a challenge in the newsgathering processes. Social media is a prime
source for spin and fake news, but it is also a place for potential leads for news-
worthy stories. They can be ready-made stories that require minimal work for
verification to become news items, yet journalists must still work through the
noise. These tasks in journalism focus on filtering and verifying social media in-
formation. Software in newsrooms has also been modified in recent years to help
journalists with verification, including features embedded into studio systems
that integrate social media streams into those systems, such as CPS Vivo, men-
tioned earlier, and SMH for diverse platform delivery.11
Verification tools allow journalists to share tips about the credibility of a
story with other journalists, using dedicated notes, and they have features for
customising the aggregation of social media posts. For example, the online tool
Checkdesk (Meedan, n.d.) includes space for online notes and flags that allow
journalists to alert others about the status of a story, e.g. if other journalists or
reporters have verified a story as an emerging story or not. This is useful where
there is a network of journalists. Many studio systems with integrated media
features also allow for Tweets to be aggregated from Twitter, in the newsgathering
process, using a unified media system like Media UX central (Avid, 2017) or
similar systems. The settings in integrated social media software in newsrooms
can also be customised by a journalist, e.g. favourite profiles or preferred social
media sources.
Some roles involving the verification of stories via social media have
fragmented what journalists previously did. However, verification is an essential
task amongst other journalism tasks that not only make a story credible, but it is
also an inseparable element of investigative techniques in journalism. If one takes
verification out of journalism, it is inevitable that journalists must fight back.
Facebook has also appropriated verification, and a closer look reveals another
story, discussed shortly. Social media have also used a weak crowd-sourcing ap-
proach to verification which was evident in Facebook’s fake news story option
in 2016. This appeared as a pop-up box of options that asked, “What’s wrong
with this post?” The choices that one could submit ranged from “annoying, and
11 SMH is an acronym for Social Media Hub, which is software made by Orad that can integrate
social media features into broadcast studio systems.

it goes against my views, to –it’s a false story” (Mosseri, 2016). Its effectiveness
for preventing misinformation resides in the closed backend world of Facebook,
which even Facebook’s shareholders are not privy to. This lack of transparency
was seen in Facebook’s annual shareholders meeting in May 2017 when “Arjuna
Capital and Baldwin Brothers, two smaller investors, called on Facebook to pub-
lish a report examining the public policy implications of its guidelines around
‘fake news’ ” (Tsukayama, 2017). The call was rejected.
The boundaries that once distinguished spin and fake news from genuine
information have become less visible, despite trillions of digital identifiers that
enable “things” to be tracked online. The exponential growth of online sources
of information and the ease of extracting information for news stories requires
high levels of filtering by journalists. Although there are various online tools for
story verification, social media continues to be a significant source for fake news.
The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, indicated in 2016 that Facebook had to
be “extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth” (Lee, 2016). However, it
may be necessary for an independent body to develop more than a code of ethics
on fake social media sites. Some new level of authorisation may be needed to take
control if misinformation continues to impact on government elections or has
other significant cultural impacts. A potential deterrent for fake news began in
late 2016, when both Google and Facebook “announced that they will ban fake
news sites from using their ad networks, thereby cutting off those outlets’ major
revenue streams” (Ghoshal, 2016), but that may not be enough.
The verification of social media stories via Storyful, owned by Murdoch,
began after the demise of the News of the World in the UK in 2011. This ven-
ture was perhaps a timely opportunity for Murdoch to invest in a new business
model across digital journalism and social media. Once Storyful had become a
division of News Corp, in Ireland, the company split could have had economic, if
not tax advantages, but more significantly it appears to have opened the door for
a partnership between Storyful and Facebook, rather than a direct partnership
between News Corp and Facebook. This partnership with Facebook gave birth
to Facebook Newswire, and Storyful was announced as “the first news agency of
the social media world” (News Corp, 2014). Storyful was positioned to take on
verification of stories for news from social media posts, and it could offer various
digital services that media organisations were likely to outsource. Murdoch and
social media were doing it together, but what evolved in the following two years
is a lesser told tale of mutual corporate benefits, which is discussed further in
chapter 5.
For a time, Storyful tapped into the needs of news media companies con-
cerned about the credibility of news as more and more stories were sourced from
social media. Storyful launched new tools, new roles, and new projects, and yet
there was a focus on “discovering” social intelligence and “trends that influence
your audience” (Storyful, 2016) which coincided with the introduction of a suite
of online tools in newsrooms, such as Alertbots, Streamdesk, Recommenders,
and Heatmaps. Each of these tools provided analytics on audiences. News
media organisations also began to access deep data about audiences, through
partnerships, with yet more analytics tools in newsrooms, such as “Chartbeat,
NewsWhip, and Parse.ly” (Cherubini & Nielsen, 2016, p. 24). Before long, the
depths of “data mining” in news were changing the focus of news and journalism.
It was as if analytics in newsrooms could affect major world events, but there was
little evidence of this.
Live accounts of emerging stories online can include social media posts
embedded into news sites. These posts can be from reliable sources, or are at least
moderated, which shortens the distance between an event and news. However,
news organisations can also distance themselves from any risks of incorrect or
unverified information with disclaimers for those segments. However, some
journalists who participated in the European Reveal project on Social Media
Verification in 2015 (Brandtzaeg, p.326) described online journalism approaches
differently. One participant “viewed published news more as a living document
[and in which] verification was something that could happen after and not nec-
essarily before publishing” (Brandtzaeg, p. 336). This perspective on verification
is like a product of participatory culture, which has become problematic in the
era of social media. Clearly, the core traditional values and ethics of journalism
do not always to extend to the next generation of journalists, even though they
should still ask the fundamental questions of “who? what? when? where? and
why?” It is yet to be seen if new training systems for journalism can address these
types of challenges.
Journalism values can nurture a capacity for reflection on self and culture and
benefit civil societies. Journalists will be journalists for as long as they can help
make sense of events and information, locally and globally, but the affordances
of digital systems don’t always match these values. Journalists understand many
of the impacts of global social media practices on news, including the tensions of
creating stories from global, local, or national perspectives. They also know that
“authoritative regimes will intentionally spread false information” (Heinrich,
2015, p. 37), whilst other regimes will use data for surveillance in various
ways. Citizens sometimes also need to avoid being tracked, to save themselves,
which was evident amongst asylum seekers in Europe in 2015 (discussed fur-
ther in chapter 4). This involves sensitivity on the part of reporters. Tracking
has many forms, including footprints, and digital journalism taps into a range
of techniques. This may include journalists “looking at metadata available from
still images or video to see the origin of a file and hidden location data” (Edwards,
2016, p.49) in the process of verifying a story.
Tags from news stories and mobile devices are rich sources of information.
They can reveal information about interactions online, or data tracks of mobile
communication, but access to these forms of data may be problematic. Metadata
from mobile phone tracking could also put a journalist in a vulnerable posi-
tion. For example, government agencies can track sources used by journalists,
or anyone else. A reported case in 2016 was when “the Australian Federal
Police sought access to metadata of a journalist from The Guardian Australia”
(Meade, 2016). The process and laws at work in this situation involved “a ‘sub-
scriber check’ which is a request to telecommunications companies for access
to information they may hold on a particular person. It can only be made under
the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979” (Meade, 2016).
Newsgathering in journalism may be riskier for journalists in pursuit of partic-
ular stories if they can be tracked by metadata, but the aggregation of misleading
stories and fake news, as well as the functionality of integrated media systems in
newsrooms, can lead to bigger ‘big’ data challenges.
2.3 Content Management Systems in news: tunnels

for social media
A unified content management system in broadcast media is a system for con-

vergent multiplatform news operations. In recent years CMS are configured
for mobile operations and social media integration. This means a journalist re-
porting from a courthouse with a computer tablet may upload a story directly to
a news site in real time and even edit online with editing software that is acces-
sible on a cloud server. A reporter need not return to a studio to upload a story,
and someone else can also re-edit a story in a news hub, perhaps for a television
story. As noted in the previous section, a unified CMS also allows journalists
to work with social media posts. An editorial team can also see content in de-
velopment and workflow choices and decisions made in almost real time. These
choices and decisions may include the use of clips, texts, and audio available in a
system and the status of those files. For example, news reports that are not ready
to be published will appear in a CMS as a slug, which means they are still in the
editorial process.
Social media posts can be embedded into news websites in dedicated timelines,
for example for live events, and they can also be integrated into television news.
This type of integration, along with other forms of data, can be done by media
organisations using a range of tools and content management systems, or it can
be outsourced to analytics and specialist IT companies. For example, a subscrip-
tion to SribbleLive in news media will enable the integration of live chat forums
into online news sites, which may be used during elections. Data-management
solutions may also involve the moderation of chat or analytics. Datawrapper

is another company that extracts and transforms data into interactive charts
and visualisations embedded into news sites. In 2015 Datawrapper’s clients in-
cluded banners for the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Australian, Berliner
Morgenpost (Datawrapper, n.d.), and many others.
As noted earlier (see 2.1), CPS Vivo is a CMS used by the BBC, which includes
tagging features for stories and media resources across a globally distributed
system. This CMS is a semantic web system and is built from a base of linked
data. Semantic systems are designed to fetch a resource, e.g. a news story effi-
ciently using a classification system of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and
Universal Resource Locaters (URLs) that can be cross-referenced according to
a set of relationships and subject clusters. In 2013 Oliver Bartlett, the product
manager for the BBC’s Linked Data Platform, explained some of the reasons why
linked data systems are important:
As we create more and more content it becomes harder and harder to keep
track of everything that’s there, for both our audience and producers alike.
Individual CMSs are pretty good at keeping tabs on the content they create but
if you wanted to get hold of the 20 most recent pieces of content from across the
BBC (and hence across CMSs) on . . . global warming it would be very tricky.
(Bartlett, 2013)
Journalists at the BBC using the CMS not only add tags to stories that they write,
which helps sort stories into a uniform system so they can be retrieved easier
later, but they also add social media feeds at the bottom of a story, e.g. tweets
that relate to the story and related content from other sources. Here we see the
semantic approach at work again, where keyword tagging by journalists is used
to sort stories into refined clusters, not just top topics, such as politics, sport, ed-
ucation, and so on, but with more granularity. These features are important for
understanding how digital systems begin to reason about resources. Like other
CMS, the CPS Vivo system allows for stories to be viewed in draft mode, be-
fore they are published. Open Calais is also a tagging system used by the global
media organisation, Reuters News, which includes a comprehensive set of user
guidelines and rules for journalists. The various features of Open Calais are
discussed chapter 5 in context of search engines.
Many news media organisations use a unified or integrated CMS, but
the brands and systems are all different. The editing systems that work for
multiplatforms, including TV, online, and radio include brands like Avid (iNews
and MediaCentral UX) and ENPS.12 Content management systems in news are
12 See http://www.enps.com/.
stories in their own right, and they include other backend companies13 that have
developed sub-systems and plug-ins to integrate social media, so that sites such
as YouTube and Facebook can be aggregated and integrated into traditional news
media formats. One suite of tools is the Social Media Hub TM (SMH) used by
journalists to aggregate social media posts and prepare them for online presen-
tation or television programs. Broadcast media systems with capabilities to in-
tegrate social media were normalised circa 2015, possibly earlier (depending on
how this point is defined and contextualised). It was, in any case, another phase
of digitisation in broadcasting, not anticipated in the early years of digitisation.
When news media organisations use social media within a CMS they need
to setup accounts as a news organisation via developer sites, for example, using
Facebook’s developer site where they must “register and accept Facebook
Platform Policy” (Avid, 2015, section 7, p. 6). A process of registration for
developers also applies to other social media platforms, such as Instagram, in
order to post images to mobile applications (Avid, 2015, pp. Ch8-16). To then
publish broadcast content from studio control systems to social media requires
“configuration steps to an external device, including IP address and port number
for communication” (Avid, 2015, section 8, p. 2). These systems are characteristi-
cally convergence points where infrastructure meets the abstractions of the dig-
ital online world. The tunnel is open, and the challenge for the next generation of
journalists working in the tunnel is, how they will distinguish themselves from
everything else ‘out there’?
ENPS software and systems is another suite of integrated media used in
newsrooms by journalists, with similar features to those already described.
It is also used in some university courses for training the next generation of
journalists, including Monash University (Techtel, 2015). The backend IT com-
pany associated with AP ENPS is an Australian-based company, Techtel, with
international offices in Singapore and New Zealand. In late 2016 the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation chose Techtel for supply and support for upgrades to
its digital newsroom systems, outlined in the following:
the AP ENPS multi-platform newsroom computer system is one of the lar-

gest single system technology upgrades ever undertaken in Australia. ENPS
will drive nationwide collaboration between radio, TV and online news pro-
duction through its seamless integration with Grass Valley’s STRATUS video
production and Nétia’s Radio-Assist 8 radio automation, and will revolutionise
workflows with the ability for journalists to access scripts, wires, media and
messaging from the desktop or in the field. (Techtel, 2016)
13 For example, SMH technology was developed by Orad Hi-Tec Systems.

In 2017 refinements to digital systems extended to TV studios when it was also

announced by Techtel that “the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is
to replace their legacy newsroom automation systems with a brand new tech-
nology solution from a consortium of vendor partners led by Techtel” (Techtel,
2017). Again, the challenges for broadcast media and news at a whole organisa-
tional level, not just for journalists, is to manage the effects of this new layer of
convergence, where integrated media systems are also connection points with
great advantages for the corporate world. Could the tunnel become a funnel, and
will there need to be reflections on the impacts of audience sharing? For example,
data sharing with social media is based on different motives and functions to
public broadcasting. The idea for greater data sharing emerged in 2016 when
Snapchat was seen by the ABC as an “opportunity for the ABC to experiment
with delivery” (ABC, 2016). The intersections at the backend are worthy of a
closer look.
Snapchat creates channels for media types, and in 2016 it “collected another
new publisher: Vertical Networks, a U.K.-based media company run by Elisabeth
Murdoch, the daughter of 21st Century Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch”
(Wagner, 2016). Vertical Networks edit and create videos for mobile and espouse
the notion that “impatience is a virtue” (Vertical Networks, 2017). According to
Re-code, Snapchat is also “an investor in Murdoch’s Vertical Networks . . .owning
somewhere around 40 percent of the company” (Wagner, 2016), so this is more
than just about a channel for a new video publisher. Snapchat has been used
by journalists in recent years for experimental reporting, creating stories with
short-form disposable media clips and still images, but few may realise that the
new kinds of social media partnerships intersecting with big media seem to be
relying on each other for audience reach. There may still be lessons that can be
learnt from “major news organisations including CBS News, Washington Post,
New York, Al Jazeera English and the BBC who have all been reporting on the
platform for some time” (ABC, 2016). By October 2019, Elizabeth Murdoch
let go of Vertical Networks and was “launching a new entertainment company
called Sister with former 20th Century Fox film chair” (Forbes, 2019).
Nationwide collaboration across media platforms, enabled by integrated
media system (such as AP ENPS), could bring more content and diversity to
major news sites in Australia. However, it is unclear what these systems will
mean for medium-size regional areas, if systems are rolled out slowly into these
areas or not at all. It is yet to be seen if integrated media systems will be utilised
to improve news agendas for the nation and add more diversity to stories and
reporting. More specifically, newsrooms may need to deal with issues that arise
from third-party distribution platforms, given the capacity for connectivity and
integration to other data hubs.
Currently newsrooms use a range of analytics tools to track online traffic, in-
cluding referral information. As mentioned earlier, popular tools “used in Europe
include Chartbeat, Newswhip and Parse.ly” (Cherubini and Nielsen, 2016,
p. 24). Clients using some of these tools also depend on algorithms for traffic
referrals via Google and Facebook. In July 2016, after Facebook altered its traffic
referral algorithm, a Parse.ly blogger noted that “Parse.ly’s clients have already
reported seeing a general decline in referral traffic from Facebook” (Van Nest,
2016). Clearly, a dependence on third-party distribution could become problem-
atic for national broadcasters. It may be smarter for national broadcasters to in-
vest in development of their own algorithms and systems. Whether that should
include algorithms that check for device activity and ‘push’ data at certain times
is debatable. Journalists, not just digital technology teams, should certainly try
to engage more with ethics in algorithms across the spectrum of automation,
amongst other considerations, before entering into partnerships and agreements
in the new world order of integrated media.
Conclusion
Integrated content management systems lend themselves to configurability and

interoperability, and when combined with cloud server operations they have
introduced a new layer of digital convergence that can generate new markets.
The digitisation of media has evolved into a new generation of integrated media
systems with social media connectivity that ensures the persistence of digital and
online advertising. Even considering all the merits of configurability in media
systems, it is still only possible to process data about user behaviour because dig-
ital media and user transactions have labels and tags. Some of these are gener-
ated via content management systems. The value in digital identifiers and online
transactions is high, and data mining identifies hidden value from user data,
which has led to new roles affiliated with journalism. Many keyword tags via on-
line news are derived from highly structured systems with an ontological base,
but unstructured and collective tagging via social media and other online sites
are also exploited in data mining, including intersections with news.
The interface of integrated media systems in news production has opened up
the tunnels and funnels for two of the most profitable industries on the planet,
social media and advertising. Integrated systems can now exchange data via
news environments and social media in seamless ways, more so than earlier
methods of moderating and integrating social media posts. News and social
media may have sought solace in new systems and servers that boost each other’s
online traffic. It is no surprise that media moguls and social media entrepreneurs
with a focus on mobile markets have also stepped up into a myriad of fairly new
cloud partnerships.
As editors and journalists tag stories and adhere to the rules for tagging, they
are filling big data pools for a global index for search and advertising. They are
doing this using the best keywords for their digital objects, text stories, images,
and clips. Tagging news stories adds to a bank of data objects and atomised news
that is worthwhile for search ends, but it may also be exploited for other purposes.
There is a need for more understanding about metadata and analytics, and the
less visible functions of integrated online news systems that may even make
journalists look like antiquarian librarians as they search for the best descriptors.
Furthermore, how significant are the tools and methods used by editors to ana-
lyse trends in news, especially in juxtaposition to other kinds of data that flows to
journalists from confidential military and government sources? Amidst so much
data, journalism is still not well-defined in the same way as news and this may
be a problem, but the following chapter opens up insights for the future of jour-
nalism as a domain.
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