Every now and then, BBC News convulses with a new 'newsroom production system'. From Basys to ENPS was really hard work, but the move from ENPS to Optimo, currently underway, seems less disruptive.
Optimo was conceived way back in 2019, so there's been no rush. But the way stories are written within the new system for online consumers will change with its 'modular' approach.
Here's modular guru Shirish Kulkarni, writing in July 2022: "Right now, a typical BBC News workflow is for one person, usually in London, to write one article that is meant to serve the needs of everyone in the world.
"I imagine instead, a not very distant modular future in which some journalists might be creating “evergreen” contextual modules, some journalists are working on “on the day” updates and local journalists all over the world could be providing the modules analysing local impacts. When combined into modular presentations .... there is the potential for the journalism to be much more robust, much more locally tailored, much more informative and frankly much more efficient than our current approaches."
That means writing in many more chunks than required by the old "What, when, where, why" approach. Here's a potential grid Shirish cited (click to go large)
I'm sceptical about big systems with big buckets of data for hacks to paddle around in; I worry more when data scientists strip down story-telling into 'elements'. In radio news, we created many big buckets, but the new transactions they produced were largely limited to clip-sharing on the big stories of the day. Sure, for, say, a Newsbeat producer to get a clip from the World Tonight just down the corridor, it was quicker than 'borrowing the tape', but it only happened bi-annually.
And if BBC News is going to major on car crash videos, flying saw wheels and clumsy divers, how much modular writing do you really need ?
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