Gannett’s KUSA TV station in Denver seldom gets beat on a news story, with most late-breaking news hitting the airwaves within minutes of reporters arriving on the scene. And now, with new technology from Avid, those same reporters have the ability to automatically and instantly publish news stories and their accompanying graphics and video directly to the Web.

The station recently purchased an Avid Active ContentManager system that lets it automate Web publishing for its cadre of journalists, both in the newsroom and in the field. The Avid Active ContentManager system complements KUSA&singlequot;s existing Avid systems supporting its end-to-end digital nonlinear news production environment, the station said.

How it works

By simply clicking on the system’s "Post-to-Web" button, KUSA journalists can immediately post late-breaking sports, news and entertainment stories to the station&singlequot;s Web site -- directly from the Avid NewsCutter, iNEWS and Avid Unity for News systems. The ActiveContent Manager system automatically encodes videos to the appropriate Web resolutions, offloading journalists from worrying about the technical details of each package. The video is then automatically ingested into the Avid Active ContentManager database and distributed to KUSA&singlequot;s streaming service provider.

The Avid Active ContentManager system also enables KUSA reporters to post text-only stories to the Web directly from the company’s current iNEWS system. This means field journalists can feed stories to the Web without impacting the station&singlequot;s news production workflow, the company said.

With the new system, content -- including text, graphics, video, flash and other Web media types -- can be easily ingested, managed and published quickly to one or more Web sites, categories or individual pages. The system also lets the station implement various business rules, such as scheduling and approvals, so that each story and its accompanying graphics and video are approved prior to publishing. The system is so easy that editors and journalists say they can quickly design, modify and deploy Web pages, news categories and site designs on their own, with no IT services or coding required.

"Avid Active ContentManager is helping KUSA become a diverse provider of rich media information, because it significantly reduces the number of steps that are typically required to publish and distribute video, audio, text, and graphics to multiple outlets," said David Schleifer, director of Avid Broadcast and Workgroups. "The system saves KUSA time, allowing the station to publish more video and thus increasing the value of its Web presence to its viewers."

For more information, visit KUSA TV here.