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| Story Budgeting
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Story management tools provide automated planning capabilities for current and future editions and broadcasts.
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| Designed to support convergent news operations Control Tower maintains content planning and development tools for any type of media platform. Editors have the ability to track and record stories long before they are assigned, from the first idea through to the production phase.
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| Stories can be scheduled for one or multiple outlets and will instantly appear on all relevant schedules. For instance, a story can be scheduled to run in a newspaper, go out on the website the next day, and be sent out in a PDA alert as soon as possible. If any of the story information changes, it couldn’t be easier to edit the details – with one click of the mouse an editor can update the information in real-time.
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| Text, photos, graphics, videos or even audio elements can be given “placeholders” in the story budget before they are available. This way the production desk knows well in advance what materials to expect. Each element can be scheduled to run in one, several, or all of the outlets running the story. For instance, a text element could be run in the newspaper and on the website, whereas a video element linked with the same story could run in the TV news bulletin and on the website. All elements are grouped within the main story to enable greater tracking capability and ease of access.
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| Control Tower’s Story Budgeting feature is tightly linked with a news calendar. Stories can be bound together to logically link all stories related to coverage of a major event – the Olympics, for example. Equally, editors can create “subjects” to link together related stories – whether a breaking news “subject” or a longer term issue – to help track multiple stories over several days, weeks or even years.
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| Key Features:
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- Provides instant access to running stories, team members, deadlines, commissioned materials and related tasks
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- Accommodates stories from the inception of an idea through the production process
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- Smoothes the production workflow by signalling in advance the anticipated elements for production (graphics, photos, text, etc.)
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- Monitors the status of elements
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- Tracks all types of data - audio, video, graphic, text and photos
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- Facilitates the sharing of materials between disparate media or sister newspapers
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- Enables stories to be associated with other stories
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- Links to quick overviews on future news events, scheduling of shared resources (camera equipment, etc.), journalist dispatches source contacts and source materials
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- Categorizes stories by user-defined parameters
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