(Image taken from @NBCNewsConnect Twitter page)
NBCUniversal News Group has many different platforms under it, including NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC. With hundreds of stories published every day, it gets easy for stories to get lost across the organization. With their newest development, NewsConnect, it allows staffers to share information and update stories instantly.
The senior vice president of NBC News specials, Mark Lukasiewicz, stated:
“We have so many platforms and we are putting out our journalism in so many ways that you can’t know how your information might be relevant to somebody else in their work, and you can’t know what other people might bring to a story you’re producing.”
This past summer, NBC News launched the first version of their new product and over 900 employees have become daily active users. The platform organizes, consolidates, and distributes the information about a story and the users following it can be notified of breaking developments.
Within each story, users can add facts, and even documents and video. The three phases of a story are listed as Submitted, Working, and Ready. Even though there are over 3,000 NewsConnect users, there are only about 100 editors who are the only one's able to move stories from one category to another.
For every thread that is created, a story then becomes searchable and contains core metadata that follows the topic from start to finish. NewsConnects plans to follow a structure of "story-centric," keeping the story at the center.
Ryan Osborn, NBCUniversal's vice president for transformation, foresees potentially licensing NewsConnect to other news organizations. He said:
“We’re not trying to build the silver bullet for every technology across our newsroom. We’re trying to build the best workflow and we’re also trying to build the best culture that wants to create an environment where people want to share information.”
NewsConnect shows its users everything that is published across all of NBC'S websites. They can even follow the NewsConnect Twitter account for the stories, updates, and trends.