Richard Humphreys |
This article first appeared in the
Winter 2017 issue of The Record.
MTV3 is a popular free channel of Finnish media company MTV, which is owned by the Swedish media company Bonnier AB. Launched as a small start-up in 1957, MTV was the first commercial television network in Finland and one of the earliest nationwide commercial TV stations in Europe. Since then it has grown into a media company that broadcasts news, entertains viewers and creates new experiences through MTV3 and its other channels, Sub and AVA.
MTV3’s newsroom journalists faced the challenge of efficiently researching news stories in an online environment awash with information. Social media is a vital source of information for the newsroom team, but the volume of noise and disinformation also makes it a challenge. When newsroom journalists were working on a report, they usually had as many as 15 to 20 different windows open. They spent a lot of time hunting down information in different places instead of focusing on the news story itself.
“Newsroom journalists of MTV News are facing the same problems as the rest of the world,” says Tommi Tynys of MTV Oy. “An overwhelming flood of information from various sources comes in continuously. In addition to more traditional agency bulletins and video streams, web sources and archive material, they also use more and more information from social media. Twitter, especially, has become a vital source of information.”
MTV3 implemented x.news, as its new newsroom research tool. x.news is an award-winning on-demand solution for the modern newsroom and enterprise market, running on the Microsoft Azure platform. It transforms the way journalists work by monitoring the different sources – such as news agencies, social media sites, web and internal sources – all on one screen.
The x.news user interface provides the team with all the information they need in one single location. The solution is closely integrated into Avid Media Central which makes it easy for journalists to use and quote all sources from the solution in their story.
“We can provide our journalists with a custom view of all sources that interest our audience and at the same time they can also follow what our competitors are publishing,” says Tynys. “Working with an amazing tool like x.news, it is still up to the journalists to gauge the reliability of all the information they are receiving. The final responsibility stays with the journalist.”