As broadcast newsrooms feel the economic pinch, News Technology suppliers are constantly trying to improve their tools to help newsrooms share content, clean up audio and access newswires in the most efficient manner from any location.
One of those companies is Burli, a newsroom software company from xxx (link to website)which was showing its latest upgrade at IBC 2024 in Amsterdam.
Steve Ahern spoke to Burli’s Ian Gunn who explained the new background noise AI tools which are now built into the software and talked about how a product for sharing news content, developed for Australia’s Community Broadcasting sector, is now available to all newsrooms in the latest version of Buril Newsroom.
Background noise cleanup tool
“We’ve got some automatic cleanup of the audio so you can record a bulletin, even in a relatively noisy environment like this on a laptop, or maybe a journalist who’s at home can record a bulletin.
“The system will send it off to our artificial intelligence, which will clean up the audio and video quality so that it sounds very nearly like something you might produce in a studio. That’s very new for us and we’ve been showing it here…”
News sharing platform
Most newsroom systems use a closed system, where computers are connected to a company’s network newsrooms and bureaus via a closed wide area network. The problem for the community radio sector when it wanted to develop its national news system, was that each station used different tools and systems which were not readily compatible. Burli solved this problem by modifying its software to deliver content and upload via a password accessed browser interface. The system is now working well for those community stations taking part, allowing them to contribute and extract news content from the system and from the CBAA’s Parliament House bureau and CSU’s National Radio Newsroom.
IAN: “We’ve made it easier for reporting things, packaging, and then sending them to a variety of platforms. We also, separately from that, have a web-based platform which is designed for sharing news…
“Whether it’s a big group or it’s a group of independent stations, whether they are all under one umbrella or just completely independent stations who wish to share news resources, we’ve built this online-based platform that really is just a big pool of journalism resources from professional journalists. It’s a way to gather that, to organize it, to categorize the various content in it, and then make it very easy to send that into an editorial system like ours or another editorial system.. then be able to use that material to build their own bulletins.”
STEVE: Sounds similar to what’s being done in the Australian community sector.
IAN: “In fact, that’s where it comes from. It’s very much inspired by that. The community sector in Australia have built a ‘Build a Bulletin’ news sharing platform.
“The same technology we use for that is now being used as part of the Burli news hub, which is being used elsewhere now to do very much the same sort of things. Groups of independent newsrooms, some of them with a fancy editorial system like ours, some of them with a different editorial system, some with none at all are now being able to share and pool their resources and have it either automatically appear in their system. To the journalist it’s just another newswire of material coming in, but to your independent producer it’s a website interface they go to and there’s this whole catalogue of material waiting there for them. It’s early days but we’re excited about the possibilities.”
Related report: Community broadcasting sector expands news services and hires Canberra correspondent #CBAAConf
Disclosure: Steve Ahern worked with Burli and the CBAA to develop the community sector’s news sharing platform and wrote the grant funding proposal for it.