MY NIS4 NEWS RESEARCH WORKFLOW

Researching the news is an exciting and rewarding role. Every day is different—searching for those events that our channel’s audience want to know about or will interest them. To support me I need a reliable and easy-to-use computer system that can help me efficiently record my new research, automatically import data from incoming feeds, or access existing stories to continue others research. It also needs to help me organise my work into projects, linking documents and run orders, supporting my complete editorial office’s collaborative environment.

GETTING STARTED
At the start of my shift I log into NIS4 and with a few clicks I can see the Events (researched stories) that have already been started for today by the earlier shift. I can also move to the part of my desktop that displays the incoming news lines, including fax, email and wires. I can perform manual searches on these, and I’ve set-up a few automatic searches that inform me when news feeds come in on subjects I’m researching. And of course I need to check my editorial office’s To Do list to see if anything there has been assigned to me.

RECORDING MY RESEARCH NOTES
So now its time to do my job. I can start entering some new research by clicking on “Create Event”, which opens an Event Card window into which I can add the title, my name, my editorial office and all my research notes, setting the status of the card to “Research”. I could choose instead to double click on one of the existing Events, then its Event Card opens and I can read, modify and add extra research. Alternatively, from the lines windows I can create a new Event Card at the click of a button, with the text from that feed automatically being transferred. However I want to perform my research, NIS4 is flexible enough to support me.

CREATING PROJECTS AND PASSING ACTIONS ON
At any point in my research, or on completion, I can assign the Event Card to a project. Projects help our editorial office by binding documents and files together, listing them at the bottom of the Event Card. These may include the Agenda, production items, web pages—anything that a member of my editorial team may find useful for this story.

To summarise my view, NIS4 makes my news research easier and more efficient. I am able to work collaboratively with colleagues in my editorial office, or on work my own, with a range of information sources. Ultimately NIS4 enables me to provide the information that my News Editor needs to decide whether the story should go to air.