Digital transformation is far-reaching across verticals, and the media industry is not one to be left untouched. As content progressively becomes digital, magazines and newspapers worldwide are slowly but certainly aligning their business priorities accordingly. Embracing the change wishfully, news agencies are also embarking on such a journey.
Press Trust of India (PTI) is India’s premier news agency and has taken a big leap by digitizing its newsroom, bringing immediacy, increased proficiency and transparency in its operations. PTI has deployed ‘Trends & Analytics’, an integrated digital news automation solution.
Press Trust of India has an influence as vast as the Indian Railways. It employs hundreds of stringers and journalists to cover almost every region and small town in India. The leading news agency works on a B2B model and counts a huge number of organizations amongst its subscribers, who include the specialized presses, the mainstream media, research groups, companies, and government and non-governmental administrations.
It was difficult to track the efficacy of employees and journalists. There were instances when a story took several hours to reach the subscribers after it had landed on the editing desk.
Tridib Bordoloi, CIO, PTI, said “Previously, incoming stories for editing were sent by PTI’s correspondents and stringers from across the country by email and upload. These were downloaded, edited and then outgoing stories were sent from the agency to its subscribers. There was no mechanism by which we could calculate the time spent by individual editors at the desk in editing a story. There were times when editors would simply leave the story open on their computers and take a long break. One had to personally inquire about the status of a particular story.”
PTI’s ‘Trends & Analytics’ has leveraged the power of digital. The requirement of the project analytics and apps created to enable, automate and broadcast.
“By maximizing automation technologies, we have been able to get insights with respect to business critical information that is easily accessible through dashboards. For instance, we have created an application that shows which stories are being processed (editing is underway) and which are pending. It also reveals who is working on which story for how long,” stated Bordoloi.
The result is news in itself and the efficiency has gone up by 70%. While previously there were 30-40 stories in the queue, today there is rarely any queue. PTI’s subscriber knowledge has been enriched, with stories reaching them in the shortest possible time.
This increase in efficiency has helped the agency to put out many more stories. From 400-500 stories every day, it now sends out 1000+ stories in a day.
