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Ekstra Bladet optimizes newsroom workflow with customized Live Center

Case study

Ekstra Bladet, Denmark’s leading news tabloid, is part of the larger media conglomerate JP/Politikens Hus, which owns other flagship brands such as Politiken and Jyllands-Posten.

As Denmark’s most visited website with more than 7 billion page views a year, Ekstra Bladet’s mission is to remain the largest and best news outlet in both free and paid news content. Live blogging is a critical tool that helps them stay ahead in delivering timely updates to their readers.

The challenge: Countering outages and unreliable news dissemination platforms

At Ekstra Bladet, the speed at which news is delivered is paramount.

Prior to adopting Live Center, Ekstra Bladet faced challenges with their former live blogging system, which was unreliable and suffered from service outages. This instability led the Danish publisher to seek a more dependable solution. Whether it’s a major political event, sports updates, or weather coverage, the live blog format helps them maintain the immediacy their readers demand.

The Solution: Built For Flexibility

For Ekstra Bladet, Live Center stood out due to its stability, user-friendly interface, and high flexibility. The ease of integrating custom functionalities and the platform’s reliability were key factors in their decision to switch. Ekstra Bladet was able to fully appreciate the extensibility of Live Center, which enabled the team to further develop and adapt the tool to their unique workflow needs, ensuring fast and reliable news delivery.

 

Custom Integration – Images

One of Ekstra Bladet’s customizations on top of Live Center is the development of a custom system for their photographers, designed to speed up image delivery to Live Center. Through the use of FTP servers and internal camera uploads, images can be transferred in seconds, significantly reducing the time between capturing and publishing them during live events.

Custom Integration – In-house AI

JP/Politiken deployed its own AI tool in early 2024, MAGNA (Monitoring and Assisted Generation of News Artefacts), a multi-tasking API chatbot that enables journalists across the company to interact with a large language model (LLM). This tool is connected to the newsrooms’ local data sources and features an intuitive user interface, allowing journalists to prompt the AI model to perform various tasks efficiently. MAGNA is designed to streamline workflows by automating tasks such as live summaries, content drafting, and accessing archived materials, improving the overall productivity of the newsrooms. “At the moment, MAGNA can receive content from a live blog via API, allowing MAGNA to generate key insights, title suggestions, and suggestions for summaries”, shares Tore G. C. Rich, Product Manager for Generative AI at JP/Politikens Media Group. “Future plans include potentially integrating MAGNA into Live Center’s UI.”

Managing reader interaction

Ekstra Bladet typically covers a range of topics with Live Center that are dynamic by nature and involve frequent updates, such as sports, politics, crime and even music contests like the Eurovision event. Live blogs can then be utilized to leverage visitor traffic to these types of articles to create reader engagement, by enabling questions or comments from readers. At times, these can be overwhelming, which is why it is important to simplify the task for journalists. At Ekstra Bladet, journalists are able to manage incoming reader comments and approve them seamlessly while also keeping an eye on occurring events.

“In a fast-paced media environment, being first is one of the most valuable assets. Live blogging plays a central role in ensuring Ekstra Bladet is the first to bring breaking news to our audience.” – Mikkel Jensen, Product Manager at Ekstra Bladet.

Workflow Optimization
When breaking news occurs, Ekstra Bladet connects a Live Center blog to a news article almost instantaneously. Mikkel Jensen emphasizes the simplicity and efficiency of setting up live blogs in their CMS, stating, “setting up in Live Center is very simple without the bloat found in competing systems.” This ensures that the team can react swiftly to unfolding events, allowing them to go live within minutes.
During larger, predictable events, the newsroom at Ekstra Bladet puts in place a division of tasks within the newsroom. Typically, a moderator, a photographer, and several journalists collaborate, ensuring seamless coverage across different angles. This collaborative approach allows the publication to keep disseminating relevant updates while maintaining a high standard of reporting.

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