One Newsroom: Reimagining the workflows our journalists work in

IBC2026 closed on Monday, and I am proud that Reuters came away from the Amsterdam RAI with the IBC Innovation Award for Content Distribution, industry recognition for work delivered with TVU Networks on a project called “Capacity that follows the live news story.” This work replaces fixed, pre-provisioned broadcast infrastructure with a Global Shared Memory ecosystem powered by TVU MediaMesh, orchestrated by API and triggered by editorial events, with integrations spanning InSync, Kinetiq, Sony, Elecard and TAG Video Systems. “For decades infrastructure dictated what we could distribute. That’s over. Now the story will decide.” Joseph Delshadian, Director of Content Distribution at Reuters said.

The award is the big news but it is part of a bigger story. Everything Reuters showed in Amsterdam — five separate projects, with five different sets of partners — belongs to one strategy: One Newsroom.

The One Newsroom strategy

Journalists spend too much of the day working around their tools rather than focused on journalism itself. Examples such as satellite capacity which has to be booked before a breaking story is known. Story context geting lost as material moves between multiple systems such as a MAM, graphics or planning as content is exported, reformatted and re-exported for each platform. Content provenance and authenticity being asserted rather than proven. All of these necessary tasks represent time taken away from journalism.

One Newsroom starts from the opposite premise: the story is the organising principle, and the workflow assembles itself around the story.

Each of the five projects below, all showcased at IBC, removes one specific point of friction between a journalist and the work — in distribution, in editing, in trust, in how systems understand each other, and in the platform where customers put it all to use.

1. Scalable live workflows with TVU Networks — capacity stops being a constraint

Breaking news does not follow a plan. Several major stories can develop at once, new live sources appear within minutes, and customers in different markets want different versions of the same content. Traditional live infrastructure is built around a fixed number of channels provisioned in advance — which means the infrastructure, not the news agenda, sets the ceiling.

In March 2026 we began migrating Reuters Live Service from satellite to a cloud-managed IP model built on TVU MediaHub and TVU NOC. The objective was better signal quality, automated failover, geographically distributed redundancy and the headroom to serve more clients as demand grows, ahead of the 2027 satellite retirement.

The work we showcased at IBC extends that scalability from distribution into the live operation itself. TVU MediaMesh brings TVU and third-party services into a common environment. Breaking-news feeds can be frame-rate converted, watermarked and monitored for both live and file workflows, with MediaMesh’s Build, Operate and Observe tooling running those workflows without exposing operators to the plumbing.

The part that matters for journalists is the trigger. Using DPP Live Production Exchange (LPX), the editorial decision to go live is wired directly to the technical workflow. When an event moves from preparation to live, MediaMesh activates the services it requires without the need to book capacity in advance, manually signal routing, or asking whether there is a channel free.

As we leave fixed on-premises infrastructure we move into an architecture built on open technologies including TAMS, EBU DMF, EBU MXL and DPP LPX, which is what lets partners add value where it counts — InSync FrameFormer for motion-compensated frame-rate conversion, Kinetiq Teletrax for invisible watermarking that helps protect and track our content across global distribution.

2. CuttingRoom — editing at the speed of a question

Announced on 12 September during IBC was a direct integration between the Reuters Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and CuttingRoom’s ShortCut AI assistant which lets newsroom editors work with Reuters coverage in plain language. An editor asks for content by story, topic, region, language or event. ShortCut finds the material, brings it into the edit, and handles cutting, audio mixing, colour correction, captioning and graphic treatments — reframing for vertical, square and bulletin formats in a single conversation. Reuters content sits in the same timeline as the newsroom’s own media.

The control model matters as much as the speed, which is the One Newsroom point: the tooling adapts to the newsroom, not the reverse. Each customer connects their own Reuters account, writes their editorial rules in plain language, and keeps their material inside their own infrastructure. As Alphonse Hardel, Head of Reuters News Agency, said: "...editors can find and bring in verified material with a simple request — no exporting, no switching tools — while staying in full control of their editorial standards and their data." And CuttingRoom's co-founder and co-CEO Helge Høibraaten commented: “Speed matters only if what you put to air is accurate.”

3. Sony and Reuters — provenance that survives the journey

With Sony, we demonstrated what is believed to be the world’s first near-live newsroom workflow to preserve content authenticity end to end, combining C2PA and TAMS. Building on Sony’s PXW-Z300 — the first camcorder to record C2PA metadata directly into video files — authenticity data is captured at the point of shooting. It is then preserved through near-live file transfer into a TAMS store built to specification V8.2, then retrieved by Reuters with its C2PA data intact for editing and packaging in compatible platforms including Media Backbone Hive. Watermarking provides a way to recover the original provenance even if metadata is stripped along the way.

Joe Delshadian said: “Open standards like C2PA are essential, but they only work if the information survives the journey from camera to client.” This is the difference between asserting that footage is authentic and being able to show it.

4. Smart Stories — systems that share an understanding of the story

Reuters was part of the collaborative 2026 IBC Accelerator Incubator Smart Stories: The New Knowledge Architecture for Content Production, with more than a dozen vendor participants including AP, Al Jazeera, the Washington Post, BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Sky, EBU, NBCUniversal, SMPTE, ITN and Scripps.

The problem this Incubator was looking to fix was multiple newsroom systems and planning tools each holding fragments of the same story but with no shared understanding of editorial context. The challenge for news producers is that they are forced to spend time re-entering context and correcting misunderstandings between tools. The solution is the Story Object Model (SOM) — a proposed open standard for how story context is structured, transported and consumed across vendor tools. It includes a Skills reference architecture that lets broadcasters encode their editorial rules as portable, machine-readable configurations, and a three-tier integration guide for vendors. Think MOS for the intelligent computing era. A live multi-vendor demo at IBC showed it working across breaking news and planned coverage, with human editorial control preserved throughout.

5. Reuters Imagen — where it reaches our customers

On 8 September, Reuters Imagen introduced a new platform offering built around four connected modules — Hub, Live, Engage and Intelligence. This gives media operations teams the flexibility to build workflows around their content, audiences and commercial priorities.

Hub is the secure, searchable, rights-governed media foundation every customer solution starts from, with access to the Reuters Connect marketplace. Live captures and activates content while an event is still happening. Engage turns content into audience and partner experiences. Intelligence applies AI enrichment, content understanding, mobile re-framing and agentic curation across the platform. “We wanted to make it easier for customers to create more possibilities from their content, as well as just managing more content,” said Greg Burns, Director, Product Management at Reuters Imagen. At IBC we demonstrated a live moment travelling from capture through clipping, mobile and social output, partner access and archive discovery — all within one connected platform.

One newsroom, end to end

These five innovations ladder up to the strategy. Capacity that follows the story rather than capping it. Editing that happens in a conversation, inside the newsroom’s own editorial rules. Provenance that holds from lens to client. An open standard so the tools around a journalist finally understand what they are working on. And a platform where our customers turn all of it into daily practice.

Every one of these was built with partners, on open standards, with editorial control in human hands.

I am grateful to the teams across Distribution, Product, Engineering, Imagen, Marketing and Communications who got this to Amsterdam, and congratulations to everyone behind the Innovation Award win.