Q&A: Dalet’s Marcy Lefkovitz on tackling newsroom challenges and embracing digital transformation

In an industry navigating rapid change and mounting challenges, newsrooms are rethinking how they create, distribute, and manage content.

Marcy Lefkovitz, senior vice president of product innovation at Dalet, brings a unique perspective, drawing on insights from the company’s recent “Future of Newsroom Workflows” report.

Dalet report highlights budget, workflow challenges in news industry

Lefkovitz has over two decades of experience in media and broadcast technology, having worked at organizations such as ABC News, Disney Content Operations and TelevisaUnivision. As Dalet’s new SVP of product innovation, she draws on her background as a journalist, editor and operations executive to oversee the design and implementation of workflow strategies and technologies that optimize operations and boost efficiencies for Dalet’s customers.

In this Q&A, Lefkovitz addresses key challenges facing newsrooms, including budget constraints and outdated workflows. She shares practical strategies for modernization, measuring ROI effectively and transitioning to a digital-first approach.

Lefkovitz also provides a glimpse into Dalet’s vision for the future of broadcast newsrooms, highlighting the critical role technology and flexibility will play in shaping operations and output.

What are the significant challenges newsrooms face today?

All newsrooms are facing significant pressure to cut costs. Typically, they begin to transform their organizational structure and train staff to assume new responsibilities without a clear plan to help them work more efficiently. Combining previously siloed teams without investing in unifying tool sets solves one problem while creating another. It’s one reason why users are forced to juggle a complex array of tools during the course of their day.

How can newsroom operations balance the need for modernization with budget constraints?

Investments in technology are not for technology’s sake. Organizations should have a clear understanding of what they are going to achieve by modernizing their infrastructure. Today’s tools cover the entire content creation and distribution value chain comprehensively, so make sure that you decommission and consolidate as much of your old gear as possible, including media storage. Too often organizations limit their ROI calculation to staff offsets – if we buy this, can we run our organization with fewer people? And while the answer to that is usually affirmative because transformation should enable a host of efficiencies, there is much more to look at. For example, for every server you turn off, you realize savings in power, support contracts and technical support staff. New tools should enable growth by serving new audiences with higher quality, purpose-built content. I recommend starting your journey with some data-driven goals for associated savings, cost avoidance and growth targets. Then drive those results as aggressively as you can.

What insights from the “Future of Newsroom Workflows” report were most surprising to you?

I was surprised at how Digital Strategies are all over the map. On the one hand, some organizations have no dedicated digital teams, even though they now have more audience engagement with their websites than their linear broadcasts. These newsrooms are addressing digital audiences with a broadcast mindset. On the other end of the spectrum, news organizations with mature digital teams are often still completely siloed. These organizations struggle to find efficiencies that would result from centralizing editorial information and unifying teams.

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Another area that surprised me was that the Caretta Research report characterized an increase in multi-skilling as Covid-related, but I think this is a trend that started long before the pandemic. Once high-quality newsgathering tools became portable and editing applications were available on every laptop, the potential was there and many news organizations started to expand journalist roles. The old image of the one-person crew – a kid lugging around cases of equipment to shoot and edit the story they were reporting – morphed pretty quickly as the tools became portable, the technology accessible, and news organizations invested in training.

So, I think it’s been true for a while that staff has employed a broader range of skill sets. Covid accelerated the adoption as management, for health and safety reasons, became thoughtful about whether every person they sent into the field or brought into the office was critical. There are some old school journalists struggling to adapt, but while that’s frustrating, I think the pace of change has been proceeding logically over a longer period of time.

The survey asked whether people preferred the added responsibilities, and I was pleased to see that for the most part people liked the expanded nature of their jobs. I can’t say I’m surprised. The journalists I’ve worked with are the most capable and resourceful people I’ve ever met. They’ll do anything in service of a story. Producers who never considered themselves tech savvy finally started editing from home during Covid, even though they’d been trained years earlier. Mixing it up can be fun and very gratifying – and doing more gives you a lot of control over the finished product.

How can newsrooms improve their measurement of ROI and the cost of covering stories?

Traditionally, news organizations did not attempt to track and evaluate costs/benefit on a per-story basis for fiscal decision-making. This was understandable. While news is a business, in most organizations management makes editorial and coverage decisions based on a more complex set of factors. News serves the public good, and an assessment of what the public needs to know weighs heavily in the calculus of deploying resources.

That said, you can’t cover what you can’t afford, and using data to operate more efficiently is necessary to survive and grow. Being able to predict a total cost of coverage along with projected ROI could factor in when prioritizing less critical stories. But, disconnected systems and manual data collection doesn’t lend itself to data driven analysis – especially when editorial isn’t organized to facilitate a TCO view.

This is where story-centricity is more than a buzzword; it’s a mindset, a way to get holistic views from a variety of angles in service of many different people – which in turn allows you to manage efficiently. By centralizing editorial and resource planning data, and ideally connecting that to the systems that have awareness of associated costs, news organizations can intelligently allocate and share resources across the divisions and automate the process of tracking spend. And now that we’re tracking all the places that a story is distributed, the next step is to feed any analytics we get – from Neilsen data to digital engagement metrics – back as well.

While I’m not advocating for ROI to be the deciding factor in coverage decisions, I predict that actionable data will emerge over time. We should ask questions like whether spending more on a story increases its reach, and which investments are worth it and which aren’t.

What specific features should newsrooms prioritize when upgrading their NRCS?

Our research indicated that one-third of newsrooms say their NRCS does not meet their needs. Legacy Newsroom Computer Systems revolve around a TV rundown, and people retrofit it to serve their different needs. And most rundowns haven’t evolved much over the years, so this is unacceptable. A modern NRCS should offer comprehensive planning tools, ready access to video, stills and graphics, state-of-the-art editing and production tools, and highly automated publishing and distribution. Integrated planning enables efficiency, integrated distribution takes advantage of automation and deduplication of effort, and integrated editorial enables transparency. If we expect our audiences to trust us, we should have a straightforward single source of truth inside our own organizations.

How does Dalet’s research reflect the broader trends shaping the media and broadcast technology industry?

Newsrooms are not the only workplaces that currently rely on fragmented tools and inefficient workflows. Organizations across the media landscape are examining their end-to-end supply chain and determining how they can best unify and simplify the front end while transforming the back end and their operational structure.

So, many of the requirements are the same – find a vendor with deep experience in managing high quality video, audio and associated metadata; present as much of the workflow to the user base in a single pane of glass while preserving the ability to integrate best-of-breed tools under the hood for every step of the workflow; validate that it is a future-looking platform that can accommodate on-prem, cloud-native and hybrid environments; accommodate a customer-driven approach to adopting AI tools in an intelligent and targeted manner; and finally, leverage this vast centralization to gather asset status, enable targeted notifications, and generate reports and insights.

News has some particular needs above and beyond all that, mostly around managing all of the above in a fast-paced, volatile and demanding environment. But if you can satisfy a news customer, you should certainly be able to delight and help transform a broad array of other businesses who manage media.

What is your vision for the future of newsroom workflows, and how does Dalet plan to address emerging challenges?

I think that the requirements I listed above are a sound base for managing the challenges and mitigating the risks associated with the uncertainty around the evolving news business model, and I’m proud that Dalet is building a product line around that ambitious vision.

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There are very few vendors on the planet poised to actually pull this off, and we are pretty far down the road already providing tangible benefits in every facet of the value chain. And every day, we refine our solutions and make them more powerful. At the end of the day we all need to invest in and build for flexibility. As fast as things are changing now, we should anticipate that they will continue to evolve and the pace will never slow down. So, if you take too long to make a decision or build something out to some precise specification, by the time you implement it, your use cases and goals have all changed. I try not to stress out about that and I recommend that our customers and potential customers try not to either. If you build for agility and flexibility and don’t tailor anything too tightly to what exists today, you will have an advantage tomorrow. Journalists and the people who partner with them are used to planning for the unexpected. That’s the mindset we need as we build the new foundation that will support our industry in the years ahead.

How has social media reshaped content strategies for news organizations, and what gaps remain?

I have two separate thoughts on this. First, it’s critical to note that our research showed that news organizations are very worried about the extent to which social media platforms who have no motivation to conform to traditional standards of journalism, have become the gatekeepers to our content. Traditional news outlets have to grapple with that and figure out a way to ensure that trusted content learns how to distinguish itself and break through. I don’t know how that will play out over time, but I am optimistic that society will demand a correction and solution to the problem.

Second, from a pure content creation and distribution perspective, the fact is that news organizations are distributing their content to a variety of outlets, and while the content is customized somewhat for all of them, most content is still going to branded news programs and their website counterparts. Today, the goal is mostly to drive the viewer to one of your other properties where they can get more in-depth reporting, connect with your brand and stay in your ecosystem. So, there is a lot of linking to repurposed content on social media and less original content produced specifically for that audience. That is beginning to change, but it’s hard to do with multi-tasking staff from the broadcast world. When news divisions start to produce content like influencers and aspire to find success – and profits – in the social media ecosystem, that will be a game changer. When you attach audio and FAST channels and build loyal audiences there and aggregate that all together, you get a much larger and more diverse potential audience. Maybe that’s why despite all the gloomy forecasts, people who work in news are actually pretty optimistic about our industry’s future.