When last we spoke about Burli NE, it was in pretty broad strokes.  We talked about what had and hadn’t changed from Burli Newsroom, but didn’t go too far into the details.

NE is all about improvements to what made Newsroom great, while introducing features that couldn’t have existed in the original program.  Why don’t we look at a couple of things NE does that Newsroom doesn’t?  Today we’ll explore some key new features we’ve added to make the editorial process of a newsroom simple and powerful.

Editorial State

One thing that our customers have made clear over the years is the need for control of a story from cradle to grave.  Newsroom gave us a lot of good tools to work with to that end, but because of Newsroom’s local storage editing, changes to a story were hidden from other users until they were shared In House.

Now with Burli NE, multiple people can review and edit stories that are on the network.  No active step is required to put the story where someone else can find it (although you can still bring a story into a local folder if you would rather edit privately).

To help reduce confusion due to multiple potential editors, we’ve added Editorial States to stories.  Whether the story is already in a rundown or just in a folder, you can change its State to reflect where it is in the editorial process.

Here we see the quick pick menu of editorial options, ranging in this case from “Unedited” to “Approved”. As the story makes its way through your newsroom’s process, it can be bumped up (or down) in state until your editorial staff is happy to have it go to air (or web, or social media…).Picking a state can add colour coding to the story in the list, so that you can see at a glance whether a story is ready for air (or definitely isn’t, as the red field pictured above shows).
Note that everything about this – from the state choices and descriptions, to the colours – is user definable and changeable. Make the software work for you, not the other way around!

Story Lock

Of course, keeping a story on the network where anyone in the newsroom can see and touch it presents an interesting potential problem – what if someone makes an edit simultaneous to yours, and you aren’t aware?  You’ve made your changes, and are ready to mark the story “Approved” for air, do you want extra changes lurking out of sight that you didn’t make?

Whenever someone is working on a story in Burli NE, it is briefly “locked”.  Other members of the newsroom can see and read the story, but may not make edits while someone else is already working on it.

Here we’re ready to work on a story, which no one else is working on right now.  What happens when we make an edit?

As soon as an edit starts, the story is Locked.  A blue padlock appears over the story’s icon in the rundown list, and a command to unlock appears above the editing window.  At this moment, anyone else looking at this story will see the lock icon and be unable to make changes until the process times out (usually 20 seconds after the original editor stops typing) or until the editor hits that release command.

Burli constantly auto-saves your work so that you don’t have to worry about wiping out work unintentionally, but you can press Ctrl-S (or that yellow padlock button) to immediately “save” your work and release the Story Lock.

Suggestions

Another way editors work with writers is to make suggestions, but not actually change the original text. We’ve added this to NE, to make that editorial workflow simpler.

Here we have a word that the editor thinks isn’t quite right, but (not being a football fan) isn’t sure. He highlights the word, and clicks the Suggestion button (the word balloon).

He can suggest a word, and even leave a comment for why the suggestion is being made. When the story is released back to the writer, she sees this:

The writer now sees a nice, bright yellow highlight, with the original and suggested text. She can go in (with the same button) and accept or reject the Suggestion, and the alternate text and highlighting disappears.

Notes

One other big difference between Burli Newsroom and Burli NE is the ability to add Notes to a story.  Notes are just that – text entries to convey extra info that goes along with a story.  However, anything appearing in a Note does not appear in the Prompter.

When you add a Note to a story, you’ll still see the familiar yellow text component logo pictured above You’ll also get a new blue Note, with a blue field to write in.

The new blue field is there to remind you that anything that goes in there is not part of the story itself, and is just extra info.  Add as many Notes as you like to a story, and call them whatever you like.

Making Burli Even Better

As you can see, Burli Software is working hard on making NE a great product to improve editorial workflows, making it easier to edit and build upon stories.

To learn more, come visit us at www.burli.com for more info, or email us to get in touch.