Guardian makes headlines with multimedia

When Guardian News & Media (GNM) announced its move to new premises at King’s Place, next to London’s Kings Cross station, it stated its intent to put multimedia – by which it means online video and audio content – at the heart of its operations. It has done so quite literally, building a studio complex at the centre of its building that is a very visible statement of the group’s intention to be more than just a paper publisher.

Six months in, the results are already proving the point. All the video and audio content on the group’s website is now coming from the in-house studios and traffic has reached up to 1 million visitors a day.

However, the studios are just part of an extensive a-v and multimedia backbone that is at the heart of the new offices. There are 18 meeting areas with installed a-v systems; a pair of videowalls to welcome visitors and show what The Guardian, The Observer and GNM’s web products are up to, including breaking news feeds, and a digital signage/IPTV network with 200 screens dotted around the building, and the capacity to deliver live video to 1,300 desktops.

Meeting and production points

Highlights of the meeting facilities include the Scott Room, which has a twin Barco projection rig and a seamless rear projection screen; the morning meeting area with videoconferencing facilities and the ability to stream proceedings to desktops and signage screens; and a “newsroom” facility for visiting school parties. All room control is done using Crestron touchpanels, most of which are wireless, and room booking and occupancy displays are handled using Polyvision Room Wizard LCD panels.

The studios are just as impressive. They are not used for television broadcasting in the traditional sense, but are all fully digital, with an SDI backbone. There are five recording studios, two with video capability, two video edit suites and a comprehensive central patch and matrix facility. The mutlimedia hub has been designed to ingest material brought in to the complex in any format, transcoding it as necessary and putting it on the multimedia operation’s central server so that it can be almost instantly edited and put out on the web.

Consultancy and installation

In effect, it is the incorporation of the studios and a whole new audio/video production process into the publishing workflow that makes the GNM installation so remarkable.

‘Multimedia is the kingpin,’ says John Sykes,the Arup Communications consultant who worked on the project. ‘The opening brief was fluid. They had ideas of the kind of facility they needed, but with workflow strategy in its early stages, they hadn’t yet determined how deep they were going to get into digital media – that strategy evolved quite a long way through the project.

‘When The Guardian decided it was going to move into the digital media area in a big way, the system designs were developed to support the migration. They wanted to get material into The Guardian in whatever format it arrived in, get it into the suite, ingested, made available for editing and sent out from there to the website.

‘The idea was to treat all incoming media in wholly digital domain and consolidate it into a workable format that everybody could share.’

Both Sykes and the GNM project managers admit that ‘the multimedia workflow brief progressed as the project developed’.

‘We recognised the need for audio and video and for a news organisation to be at the cutting edge of new media,’ says GNM project handler Karen Frankel. ‘But when we were in Farringdon Road (at the old offices) we didn’t have any video studios, just two small audio studios. Most of the video we used was shot on location or re-purposed from agency feeds.’

As the project developed and GNM brought new audio engineers and video producers on board, building towards today’s 30-strong multimedia team of producers and video journalists, Arup and GNM held workshops to discuss the studio requirements and match the installation to the workflow. ‘We asked the team how they wanted the infrastructure to work,’ says Frankel. ‘That didn’t change the concept, but some of the details came out differently from the ones originally envisaged.’

Some of those details included equipping the studio complex (and other inject points in the building) with a serial digital backbone (SDI) rather than the analogue cabling originally proposed.

‘You can set up a presentation or a video capture area in any part of the building,’ says Sykes. ‘Everything goes into the multimedia hub for production either at the desktop or in the studios, straight back to the studio, and everything that goes on the website comes out of the complex.’

User implications

Staff at GNM have welcomed the new systems and the use of technology to break down communication barriers between teams. For example, the morning conference – at which senior editorial staff discuss the paper’s last edition and plan the next one – used to be an almost closed event. Now it is open to all to view and take part in, either in the conference room itself, or via the internal television system. Discussions that were hidden from view are now open, and even the commercial team can watch.

Events and discussions in the flagship meeting area, The Scott Room, are visible, and meeting spaces elsewhere across the four floors occupied by GNM are also glass-walled or completely open.

Other changes are also in the pipeline. With journalistic teams now working across all three GNM products – The Guardian, The Observer and the web – new ways of working are being developed. Frankel describes her role as ‘a mediator between editorial and IT’ and acknowledges that there is still work to do, especially as there are still separate editorial content management systems for the print media and multimedia.

GNM’s staff and management are still learning about the new areas they have pushed so hard into. But the whole project is a classic example of how organisational habits and attitudes can be changed by a mix of design and technology.

In the end, that helps provide a competitive advantage in a sector that’s becoming more cut-throat by the day, and GNM’s coverage, enabled by the new studios as well as an integrated approach, is a high-profile testament to the organisation’s new-found edge. It is the top newspaper website in the UK, with the latest ABC figures showing that it attracted 14.5(m??) unique visitors in June – 33 per cent more than its nearest competitor.

‘We get more traffic on our website because have we approached it with an integrated desk using our considerable editorial resources,’ says GNM managing director Tim Brooks. ‘We are providing a faster and better quality service.’

KIT LIST

THE PRESENTATION EQUIPMENT

Ground floor and reception
2x Orion plasma videowalls with 10 and 6 42in screens

Scott Room
Twin Barco projectors with mirror rigs. The room can be divided into two, and the second part, Scott B, is equipped with a Draper hoist and a Barco IQ R500 projector. Control is via a Crestron 8.4in wired touch panel on the lectern and a second wireless panel when the room is divided. Audio  includes JBL, Clock Audio and Amina devices and the rooms are also equipped with Sony PTZ cameras, a Smart Sympodium interactive panel and Extron switchers to handle up to eight simultaneous sources. Other equipment includes a Tandberg 3000 MXP videoconferencing codec, Sennheiser radio mics and an Ampetronic induction loop system.

First floor meeting rooms
There are eight meeting rooms on the first floor, all with a Polyvision room management LCD panel, Crestron wireless touch panels, wall-mounted NEc 50in and 60in plasmas with Smart interactive overlays, Extron switchers and, in the biggest room, a Tandberg videoconferencing codec. Exterity IPTV receivers, Cloud amps and JBL speakers are used throughout.

Morning conference room
Display is via a 65in Panasonic plasma and conferencing is handled via a Tandberg codec and Polycom audio systems. Control is via a Crestron panel and the room uses Sennheiser radio mics and a Shure Servoreeler system.

Offices and meeting rooms
Other meeting areas – including the editor’s office and a 16-person meeting room use Panasonic 65in or NEC 50in plasmas. Extron and Gefen drivers and signal boosters are used throughout, along with Crestron panels. The exception is the newsroom, which uses Smart Sympodium, a Smart overlay on a 50in NEC plasma, a drop-down Sanyo PLC-XT20L projector with Da-Lite screen, a TOA amplifer and an Ampetronic induction loop.

Digital signage and desktop television equipment
The signage and television systems run via Exterity gateways and encoders/decoders, with a mix of screens deployed in the different areas. The principal screens in use are 37in LG Electronics LCD screens (LCD3702C) and 50in NEC NPD50XP10 plasma screens. A few 32in Sony LCD screens are also in use.

Studio equipment
The studios have been equipped to high standards. Key items used in a massive list of equipment include Yamaha sound desks and audio mixers, Trilogy interfaces, Kramer DAs and switchers, Extron switchers and receivers, FOR-A splitters, Genelec speakers, and Lund and Halsey workstations. The audio systems include Neumann, AKG, Rode and Shure mics, while video capture is done using Sony PMW camcorders. The studios are also equipped with Crestron control touch panels and the Polyvision Room Wizasrd system. Editing is handled using Final Cut Pro on Macintosh.