Why the price is not one figure
People ask me for a single number for newsroom workflow setup, and I understand why. A producer has a budget line and wants to fill it. But the work is closer to a survey than a product: we look at how a story travels from the camera card to the screen, and the cost follows the length and tangle of that route.
A small digital desk with three editors and one approval step is a short job. A television newsroom with several bulletins, a legal read, a duty editor and two delivery destinations is a longer one. Neither is better run. They simply contain different amounts of handing over, and every hand-over is a place where we must watch, ask and write something down.
So when we quote, we give a written figure after hearing how your day runs, not before. The prices page sets out the starting points and what each includes. This note explains what sits behind those starting points, so the quotation we send you does not feel like a surprise.
The first thing we measure: how many steps there are
We begin by counting stages, not people. Ingest, logging, rough cut, script check, approval, captioning, formatting, delivery. Some newsrooms have five of these, some have nine, and a few have steps nobody has ever written down because the person who did them left years ago.
Each stage needs to be watched in real use. I have stood behind editors for a full shift to see where a clip waits, and it is rarely where the manager expects. The wait is often a folder nobody checks or an approval that only one person can give and who is away from the desk.
More stages mean more observation time, more notes to reconcile and more to test once we change anything. That is the plainest driver of price, and it is the one you can see for yourself by drawing your own process on a sheet of paper before you call us.
- Number of distinct stages from ingest to delivery
- Steps that exist only in someone's memory
- Stages with more than one possible route
Approvals and who has to say yes
Approval is where deadlines are lost. A single clear sign-off is cheap to design around. Three people who each have a partial veto, and who disagree about what they are vetoing, take real time to untangle, because the fix is as much a conversation as a diagram.
We do not decide who should hold authority in your newsroom. We write down who holds it now, show where it causes delay, and propose a simpler order for you to accept or change. That means meetings with your editors, and the number and length of those meetings is part of the cost.
If your approvals already follow a fixed rule that people respect, our work here is light. If the rule changes with the time of day or the seriousness of the story, we need to document each case, and that adds a measurable amount to the job.
- Number of people who must approve a typical package
- Whether the rule differs for breaking and planned stories
Tools you already own and how they talk to each other
We work with the editing and delivery tools you have rather than asking you to buy new ones. That keeps cost down, but it also means our time depends on how well your existing systems pass material to one another. A clean hand-off between edit suite and playout costs little. A manual copy by memory stick costs more to redesign.
Naming and folder habits matter more than people expect. If every editor labels files differently, we spend a good part of the job agreeing one scheme and checking that it holds. It is dull work, and it is often where the biggest time savings come from afterwards.
Where a tool is old or locked down, we say so early and plan around its limits. We would rather tell you in the first conversation that a particular step cannot be shortened than discover it in the final week.
- Number of editing and delivery systems in use
- Manual copying between systems
- Agreed file naming and folder structure
Delivery formats and destinations
The end of the chain is often the most varied part. One bulletin may need a broadcast file, a vertical clip for a phone feed, a captioned version for the website and a short cut for a partner channel. Each format has its own settings, checks and naming.
Every extra destination adds a branch we must design, test and write up. We do this by running real clips through each branch until the output is right, not by trusting that the settings look correct on screen. Testing is a visible part of the price because it is where mistakes are caught before they reach air.
If you only deliver in one or two formats, this part is brief. If you deliver in six, expect it to be a noticeable share of the total, and consider whether every one of those formats is still needed.
- Number of output formats
- Captioning requirements for each
- Partners who receive files directly
Timing, training and what you keep afterwards
Two further things change the figure. One is timing: work done around a live newsroom, in gaps between bulletins, takes longer than work done on a quiet week, and we plan accordingly. The other is hand-over. We write the new process in plain steps and run a short session with your staff, and a larger team means more sessions.
What you keep is a written workflow, folder and naming rules, and notes on who does what at each stage. You can use these without us. We do not build a dependence on our presence into the setup, because a process that only works while we are in the room has not been finished.
Ordering follows the usual route: an enquiry through the contact page, a written quotation or confirmation, then an invoice paid by bank transfer. Cancellations and refunds follow the payment and refund policy.
The cost of newsroom workflow setup rises with the number of stages, the number of people who must approve, the tangle between your tools and the number of formats you deliver. Draw your own process before you write to us, count the hand-overs, and send us what you find. We will answer with a written quotation that shows what is included, so you can compare it with the price starting points and decide calmly.