Overview
NewsTicker, at its core, is a specialized content management system (CMS) used to create, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fashion. It’s designed for efficiency by recognizing the roles of news, production and engineering, and segmenting those areas of the software out. Thus, news never accesses anything design-related.
Designers don’t have to type in any content. And, engineers have all of their broadcast controls in a single rack-unit device. Best of all, NewsTicker integrates all of your edge graphics needs in a single platform, preventing you from having to deal with multiple vendors, servers and CGs. In the most optimized of cases, NewsTicker and the Freedom have replaced nine individual vendors between applications, content and hardware.
The other major benefit of a CMS is the ability to enter data into a single location, yet have it be distributed to many outputs, formatted differently. Content in NewsTicker is entered with little regard for the output design. This is intentional as your news staff should be concerned about content and your design staff should be concerned about design. This doesn’t mean you can’t have editorial selecting design elements. The best example of this is within forecasts. If your display uses graphical icons, a meteorologist can select a textual description from a dropdown box, such as “Partly Cloudy.” Then, on air and on the web, you would match up the appropriate image.
Main Menu
NewsTicker is a web-based application, meaning anywhere on the network you have a PC with Internet Explorer, you can potentially access it. With proper firewall configuration or a VPN, you can even access it remotely. Your IT administrator will provide you with the website address, login name and password to access NewsTicker. Once you have that, use Internet Explorer (version 5.0 or newer) for the PC and open the site.
NewsTicker is made up of a series of “modules”. Each module controls a different data set, contributing to the product’s ease-of-use. The NewsTicker main menu (homepage) is the launch site for all modules.
Based on your license, you may have a subset of all available modules.
- Breaking News: This link appears once you’ve configured the “breaking news” category from within the Headlines module. It takes you into the Headlines module, hiding all categories except for breaking news.
- Closings: Full-featured school closings package that can take in closings and delays via touchtone or external web interface.
- Currents: Current weather conditions updated automatically from National Weather Service reporting stations. Some local temperature probes may also be used.
- EAS: Provides ingestion of messages from your EAS endec for displaying alerts through NewsTicker.
- Elections: Full-featured package for taking in election results from a wire, websites, and manually from area county clerks and election boards.
- Finance: Stocks of local interest, as well as the most popular indices, updated automatically as configured.
- Forecasts: Local or hyper-local weather forecast information, as updated by your meteorologist. It can be configured for multiple cities and dayparts.
- Gas Prices: Display of the cheapest places to buy gas in your market, automatically updated.
- Headlines Module for all headline data, categorized as desired. Automatic updates of national headlines are included.
- Lottery: State lottery results, fed automatically.
- SevereWx: Full-featured severe weather notification package with automatic updates from the National Weather Service.
- Ski: Current status of area ski resorts, including number of lifts open, base and top depth, and 24-hour snowfall. Information is updated automatically.
- Sports: Schedules and real-time scores of professional and NCAA teams, fed automatically. Local leagues, such as high school, can also be configured for manual entry.
- Terrorism: National Terrorism Threat Level as set by the U.S. Office of Homeland Security, updated automatically.
- Traffic: Traffic data from Metro Traffic or Traffic.com, if subscribed to their service. A manual traffic module can be used if an automated data source is not available.
- Globals: A centralized data source for entering high-level information used in broadcasts, but not suitable in other modules. For example, it may include a dynamic sponsor logo or snipe information.
- Broadcast: Module for building runlevels (playlists), as well as controlling the on-air display.
- Support: Link to support resources, documentation, and contact information.
Simply clicking on a module will take you into it. The next chapter provides more detail on each module, however you will likely find them to be intuitive.
Configurations
Setting up each module is consistent across all of NewsTicker. After clicking into the module you wish to set up, click Configure. The resulting configuration screen is generally organized, top to bottom, in the order in which you should configure it.
NewsTicker is designed to run day-in and day-out without ever clicking into the configuration screen. These settings are intentionally hidden behind a link to reduce the chances of somebody accidentally stumbling on them and changing something.
Any changes you make take effect immediately. The next chapter discusses the actual configuration of each module.