Question, have you ever had the misfortune of living through this stress-inducing newsroom scenario? You get a graphics request for a breaking news event, the live broadcast is coming up quickly, you don’t have relevant premade graphics on hand, and your graphic artists already have their hands full.

If the answer is yes, you may be wondering how you can simplify and accelerate your workflow so that air-ready graphics are done on time (and without such a massive increase in blood pressure). Any and all of these four workflow improvements can make a difference that you and your team will appreciate every day, and especially on a busy news day.

1) Unify Assets and Metadata

While some aspects of breaking news will be original or even unusual, your station likely has images, graphics, and video assets that you can quickly repurpose to support the story. Currently, you may store these assets within on-prem systems, both new and legacy equipment from different vendors, as well as in the cloud. Despite working with multiple platforms or a decentralized storage model, you can leverage all these assets to reduce the time and work involved in preparing graphics for air.

By bringing assets and related metadata into a single repository, such as a graphics management system, you create a searchable collection of all your resources, no matter where they are stored. Within moments, you can locate assets tagged with keywords that align with your breaking news story, and even the graphics and visuals used for earlier stories on the same subject. (No more searching by filename!) You know where to find each asset and how to get it. You can easily direct other team members to just the right image, clip, or graphic – and every authorized user of the graphics system enjoys convenient access from their desktop.

[READ: Five Technologies to Make Your Broadcasts More Impactful]

2) Remove Graphic Order Bottlenecks

By integrating  this centralized asset management system with work order management within your graphics creation and fulfillment environment such as ENPS, iNews, or Octopus, journalists and producers can see both the graphics-creation work done in the past and the graphics orders that have yet to be fulfilled. This connection between the graphics team and the newsroom staff improves communication and helps both teams get the story finished more quickly.

Without the need to move assets here and there — emailing images, running video clips down the hall on a thumb drive, and so on — everyone contributing to the news story can work with fewer interruptions and more freedom to access the resources they need.

Journalists and producers can easily grab existing and newly completed graphics while working within the newsroom system. (No more moving from tab to tab or opening and closing different applications.) In fact, everyone with access to the asset management system can see and work with those graphics too. An editor working in the edit bay could locate a video clip to fill out a story. If necessary, a control room operator could find a graphic for last-minute playout.

3) Empower Your Producers

Simplify graphics creation by empowering producers and journalists to find the right image or video to tell their stories and by giving them DIY tools that help them move the story along in a timely way.

Chyron’s CAMIO graphics management system does this every day by enabling fast, flexible template-based graphics creation. Without leaving the newsroom interface, producers and journalists can locate visual assets, quickly input information that will populate a lower-third, an over-the-shoulder graphic, or a full-screen graphic. When time is especially short or a graphics request is a low priority for an already busy graphics team, CAMIO’s new “image compose” feature is a great way to get simpler graphics done and ready for air.

You can quickly adjust and overlay multiple images in graphic compositions that meet the design standard of the show or station, and you can do it without leaving the MOS environment and without developing a new skill set or learning another discipline. If your choice is DIY or nothing, it’s a no-brainer. A simple composite image can do a lot to enrich the news story and help viewers understand what’s happening.

[READ: How CAMIO Empowers Producers and Journalists To Bring Better Stories to Air]

4) Offload to Cloud Graphics Creation

Chyron’s AXIS is graphics creation as a service, and you can implement it as a single station or as a group in a hub-and-spoke model. If your graphics team is just too busy or simply not equipped to handle the complexity or volume of graphics requests, an AXIS subscription gives you a valuable shortcut in getting professional graphics ready for air.

Using an intuitive browser-based interface, you essentially access your own creative services department in the cloud, where you find predefined templates you can use to create graphics or a fulfillment service when you need something more. Everyone from reporters to editors to producers can quickly locate images, maps, and charts that help to bring stories and data to life. Rather than wait hours for a graphics order to be fulfilled, you and other team members can get results in minutes.

[READ: Streamlined News Graphics: What Are You Missing?]

What’s Your Order-to-Air Hurdle?

If you’re working with CAMIO, all four of these workflow improvements can happen seamlessly. But even if you’re not, they’re still worth considering.

• What tools do you have that can help you tackle some of these obstacles to a faster, more efficient workflow?
• What one change to your graphics-creation workflow could empower your journalists and producers to move stories along faster? 
• How much richer could your storytelling be if everyone shared easy access to all visual assets, old and new, created for your station or broadcast group?

Interested in learning more about how an efficient and streamlined graphics workflow can get you to air faster? Click Here