Metadata Design is Not an IT Problem; It's an Editorial One

Most newsrooms treat metadata as a technical task. Something you hand to the IT team, or the MAM vendor, or whoever is running the migration.

That's the mistake.

Metadata is how your journalists find things. It's how your assets get used. It's how AI understands your content; or fails to.

None of those are IT questions. They're editorial ones.

When we sit with a newsroom and ask "How do you search for footage?", the answers come from journalists, producers, library teams. Not from engineers. They search by story. By correspondent. By the feeling of a moment. By things that never made it into a filename.

If the people designing the metadata schema haven't spent time watching how journalists actually work, the schema will be technically correct and practically useless.

We've seen archives with millions of assets that journalists refuse to use; because search returns nothing useful. We've seen migrations that moved every file perfectly and destroyed every piece of editorial context in the process.

The technology wasn't the problem. The design was.

This year alone we have helped multiple clients move multiple petabytes of Archive from the old world to the future world we have built for them… and every time, we have migrated the files while upgrading them with new metadata and AI capabilities..  

This is why metadata design is at the heart of everything we do.

For us, metadata isn't the afterthought at the end of a workflow. It's the foundation everything else is built on.

If you have millions of files gathering dust in old archives and want to make them useful for your journalists, get in touch with us.