One story. Four systems. And a producer retyping the same context into each one. The Story Object Model (SOM) is designed to close that context gap. It proposes one open, shared way of describing a story that any system can follow: what state it is in, where it has reached in its life, what it is cleared for, who the sources are, and how it connects to other stories. The aim is that meaning travels between systems with the same dependability that pictures and audio already have.
SOM is being specified by SMART STORIES, a 2026 Incubator project in the IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme. Octopus Newsroom is proud to be one of its technology participants and to help shape the standard.
We’d be glad to show you what the consortium has built!
Live demos:
Accelerator Zone – Hall 14, Booth 14.D25
- Friday, 11 September | 12:00–13:00
- Sunday, 13 September | 14:00–15:00
Milan Varga and Daniel Sulik from Octopus Newsroom will be running demos alongside the other project participants.
Accelerator Final Showcase:
- Saturday, 12 September | 16:00–17:00
Come and see it in action – and meet the people behind the project.
Amsterdam is still a few weeks away, so we asked Milan Varga, Product Manager at Octopus Newsroom, to tell us more about SOM ahead of IBC 2026: what the standard is for, who is involved in the project, and what visitors can see at the stand.
Please explain what the Accelerator project is in as much detail as possible.
SMART STORIES is a 2026 IBC Accelerator project specifying SOM, the Story Object Model: an open standard describing the editorial context of a news story in a structured form, so that context can move between newsroom, production and AI tools built by different vendors.
The gap it addresses is specific. A production chain already moves a great deal across vendor boundaries and does it reliably: the media itself, the timings, the technical metadata, the commands that drive equipment. What has never been described in a structured form is the editorial context of the story itself. The subject as the desk currently understands it. The verification status of each claim. The compliance sign-off. The record of what moved since the last bulletin. It went unmodelled because there was always somebody available to hold it.
SOM rests on four ideas. A shared story structure that carries editorial context and interprets none of it. A story agent that follows one story across every tool it touches and tracks what changed. Decentralized intelligence, keeping processing inside each vendor’s own software rather than moving it to a central engine. And a Skills reference architecture, so a newsroom can write its editorial rules once, as portable configurations that agents in different systems can read.
Five things come out of the development phase: the specification, the Skills reference architecture, a reference implementation, a three-tier integration guide setting out what joining costs at three levels of engineering effort, and a live multi-vendor demonstration at IBC2026.
Who is involved in the project?
The project was proposed by the Associated Press, NBCUniversal, ITN and the BBC, with co-champions Channel 4, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Sky and ITV. The specification is being written by editors from AP, NBCUniversal, the BBC and ITN.
The technology participants are Octopus Newsroom, Shure, EVS, CUEZ, Moments Lab, Perspective Media Group, Google Cloud, TRINT, Cognizant, Nuvelics, AWS, The Weather Company, HyperContent AI and LiveU.
Why do you believe the project is important to the media industry?
Production technology has advanced mainly by connecting things, and what got connected was whatever had already been written down in a form a machine could read: the media, the timings, the instructions that drive equipment. The meaning of the story was never written down that way, so it never moved. It stayed with the people – in a producer’s memory, in the messaging app the desk actually runs on, in the conversation nobody recorded.
That held for as long as someone was standing at each handover to supply the missing part. It stops holding the moment the systems themselves need the context. An AI tool with no access to a newsroom’s editorial context fills the gap with an assumption, and the assumption reads as fluently as a fact.
There is a second reason that matters more to a broadcaster than to a vendor. Provenance currently travels by hand. The origin of a claim, the name of whoever checked it, and the clearance that let it go to air are recorded in whichever system happened to be open, and put back together by a person if anyone asks later. A shared story object would move that record with the story. Just as importantly, the standard is open and will remain open.
What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced as part of your project?
The problem is not the technology. It is that we are trying to formalize knowledge that has until now lived only in people and in informal communication. And the difference between data that is genuinely structured and data that only looks structured turns out to be fundamental.
Why did you want to be part of this year’s IBC Accelerator programme?
A new standard is being defined to close the gap in how editorial context moves between systems, and we wanted to help shape it from the beginning. We bring years of experience integrating Octopus with newsroom, production and third-party systems, giving us first-hand insight into where that missing layer becomes apparent. The Accelerator gives us the opportunity to help define an open standard based on real newsroom workflows.
What can IBC Show attendees expect to see from you in Amsterdam?
In the Accelerator Zone, the consortium runs its live proof of concept: SOM working across systems from several companies, in breaking news and planned coverage scenarios, multi-vendor and multi-cloud, with editorial judgement expressed as Skills. That is the only place at the show where the standard can be seen doing the thing it exists for.
At booth 6.C12, we will be showcasing the SMART STORIES concept alongside Octopus 13, the next generation of our news production system, featuring agentic workflows and Contextual AI, a No-Code Workflow Designer, and a mobile-friendly Web Client for remote news production.