How It Works — SmartRundown

Six tools, one workflow — from morning meeting to digital publish. Here's how SmartRundown fits into an actual newsroom day.

A Day in the Newsroom with SmartRundown

Morning Meeting

The day starts the way it always has: a stack of wire copy and a show to fill. But instead of spending the first hour massaging print-speak into broadcast copy, the producer drops each story into the Script Simplifier — and walks out of the morning meeting with clean, air-ready drafts already in the rundown. Assignments go out with a difference reporters notice: the handoff script already sounds like television, so the field crew starts from structure instead of from scratch. The morning meeting has always been about story judgment. SmartRundown just gets the mechanical work out of the way so that's all it has to be.

During the Show

Then 3 p.m. hits and the plan meets reality. A presser drops — the Simplifier turns it around in seconds. The rundown fills with VOSOTs, and the VOSOT Generator structures each one clean: tight VO, toss to sound, out with the tag. A reporter turning a package on deadline starts from the Package Generator's framework instead of a blank page, while the Banner Builder keeps the on-screen words as tight and accurate as the spoken ones. And when the EP calls for teases, the Tease Writer generates story-specific hooks that tease the story without giving it away — because a tease that answers the question has no reason to be on air.

Digital & Social

The show ends. The story doesn't. This is where one person used to become three jobs — and where SmartRundown does its quietest heavy lifting. The Digital Article Creator takes the air script and rebuilds it as a real web story: new headline, digital structure, sentence case, search-friendly. The Social and Push Alerts tool then writes the alert and the platform versions — each one shaped to its rules, each one accurate, because speed never excuses getting it wrong. What used to be an hour of reformatting is now five minutes of review. The journalist's time goes back to journalism.

Training on Your Schedule

The Training Hub isn't a course, and that's the point. Nobody in this business has a free Tuesday for a seminar. It's a reference library built for the ten minutes you actually have — between shows, on the desk, over lunch. A quick guide before you try a tool. A refresher on writing teases that don't lie. A straight answer on using AI responsibly, from someone who teaches it to newsrooms across the country. Dip in, take what you need, get back to the story.

Annotated Screenshots

Simplify Script tool — style selector and target duration — Simplify Script — choose your style and target duration; it writes to fit.

VOSOT Generator — anchor read and SOT hand-off — VOSOT Generator — anchor read written for the ear, clean hand-off to the bite.

Package Generator — anchor intro, standup, and anchor tag — Package Generator — full framework: anchor intro, standup at the turn, anchor tag that lands the return.

Tease Writer — three tease options, raises the question never answers it — Generate Teases — a tease for every slot in your show; raises the question, never answers it.