AI‑Driven Live News Operations Lead

Versant Media; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Versant Media seeks a New York-based Operations Manager to help modernize MS NOW into a world-class live media organization. You will work with editorial, production, and technical teams, prototyping tools and workflows, solving live production challenges, and building scalable processes with a hands-on, collaborative approach.

The role emphasizes curiosity, relationship-building, and a bias for experimentation, including AI-enabled workflows and cross-disciplinary collaboration across

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in newsroom operations, television production, digital media, production management, live events, product operations, or a related field.
• Strong understanding of how live news and media organizations operate.
• Experience working in fast-moving editorial, production, control room, digital, or field environments.
• Demonstrated ability to identify problems, simplify complicated workflows, and turn ideas into practical solutions.
• Hands-on interest in AI tools, including Codex or similar AI-assisted development platforms, and a willingness to use them regularly to prototype solutions.
• Comfort experimenting with new technology without waiting for every answer to be known in advance.
• Strong operational instincts and the ability to distinguish between an interesting technology and something that will actually help people do their jobs.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with an ability to build trust across editorial, creative, technical, and executive teams.
• Ability to move comfortably between strategic conversations and hands-on execution.
• Strong judgment under pressure and the ability to manage multiple priorities during breaking news and major productions.
• Willingness to travel and occasionally work nights or weekends around breaking news, major events, launches, and live productions.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a dedicated operational partner to MS NOW editorial, production, digital, and technical teams.
• Work directly with journalists, producers, editors, control rooms, field teams, and leadership to understand how work actually gets done and where it can be improved.
• Identify recurring pain points, outdated workflows, manual processes, and opportunities to make teams faster, smarter, and more creative.
• Translate between editorial needs and technical teams
• Build strong relationships across editorial, production, engineering, product, facilities, and technology teams.
• Develop simple documentation, playbooks, training, and onboarding materials so successful workflows can scale.
• Help teams adopt new tools and ways of working, recognizing that successful transformation depends on people, not just technology.
• Create lightweight applications, dashboards, automations, workflow tools, and proof-of-concepts that allow teams to test ideas quickly before committing to larger development efforts.
• Experiment with AI-enabled workflows across areas such as news gathering, production, transcription, metadata, research, clipping, publishing, planning, and live television.
• Support the day-to-day operational needs of MS NOW, including live productions, breaking news, digital video, remote productions, special coverage, field operations, and major events.
• Help modernize workflows across linear television, streaming, digital, social, and emerging platforms.
• Test new technologies in real production environments and gather direct feedback from the people using them.
• Travel to MS NOW and Versant locations as needed to understand workflows firsthand and support productions, pilots, and major initiatives.
• Jump in wherever necessary. If something needs to get done, this person should be comfortable helping figure it out.

Skills

Newsroom operations

Editorial workflow

Communication

AI tooling

Project coordination

Tools

iNews

Avid

Adobe Creative Cloud

LiveU

MAM platforms

CMS platforms

Job description

Versant Media seeks a New York-based Operations Manager to help modernize MS NOW into a world-class live media organization. You will work with editorial, production, and technical teams, prototyping tools and workflows, solving live production challenges, and building scalable processes with a hands-on, collaborative approach.

The role emphasizes curiosity, relationship-building, and a bias for experimentation, including AI-enabled workflows and cross-disciplinary collaboration across