Live News Operations & Innovation Lead

Versant Media; New York (NY); On-site; USD 108,000 - 132,000; Full time

Job summary

Versant Media in New York is hiring an Operations Manager to help build MS NOW into the most modern live media organization. The role sits at the intersection of editorial, production, digital, and technology, blending hands-on problem solving with strategic process design.

You’ll work with journalists, editors, engineers, and field teams, prototype tools, and help scale workflows while traveling to MS NOW and Versant locations.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in newsroom operations, production management, or related fields.
• Strong understanding of how live news and media organizations operate.
• Experience in fast-moving editorial, production, control room, or field environments.
• Hands-on interest in AI tools and prototyping with AI-assisted platforms.
• Excellent communication and ability to build trust across teams.

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• Identify recurring pain points, outdated workflows, manual processes, and opportunities to make teams faster, smarter, and more creative.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/production coordination

Strong communication

AI tooling familiarity

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

iNews

Avid

Adobe Creative Cloud

LiveU

MAM platforms

CMS platforms

Job description

Versant Media in New York is hiring an Operations Manager to help build MS NOW into the most modern live media organization. The role sits at the intersection of editorial, production, digital, and technology, blending hands-on problem solving with strategic process design.

You’ll work with journalists, editors, engineers, and field teams, prototype tools, and help scale workflows while traveling to MS NOW and Versant locations.