The live newsroom

The demo newsroom shows what the bus does before your systems are connected. The live newsroom goes one step further: the same newsroom is played by live actors, separate processes that each connect to the bus the way a vendor's system does, with their own credentials, and talk to each other only through the bus.

An actor is a simulated system. Everything it sends is synthetic and marked as demo traffic (its stories end in .demo-live-<day> and carry newsroom_id: "demo").

Who does what

Only two actors start anything on their own. Every other actor only reacts to what reaches its queue, so what you watch is a real chain: publish, route, pull, react, acknowledge.

Actor	Starts	Reacts to	Sends
Newsroom system (NCS)	The day's story beats	Media landing for its stories	story.context
Media store	The tip-line clip	A story's first snapshot	delivery.media_available, story.context
Skill executor		Every snapshot, evaluating the house's skill instances	skill.warning.raised
Graphics		A snapshot with an on-screen element; a kill	link.committed, link.withdrawn
Standards desk		A link waiting on a gate	link.gate_changed, system.audit
Playout		A cleared gate; a kill	telling.started, telling.ended
Web CMS		A story going to air; a kill	link.committed, telling.started, telling.ended
Automation		A kill	system.audit

Watch it

RND runs the live actors in its shared demo house while someone is looking at it. Once you are signed in to the portal, explore the demo house read-only: each actor is a connection there, with its grants, health and last seen, next to the house's activity and stories.

Run it yourself

The actors are open source, in the SOM Managed Bus developer kit under examples/newsroom. Create the connections its README lists in your own sandbox house, one producer connection per role and a consumer connection for each role that reacts, and start them all with one command. Every run is safe to repeat: an actor never sends the same message twice.

Swap in your own system

Each role is played by its actor until you hand it to your own system. That actor then stays silent, and the others react to what your system sends, so you can see your system work with the rest of a newsroom before any other system is connected.

Good to know

• A consumer connection in a house where the live newsroom runs receives the actors' messages like any other connection's there, whether or not it asked for the demo newsroom's messages. The actors are ordinary connections of the house; their stories are marked as demo, so the portal shows them with the Demo chip and Hide demo hides them.
• A real system that takes a role marks its own messages; the actors react to them either way.
• The in-process demo, Play and the ambient news day, stays as it is in every house.