Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » content management system

BBC News redesign architect gets technical about changes

Rachel McAthy — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:36:44 +0000

If you are more interested in the cogs and wheels behind the BBC News site’s redesign than the end product, a post by their chief technical architect John O’Donovan this week should be of interest.

The BBC has one of the oldest and largest websites on the internet and one of the goals of the update to the News site was to also update some of the core systems that manage content for all our interactive services.

O’Donovan first outlines the reasoning behind keeping with a Content Production System (CPS), rather than moving over to Content Management System (CMS), before giving a detailed look at the latest model – version 6 – that they have opted for.

The CPS has been constantly evolving and we should say that, when looking at the requirements for the new news site and other services, we did consider whether we should take a trip to the Content Management System (CMS) Showroom and see what shiny new wheels we could get.

However there is an interesting thing about the CPS – most of our users (of which there are over 1,200) think it does a pretty good job [checks inbox for complaints]. Now I’m not saying they have a picture of it next to their kids on the mantelpiece at home, but compared to my experience with many organisations and their CMS, that is something to value highly.

The main improvements afforded by the new version, according to O’Donovan, include a more structured approach, an improved technical quality of content produced and an ability to use semantic data to define content and improve layouts.

See his full post here…

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Johnston Press Atex system is bad news, but the death of the sub-editor is inevitable

Patrick Smith — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:50:42 +0000

Last month Johnston Press journalists, enraged by a new publishing strategy and online/print content management system (CMS) called Atex, voted for group-wide industrial action. Atex will make reporters responsible for subbing and editing their own newspaper stories using pre-made templates. The vote was thwarted by a High Court challenge; a re-ballot is underway.

Now several other companies including Archant are either using or considering using the same system.

The NUJ has a point when they say that with fewer staff and less checks and balances, more errors will get through – this aberration of a front page in the JP-owned Bedfordshire Times & Citizen recently is a classic example.

Yesterday I questioned exactly why the union was opposing Atex; included in the union’s greviances were baffling and unexplained “health and safety” concerns. The union later told Journalism.co.uk that they meant that it adds to staff stress levels.

But, I went on in conversations both online and privately, isn’t this part of a wider problem? The NUJ has a fundamental belief that sub-editors should sub stories and reporters write them. Like the pre-Wapping ihousen-printers that jealously guarded their very specific, outdated roles, the ideal outcome for the union is to maintain the status quo and protect jobs.

The reality isn’t quite that simple. Atex, as more than one person said, is far from the innovative answer that newspapers need. One person with knowledge of how Atex works, who works for a company that is planing to implement it and asked not to be named, put it to me like this:

We’re still in transition in my newsroom at the moment – we haven’t switched to using it for the web yet. However, if the system goes ahead as planned we will not be able to insert in-line links into stories, nor will we be able to embed content from anywhere else online. It’s possible to build link boxes that sit next to web stories, but it’s time consuming compared to in-line links – and if our current CMS is anything to go by, in the press of a busy newsroom, it won’t get done.

That sounds like a retrograde step. Far from holding back innovation, it sounds like JP journalists are right to oppose the move. This is from a company whose former chairman of nine years, Roger Parry, last week criticised the very board that he chaired for not investing enough in digital media (via Press Gazette). Exactly who else is there to blame?

But it gets worse:

For those of us who possess data skills and want to make mashups, visualisations and so on, this is a massive inhibition – even if we find the time to innovate or create something really special for our papers, we’ll have no outlet for it. It also means we can’t source video or images for our stories in innovative ways – no YouTube embeds or Flickr slideshows – cutting us off from huge resources that could save time, energy and money while enhancing our web offering.

It’s astonishing that we’re even considering such a backwards step to a presumably costly proprietory system when so many cheaper, more flexible, open source solutions exist for the web.

Regional reporters, web editors and even overall editors will read that and find this frustration of digital ideas by technical, budgetary limitations very familiar. The last point rings loudest of all: cheap, dynamic blogging solutions like WordPress and Typepad provide all newsrooms need to create a respectable news site. Publishing executives seem to find it hard to believe that something free to use can be any good, but just look at what’s coming in the in-beta WordPress 3.0 (via @CasJam on Mashable).

So the union’s misgivings in this case appear to be well placed. The drop in quality from Johnston’s cost-cutting is there for all to see in horrendous subbing errors, thinner editions and entire towns going without proper coverage.

Unfortunately, journalists have to accept that no amount of striking is going to bring back the staff that have gone and that times have changed. Carolyn McCall’s parting shot as CEO of Guardian Media Group was to repeat her prediction (via FT.com) that advertising revenues will never return to pre-recession levels – and don’t forget Claire Enders’ laugh-a-minute performance at the House of Commons media select committee, in which she predicted the death of half the country’s 1,300 local and regional titles in the next five years.

Regional publishers may not all have a solution that combines online editorial innovation with a digital business model right now. But to get to that point, reporters will have to cooperate and accept that their roles have changed forever – “sub-editor” may be a term journalists joining the industry in five years will never hear.

Patrick Smith is a freelance journalist, event organiser and formerly a correspondent for paidContent:UK and Press Gazette. He blogs at psmithjournalist.com and is @psmith on twitter.

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Latest media jobs on Journalism.co.uk

Ed Martin — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:18:22 +0000

The following great new vacancies have been advertised on Journalism.co.uk’s jobs board this week:

Editor
Computing is looking for a far-sighted and highly capable editor to take charge of the UK’s leading business technology brand
Salary: DoE
Incisive Media
London, England
>>more

Graphic designer (digital media)
Spreek je Nederlands? We need an experienced graphic designer, fluent in Dutch, to join this funky technology brand and push the creative boundaries further with their remarkable creative skills. Must be willing to relocate to Amsterdam.
Salary: €50K + bens.
Formula Won
Amsterdam, Netherlands
>>more

Sub-editor/compliance assistant
Growth Equities and Company Research is a leading independent research brand. GECR is looking to recruit a talented sub-editor to manage and develop the brand and product, manage a team of analysts and take on a compliance role within our organisation.
Salary: £25K
Rivington Street Holdings PLC
London, England
>>more

Senior advertising sales executive
We are looking for people who are target and performance driven, highly motivated self-starters who have very strong pitching and closing skills and also have good organisational abilities.
Salary: DoE
Crew Magazine
London , United Kingdom
>>more

Features writer
Experienced journalist with an in-depth understanding of all marketing disciplines and business sectors needed to join the features team at Marketing Week, the UK’s leading marketing industry weekly magazine.
Salary: DoE
Marketing Week
London, England
>>more

Assistant editor
Assistant editor required for national newspaper for the hearing impaired and deaf communities
Salary: DoE
Hearing Times Ltd
Woking, Surrey, England
>>more

Marketing assistant, social media
With experience in a similar role and additional language skills for this pan-European role for Travelzoo.
Salary: Competitive
Travelzoo (Europe) Ltd
London, United Kingdom
>>more

News editor
For the UK’s only weekly news title covering the interactive marketing and media sector.
Salary: DoE
Centaur Communications Ltd
London, England
>>more

Senior editor
To monitor breaking regional news, assign editors/writers as warranted and write and/or edit news items as needed Assign writers/editors and freelancers Process both incoming and outgoing content within the confines of a content management system
Salary: Competitive
News Corporation
London, England
>>more

Staff writer
We are looking for a staff writer who wants to have a real impact on the leading laboratory publication in the UK. The ideal candidate will be a science graduate with a real interest in, and knowledge of, all aspects of science.
Salary: DoE
Metropolis Business Media
Croydon, England
>>more

Staff Writer – Cycling Plus
Would you like to write for one of the UK’s best selling road cycling magazines? Take your first step into magazine journalism and join Cycling Plus as a staff writer.
Salary: Competitive salary plus excellent benefits
Future Publishing Ltd
Bath, England
>>more

To see the full jobs board, please go to http://www.journalism.co.uk/36/64/

To sign up for free as a jobseeker, please go to http://www.journalism.co.uk/113/

To sign up as an advertiser, please go to http://www.journalism.co.uk/75/

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Newsandtech.com: San Diego Union-Tribune finally abandons manual pagination

Judith Townend — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:09:48 +0000

The San Diego Union-Tribune, the last major metro in the United States to put together its pages manually, will finally – after 140 years – move to a new content management system.

Newsandtech.com reports:

“[T]he paper goes live on a 250-seat Atex Prestige content management system in November.”

Full story at this link…

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The Editorialiste: ‘New media reality check’ for new journalists

Judith Townend — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:45:45 +0000

Andrew Nusca shares his thoughts on the new media skills needed by modern day journalists:

“As new media has increased in popularity and usage, this myth has populated of the multi-talented reporter – you know, the one carrying all the gear a few paragraphs back. And while it’s certainly an ideal, it’s not a necessity. In fact, it’s barely a reality.”

He follows this with some very useful advice for journalists entering the profession:

“For most online journalism, all you need to know is how to blog and how to use a CMS, or content management system.”

Full post at this link…

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New look for Archant’s Eastern Daily Press

Laura Oliver — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:18:02 +0000

At the end of last week regional newspaper publisher Archant set live its new look Eastern Daily Press site – part of changes ahead of a larger redesign later this year.

Here’s a snapshot of part of the home page, which now features a wider layout and simpler navigation. The design follows that already seen on the revamped East Anglian Daily Press and Evening Star titles, which will be rolled out group-wide.

“The EDP is Archant’s most popular newspaper website (around 2.5m page views, and 280k monthly unique visitors), and is a regular award-winner. The changes made this week are to intended to give the site a more modern approach (…) and represent the first major redesign since the site was launched in 2001,” James Goffin, Archant regional web producer, told Journalism.co.uk.

“We’ve also reviewed the content on the site to make sure it is fully in tune with what our readers are looking for.

“This first-stage of the relaunch will be followed up later this year with new features as part of our move to a new joint content management system for print and web.”

Congratulations to Archant’s Norfolk web team (Celia Sutton, Tracey Tutt and Vince Yallop) for the EDP overhaull – am sure they’d appreciate any thoughts?

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NPR: ‘Develop content management tools, not web publishing tools’

Laura Oliver — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 09:26:25 +0000

Media and news organisations should look at building content management systems that do more than just creating webpages, says National Public Radio’s (NPR) Daniel Jacobson.

“In building our CMS at NPR, our goal was to make sure the tool could publish to anything, including NPR.org. If our focus did not consider other platforms, we could have ended up with a web publishing system that binds the content too closely to the website itself.”

Full story at this link…

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: Mecom’s Danish arm will cut costs with open-source CMS

Kristine Lowe — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:45:39 +0000

Mecom-owned Berlingske Media, Denmark’s biggest daily newspaper publisher, has decided to ditch its costly online publishing system for open-source software Drupal.

As Journalism.co.uk reported earlier this year, Berlingske Media already runs some of its sites on Drupal – a free content management system (CMS).

After a long period of deliberation, the Danish division of Mecom, the ailing pan-European media group headed by former Mirror-boss David Montgomery, has decided to make Drupal its online publishing system of choice.

“It is no secret that economy means a lot to us, but if the system had been unstable and not user-friendly, the price would not have been decisive,” Berlingske’s CEO Lisbeth Knudesen told eJour (in Danish).

She particularly praised Drupal for being so much more flexible than traditional publishing platforms.

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CSM and CMS: Christian Science Monitor readies technology for web-only move

Laura Oliver — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:43:58 +0000

Following its decision to become an online-only outfit from spring next year, the Christian Science Monitor has opted for an open source content management system (CMS) produced by Norway’s eZ Systems.

The eZ Publish CMS will support multimedia content and allow the monitor to publish to multiple platforms if needed, a release from eZ said.

The deal marks the CMS provider’s plans to expand into the US.

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The Drum: Trinity Mirror to expand new production system to Scotland

Laura Oliver — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:59:27 +0000

The publisher may extend the new production system currently being introduced to its Midlands titles to its Scottish operations, which includes the Daily Record and Sunday Mail.

As part of the new procedure journalists upload their copy directly to a centralised content management system, before it is deployed to the online or print edition, The Drum reports.

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Makeover for the Telegraph business pages

Judith Townend — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:09:53 +0000

Today sees the launch of the all-new Telegraph.co.uk Finance – a merger of their business and personal finance sections into one channel.

The new format is the result of their new digital publishing and content management system, Escenic. A release from the Telegraph said that Escenic has allowed ‘easier navigation, improved accessibility and allows for contextually relevant data to be embedded in articles and throughout the channel.’

The new finance channel includes:

Edmund Conway’s ‘Economic Pulse’ blog

Two new platforms for funds and shares, where users can make their own portfolio

Financial commentary and analysis from breakingviews.com, as announced last week

The channel is available on their mobile portal, out last month. The group has also developed a new widget for social bookmarking, a financial iPhone application, and a ‘Questor’ tool, which gives share and market tips.

Paul Farrow, digital personal finance editor, Telegraph.co.uk, said in the release: “Financial news has never mattered more. We wanted to strengthen our business coverage by looking at the reasons behind financial developments but also at how they directly affect the consumer.”

The changes are a continuation of their re-design process, started in July, which saw a new look for the news, sport and travel sections.

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Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – optimise urls for search engines

Laura Oliver — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:55:39 +0000

Online publishing: When choosing a content management system or blogging software, make sure it can include headlines in the article page’s URL. It is more memorable than strings of numbers and good for search engine optimisation too. Tipster: Laura Oliver

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: Mecom’s Danish arm may ditch costly CMS for Drupal

Kristine Lowe — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:57:54 +0000

Berlingske Media, Denmark’s biggest publisher of daily newspapers, is considering making free open source software Drupal its online publishing system of choice.

Former Mirror-boss David Montgomery’s Danish lieutenant, Lisbeth Knudsen, is contemplating the move, which could save a substantial sum of money – but it does not come without risk.

Berlingske Media already runs some of its sites on Drupal – a long-time favourite free content management system (CMS) of web hacker-geeks – but many consider the open source solution more vulnerable to hackers than proprietary systems.

“Our sports portal, launched early in June, is developed in Drupal, and we will use this for more sites. We are in the process of evaluating future online solutions, and will make a decision on this later this year. So far we have chosen Drupal for some of our smaller sites and Saxotech online for the bigger,” Knudsen told me.

But is Drupal up to the task?

The Danish newspaper publisher is in the process of integrating all its titles into ‘verticals’ that deliver copy across platforms and titles, and its sports site carries material from several of Berlingske’s titles.

Henning Sund, head of digital development for newspaper publisher Edda Media, is sceptical about how well Drupal is suited to such large-scale projects.

”I think part of the reason Berlingske Media is considering Drupal is that they are so desperate to get away from Saxotech Online. That is a desire I understand perfectly,” he said, explaining that Edda Media, Mecom’s Norwegian division, is also in the process of replacing Saxotech Online, but Drupal is not a candidate.

”I do not feel the security in Drupal is well-documented enough. We want a provider that can take responsibility for this, something we will not get with Drupal,” said Sund, adding that you also have to spend a lot of money on developing the desired functionality in Drupal, as it is not ‘plug and play’.

Berlingske-owned AOK.dk, a city guide for Copenhagen that runs on Drupal, has used an east European company to develop extra functionality in Drupal – a concept that has been exported to Berlin and Mecom Germany.

However, Sund does not think that Mecom boss Montgomery will impose Drupal as the standard CMS throughout the company should it be a success:

“Montgomery has made it very clear that as long as you reach your budget targets, you can choose the solutions you see fit. However, if you do not reach these targets, you will get Montgomery breathing down your neck, and that is something you would do anything to avoid.”

For more news on newspapers harnessing open source read about The Jewish Chronicle’s launch of a beta site using Drupal.

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Poll: Is the new Daily Mail beta website an improvement?

Laura Oliver — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:16:00 +0000

The Daily Mail has launched a beta version of its website to trial design improvements and a new content management system.

The trial version currently features content from the sport, showbiz and femail channels of the main site, but more will be added in the next few days.

The Mail is asking users to submit their feedback directly through the site – so why not give us yours in the Journalism.co.uk poll: is the new Daily Mail beta website an improvement?

(Apologies for not publishing the poll directly to the blog, we can’t get that to work yet)

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Innovations in Journalism – Instant Journalist

Oliver Luft — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:15:40 +0000

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today it’s flat-packed news websites ready for easy assembly and use from Instant Journalist.

1. Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Scott Durham, president of Instivate. We’re a small software company in Seattle, Washington building a flexible, scalable platform for powering online communities.

Our first product is Instant Journalist, which makes it easy for anyone to launch their own online news communities where the public can read and contribute news stories and events of local interest with rich media such as video, images, and documents.

2. Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Since anyone can join and submit content to a site powered by Instant Journalist, it allows the site to cover a much wider range of news events than an individual or team of journalists could do alone.

We have an advanced set of content rating tools, automated algorithms, and editorial controls that makes it easy for the site owner to manage the content from thousands of individual contributors, and make sure that the best content rises to the top of the heap.

In addition, we have a variety of features that aren’t available in traditional blogging or other content management systems.

One key strength is that our product comes with native support for video. That makes it easy for anyone to upload video of a news event and make it available to readers of the site. Our system handles all the complexity of video processing and conversion behind the scenes, and then allows playback on any web browser.

Another key feature includes our integrated mapping technology, where any story can be placed on a map and assigned to a specific geographical neighbourhood, town, or city.

This allows users to quickly visualise the location of a news event and browse and discover other content in that specific area. Users can also subscribe to RSS feeds for specific geographic locations and track the news around them at a very local level.

3. Is this it, or is there more to come?
Our major focus now is the delivery of a self-service advertising solution that will make it easy for site owners to monetise their site.

It will allow any advertiser to easily sign-up and create ads for the site. Also stay tuned as we roll out more advanced content management features and more interactive ways of reporting news events on the site.

4. Why are you doing this?
We’re passionate about building systems that make it easy for people to participate in and contribute to communities of like-minded people online.

We picked the news space as our first project because there’s a huge opportunity there to empower professional journalists and regular members of the public to collaborate online and cover a much wider range of news than has ever been possible before.

5. What does it cost to use it?
We have a range of packages that scale up according to the amount of traffic a site serves, starting at just $18 a month.

It’s designed so that a site can start small, with pricing that grows as the site does and at a very affordable rate.

6. How will you make it pay?
Our content management system makes it easy for site owners to plug any 3rd-party advertising solution into their site, such as Google ads, etc. And our forthcoming self-service advertising solution will take that to the next level by allowing access to a wider range of potential advertisers, and providing the site owner a higher percentage of overall revenue than other 3rd party online advertising solutions.

Have a look at Centraldistrictnews.com – it covers a neighbourhood here in Seattle and allows people to communicate with their neighbours about the news that happens right around them.

We’re also working with a major newspaper company to adapt our platform to a wide range of less newsy applications; covering topics from travel to sports and local dining we’re allowing them to quickly deploy niche interest sites and other targeted online communities that will build a rich online ecosystem of websites around their existing newspaper brands.

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