Comments on: Which CMS do they use in online journalism utopia?

By: savings

savings — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:59:14 +0000

Great post. He definitely needs a competitor, there's no arguing that Joomla is quickly becoming one of the top content management system (CMS) platforms on the Internet. But that being said drupal has a major share in the CMS market.

By: Adult Toys

Adult Toys — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:29:49 +0000

interesting article

By: Dave Spathaky

Dave Spathaky — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:14:21 +0000

Yep, for sure, it's all about workflow….

By: Ian Reeves

Ian Reeves — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:39:58 +0000

Hi Martin,
I've built a very simple Drupal site for students (and staff) at the Uni of Kent's new Centre for Journalism (http://www.centreforjournalism.co.uk) to use as a live publishing environment as they learn their trade. It fulfills the basic brief of allowing them to post blogs, stories, images, videos and audio content – with some areas restricted for departmental eyes only, for assessed work etc – but the idea is that as they progress, they'll also be involved in the site's development into something far more sophisticated. Hopefully they'll eventually bringing ideas I've never even thought of to the table.
It's currently an online-only cms, of course, but I note there's some discussion on the Drupal Newspaper Group about integration with InDesign and InCopy that I'll be following closely.

By: Bookmarks for October 6th from 18:15 to 18:29 | Jared Silfies

Bookmarks for October 6th from 18:15 to 18:29 | Jared Silfies — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:02:47 +0000

[...] Which CMS do they use in online journalism utopia? | Martin Stabe – Analysis of CMS and how it affects journalists work. Discusses the problems with clunky backends and poor templates. CoPress might fill these voids. [...]

By: Martin Stabe

Martin Stabe — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 18:44:34 +0000

Absolutely right.

But wouldn't you agree that most newsroom CMSs are designed specifically to do the sort of "knock out a piece of text" journalism and actually discourage the sort of mind shift towards data-driven work you describe?

To build your database-driven football tables, for example, a technically knowledgeable journalist like yourself will most likely have to step outside the constraints of the system used by the to build it from scratch.

The output from that application would then probably be piped back into the general framework that runs the paper's site with some ugly hack involving Javascript or iframes. That's an example of the creative workarounds I was talking about.

The best website editors are those who can achieve this sort of stuff in spite of whatever systems are at their disposal.

By: James Goffin

James Goffin — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 18:28:13 +0000

It's not just the fault of the CMS. There's a fundamental difference in the way you handle information to do all the sparkly stuff that is alien to knocking out a piece of text.
To do a football league table as plain text you can just type it, bung in few tabs and you're done. To make that interactive you need a database table for the teams, for each result, some script to work out the points and generate the table.
Open that up to a big competition like the FA Cup and you need an index that includes every club in the country. Or you could just type the text in, bung in a few tabs…
Journalists are used to working with words and not data; they are two different disciplines that have a lot to offer each other, but different nonetheless.

By: Steve Yelvington

Steve Yelvington — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:58:07 +0000

The other obvious candidate is Drupal, which is now powering dozens of fairly large newspaper sites.

However, the path from a generic Drupal download to a system properly configured to meet the needs of a large multimedia news organization is not a short one.

We're working toward relaunch of Jacksonville.com on the Drupal platform by the end of the month, followed quickly thereafter by CJOnline.com. As quickly as possible we'll be releasing our work -- new Drupal modules and a configuration script -- to the open-source community.

Our goal is to move from a model in which web sites are maintained by online specialists to one in which every member of the news organization can play an appropriate role in direct online publishing and interaction.

The flexibility issue is huge. One of the benefits of our system will be that editors will have complete flexibility to change layouts of major display pages such as the homepage, section fronts, and topics pages. It won't be necessary to know any HTML.

By: Daniel Bachhuber

Daniel Bachhuber — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:59:10 +0000

[crickets, crickets]

I think Ellington needs an open-source competitor for there even to be a discussion.

By: hackademic.net — journalism • learning • teaching = journalism education » Which CMS do they use in online journalism utopia? | Martin Stabe

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:02:42 +0000

[...] Read more here [link] Tags:CMS, hackademic, Journalism, martin_stabe, Newspapers, Online [...]