Why can’t a newspaper CMS be as user-friendly as a blog?

Monday, 29 October 2007, 08:00

The much-anticipated Web 2.0 regional news portal in Germany, Der Westen, has gone live.

The front end — full of geotagging and social networking goodness is very nice indeed, but what’s been done under the bonnet that seems to be equally important. The backend of the custom-built CMS, apparently, is very user-friendly — which is important because over 800 print journalists have had to be trained to use it.

Blogger-turned-regional-newspaper-executive Katarina Borchert, who has lead the project for the WAZ group, is on the cover of German journalism mag Medium this month, and has some extremely wise words in the interview:

Ich komme ja aus der Blogwelt und habe much gefragt, warum Redaktionssysteme von Zeitungen im Vergleich zu denen für Blogs so kompliziert sein müssen.

My translation:

Coming from the world of blogs, I asked myself why newspapers’ content management systems have to be so complicated compared to blogs’.

Why indeed. I’ve asked myself the same thing a few times over the last few months.

Entry Filed under: blog, bloggers, blogging, cms

Zac Echola

I think half the problem with newspaper.com CMS, especially homebrewed CMS is that the people in charge of the sites treat the Web as a newspaper.

What I mean is that I think a lot of editors out there are looking for special projects that require their own back-ends and over the years these special projects end up bloating the CMS.

The beauty of most blog content management systems is that they treat content as part of a stream. The display mechanism doesn't change much simply because the content is different.

Simplicity is important.