SourceWire Abacus e-Media announces MBO from Bond International Software PLC

"Abacus e-Media nnounces the completion of a management buy-out from its owner of four years, Bond International Software PLC. The management buy-out, which was finalised on Friday 8th April 2011, is backed by funding from management and from external private investors, including three of the publishing sector’s most well-known and experienced players – Graham Sherren, Martin Durham and Nick Miller.

Nieman Journalism Lab: To build a digital future for news, developers must be able to hack at the core of old systems

Matt Waite: "[Online journalism] experimentation takes place almost entirely outside the main content management system. Story here, news app there. A blog? A separate software stack. Photo galleries? Made elsewhere, embedded into a CMS page (maybe). Graphics? Same. Got something more, like a whole high school sports stats and scores system? Separate site completely, but stories stay in the CMS. You don’t get them. ... Instead of a single monolithic system, where a baseball game story is the same as a triple murder story, general interest news websites should be a confederation of custom content management systems that handle stories of a specific type."

Journalism.co.uk: City University launches new interactive journalism MA

"The course will feature core modules from the university's other journalism MA programmes, including online journalism, media law, journalism and society and journalism practice, alongside new teaching on data journalism, developing and managing online communities and understanding content management systems."

Journalism.co.uk: City University launches new interactive journalism MA

"The course will feature core modules from the university's other journalism MA programmes, including online journalism, media law, journalism and society and journalism practice, alongside new teaching on data journalism, developing and managing online communities and understanding content management systems."

psmith, journalist: Link to the past: why do journalists still not link to each other?

"Content management systems in some newsrooms make such a simple thing a Big Deal, something only one or two people in the organisation can do.... But for the national newspapers and magazines, in the majortiy of cases they have no such excuse and the fact is that many simply choose not to send readers elsewhere. We’re the best, our readers love us, why would anyone go anywhere else?"

BBC The Editors: BBC News website redesign

"In the next week or so, we'll be making some improvements to the design and layout of the BBC News website. ... We are doing this after listening extensively to what our users in the US and Canada have said, and with the backing of the BBC's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, which funds our online service internationally. And we've done something which will be less obvious to you, but hugely important to the journalists working on the site. We've completely rebuilt the content production system (CPS) which we use to create content and run the site. The new version of the CPS is designed to be easier to use and - crucially when we want to get stories out to you fast - quicker too."

Nieman Journalism Lab: Making connections: How major news organizations talk about links

"technical issues are definitely a barrier, and staff from several newsrooms told me that their print-era content management systems don’t handle links well. There’s also no standard format for filing a story with hyperlinks — copy might be drafted in Microsoft Word, but links are unlikely to survive being repeatedly emailed, cut and pasted, and squeeze through any number of different systems. But technical obstacles don’t much matter if reporters don’t value links enough to write them into their stories. In conversations with staff members from various newsrooms, I’ve frequently heard that cultural issues are a barrier. When paper is seen as the primary product, adding good links feels like extra work for the reporter, rather than an essential part of the storytelling form."

Hacks/Hackers: Don’t Mistake Your CMS for a Development Platform

"CMSes are good at mapping complex editorial processes onto a repeatable digital workflow. They store and retrieve complex data, for the most part very reliably. They trade flexibility for ease-of-use. ... This tradeoff is common to many systems: the more flexible, the harder it is to use, and vice-versa. Compare a professional SLR camera with a point-and-shoot, or a manual transmission car and an automatic. Customizability comes at the cost of ease-of-use."

PBS MediaShift Idea Lab: Resurrecting Unstructured Data to Help Small Newspapers

"At best, a selection of [a newspaper's text] files are copy and pasted into a content management system for ublication online. But this process seldom happens until after the newspaper's print edition has been completed. At this point the newspaper has little incentive to process these files further, as attention must now be focused on the next day's edition. This reality helps illustrate the potential for the CMS Upload Utility, my Knight News Challenge project. It's an inexpensive way to move text files into a web-accessible database."