Category Archives: workflow

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

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"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."

Dangerous Precedent: E-Books – The Bigger Problem, Part One of Three

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Ben Hammersley on the workflow implications of tablet- or e-reader based magazines: "a real design challenge for e-books isn’t to design the user experience (which is dependent at the end of the day on the device capabilities anyway, which are pretty much unknown) but rather on designing a system that would allow existing publishers to transition their operations from ramshackle print to All Knowing Digital."

CounterValue: Is the FT’s Newsroom 2009 the silver bullet?

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Justin Williams: "There is no reason why, with sophisticated spelling, style and grammar engines like Tansa, reporters cannot self publish stories directly to the web without a second pair of eyes. ... We’re getting close to this on the Finance channel at the Telegraph ... What has and continues to hold this up is the technology. Editorial CMS suppliers continue to market products that, although making the process of web publishing easier and faster, still rely upon the buyers maintaining large production departments to manage the print pages."

Journalism.co.uk: FT plans for new ‘web ready workflow’ leaked …

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"FT stories will be filed and edited within the web channel of the editorial content-management system ... by reporters, writers and sub-editors. The story will be updated in this channel before and after it is published, according to the document. ... As reported by MediaGuardian last week, under the new 'create-craft-complete' system, reporters will add hyperlinks, metadata, write draft headlines and, where stories are linked to the CMS' newspaper channel, run basic formatting checks. ... [S]ub-editors will edit, check and revise these elements and add multimedia and interactive features, and be responsible for revising content for print and online."

Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog: How much is too much? Defining the grey areas in attribution and linking

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"Just how much of other people’s work on external sites can/should you use and how should you attribute in articles?" ... [Tom Whitwell, assistant editor of TimesOnline] ... said the subbing system and workflow in place - used for online as well as print work - meant links often got omitted. But ‘the general policy would be to link out to things’, he said."

Prescott Shibles: B2B Magazines: When to adopt a Web-only strategy

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"One of the most overlooked issues with going digital is the radical change in business operations. Magazines operate around issue close dates, affecting both workflow and workload. The transition from a "close"-based workflow to dynamic publishing model has implications for editorial, marketing, and sales. Many will struggle with how to create deadlines without the print product..." (May 2008)

Steve Yelvington: ‘Now’ means ‘now:’ tools for timelines

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"Our newspaper newsrooms still rely on antiquated, print-centric systems for internal workflow as written copy passes through various stages of editing. ... When it's ready for publication, a story can be immediately released to the Web -- but you have to be a bit patient, because it then passes through a bucket brigade of software and systems. Eventually it'll show up on the Web, but you'd better not hold your breath. This sort of thing drives a lot of newsrooms to 'fix' the problem by using blog software."