It shouldn’t be, but I’ve been meaning to write about this for a week: the Bangor Daily News finally switched their entire publishing workflow operation to Google Docs and WordPress. According to his boss, here’s why:
As we lost staff to cutbacks over the years, assembling our content into finished products was taking a larger and larger percentage of our time. Simply processing press releases seemed to suck up significant portions of editors’ days. No one wanted to be in this situation, but our infrastructure for moving content demanded it. We were trapped.
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As the newsroom has grown comfortable with Docs, it is becoming more efficient (links and headlines, for instance, travel from Docs to WordPress) and we are shifting staff members from production to content creation. We knew we had a winner in Docs when we had a major election story with two reporters in the field and an editor in the newsroom, all working simultaneously on the same breaking story, adding content, seeing in real time what each was adding, talking to each other through the chat function and responding with updated information. Fast, simple, low cost.
Lauren Rabaino interviewed Will for MediaBistro to get the full details on how it actually works:
- Reporters and editors compose all stories in Google Docs. Using labels and native commenting, the stories get sent through the editing process.
- When a story is ready to publish, it gets sent from Google Docs to WordPress with one click.
- In WordPress, editors can publish the story to the web, then set up a print headline and print subhead.
- The story then appears in InDesign, where print designers can lay out the print newspaper.
Matt Thompson, in a piece for Poynter about why content management systems matter to journalists, gets the last word:
We’re beginning to understand that a CMS — every CMS, open-source, enterprise, or otherwise — requires continual investment and development. No matter how small or large your organization is, your content management system has to develop to accommodate a digital news environment that changes dramatically from year to year.
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Because it makes no sense to spend a month of training on a system that’s going to change in a year, we have to use content management interfaces that are beautiful enough for users to grasp intuitively.
And because we need to develop fast, we have to borrow tools and ideas from the world of open-source software to make our content management ecosystems better.
Finally we’re getting somewhere. Good investments pay dividends.