The future of CMS
I find it fascinating to follow discussions on the evolutions of newsrooms. The internet has really disrupted how news is presented to people, and even though we master it well, we are still grappling for the best ways to integrate new technology into newsrooms. One very interesting discussion I recently read on Martin Stabe’s blog focused on the next generation CMS.
According to Chris Edwards, one of the ways to go is more metadata. This would improve interlinking between articles and relevant information and would also simplify the journalist’s work whilst providing excellent information to readers. Tags are still a pain in the ass to use though as you need to enter them manually, so there should probably be a way of automatically identifying key words and maybe giving the editor a choice as to what elements he could link to (I’m thinking of something like the automatic word correction or suggestions in Google). This might work if databases like Lexus Nexus or Factiva were interconnected and information could be shared (maybe?).
According to Martin Stabe, one great example of that, but in-house, is Reuter’s Open Calais Project. Obviously, Reuters have the technological resources and sufficient information to implement such things, but it’s even more exciting that they are making the information they are interlinking accessible to outside developers. Can’t wait to see what some creative minds are going to do with it. If you have examples please let me know.
Finally there’s the NYTimes “open universe” project whic sounds as if they are reorganizing all their data to make it more accessible and useful for journalists. Not sure if it will be open to outside developers and other users though.
I couldn’t agree more with Martin that the key is probably for CMSs to be easier to use for non techie journos. After all, the popularity of Blogpost or WordPress comes from the fact that you can create a blog in minutes and start publishing even if you know little about programming and web editing. I optimistically think that journalists will be more and more techie as time goes by, simply because it’s almost become a prerequisite for new journalists to know their way through multimedia and be comfortable with the web. As much as it’s the role of news editors to teach journalists that a story can be presented in multiple ways, new CMS need to make it easy for journalist to quickly write a story, publish a video, create an audio piece or pull together interlinked data to bring more to the table to readers.
I have to say that yes, CMSs should be as usable as possible. But obviously not to the point where they lack features. As you note, journalists are increasingly required to have at least moderate technical skills in order to be able to self-produce exactly the multimedia content you describe above.
What would be interesting for me is a truly open source standard platform for content management. Imagine: you’ve done your first internship and finished your degree and you’re equipped to work pretty much anywhere. Obviously there’s not much chance of this happening but the idea of being able to move easily between freelancing and fulltime, between different companies, and always using the same tool: that would be pretty cool.
Kind of like WordPress but as a professional tool.
Tom
February 25, 2009 at 1:31 pm
I see where having an open source CMS could make work more flexible for journalists throughout their career, but I doubt this could ever happen considering how fast technological innovations come about. It would just be too risky being tied to a CMS which would become obsolete in a few years. Just look at how everybody changes email adresses every now and then.
What would be interesting to see, and which as yet seems to have been little discussed, is the copyright of journalists’ work. We’ve evolved in rights issues with Creative Commons yet a model should maybe be thought out that allows journalists to reown their stories or share ownership as often they give away the rights to the news publication they work for.
Cyril
February 27, 2009 at 12:05 pm