Papers take different
routes to content management
Open source vs. shrink-wrapped
just one area newspapers examine.
By Marcelo Duran
Associate
Editor
When it
comes to content management, one size doesn’t fit all.
That was evident at this
year’s Capital Convergence conference in Washington D.C., as several speakers
waxed philosophic about the various content management options available to
newspapers, ranging from in-house platforms created on open-source frameworks to
shrink-wrapped apps.
Case in point, The Gazette in
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which made several changes over the past few years to its
CMS infrastructure.
The paper recently switched
from a 29-year-old SII editorial system to Saxotech Inc.’s Editorial Go-Live app
to provide more control, said Audrey Wheeler, project manager for parent Gazette
Communications.
“We wanted a single database
to manage all of our newsroom generated digital media and print content,” she
said. “We also wanted something that would give us more flexibility and
efficiency in getting changes made.”
Prior to moving to the new
platform, format changes were made by the IT department and news stories had to
be copied and pasted through a long series of steps from the legacy app to the
online system before they could be posted online to The Gazette’s Web site,
www.GazetteOnline.com.
Before The Gazette installed
the new editorial app, the paper in January 2007 rolled out Saxotech Go-Live
Online. That app replaced a proprietary online system it had built in 2004.
The newspaper made the switch
because it could no longer keep up with the changes it wanted to make with the
software, Wheeler said.
“One or two people developed
that system so as we needed changes they were very slow in coming,” she said.
“Further development was delayed with our limited resources and expertise.”
With the launch of the
Saxotech apps, The Gazette now has the flexibility to determine how it wants to
create and distribute its information, for both print and online, Wheeler said.
Homegrown open framework
Other newspaper groups
continue to invest time and money in building custom CMS, using popular
open-source applications.
One publisher that has
followed the open-source route, Journal-World in Lawrence, Kan., has reaped
countless awards and accolades for its Web operations.
And as the honors rolled in so
did inquiries about Ellington, the open-source software the daily wrote and uses
to manage its Web content.
That attention prompted the
paper’s parent, World Co., to create an offshoot, dubbed Mediaphormedia, to
commercially market Ellington, said Dan Cox, president of the unit.
Ellington relies on an
open-source platform consisting of Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL and Python. A
software development app, Django, allows programmers to write custom code that
interacts with Ellington data through a set of APIs, Cox said.
Cox said it’s important for
newspapers to embrace new technology so they can distribute their content across
a wide variety of platforms.
“A lot of companies you see
are asking how to get their print product online. We’re coming at it from a
different direction,” he said. “Online should be the space where we are
producing a great amount of content and disseminating the best of that content
back into traditional products or other distribution avenues.”
To that end, Journal-World
often posts its content on multiple sites.
Since making Ellington
available commercially, a number of other newspapers have purchased the app,
including The Washington Post and Naples (Fla.) Daily News.
Content and resource
management
At GateHouse Media Inc., the
publisher’s CMS serves double-duty. It manages GateHouse’s Web content and Web
resources for the publisher’s more than 500 newspapers, said Howard Owens,
director of digital publishing.
The company began installing
Zope Corp.’s Zope4Media content management software late last year and will
finish deployment in 2008, Owens said.
Zope4Media relies on both
open-source and proprietary software.
“Our challenge is running
hundreds of Web sites on the same content management system,” Owens said. “One
of the great things about Zope is that they handle all the hosting and
infrastructure support while we can concentrate on building great Web sites.”
That allows GateHouse
newspapers to funnel specific content to other sister publications for print
and online use. For example, if a newspaper in Ohio covers a Boston Red
Sox/Cleveland Indians game, the New England publication can pick up and run the
story.
The standardized approach also
allows GateHouse editors to pick up the slack when a sister newspaper needs
temporary relief, Owens said, citing times where an editor at one GateHouse
daily might be needed to oversee content generated at a second newspaper.
Triangle of death?
WASHINGTON — Gauging the long-term value of software can be a
challenging proposition.
Just ask Ken Rickard,
deputy vice president for strategic partnership development at Morris
Communications Co. LLC.
At a Nexpo 2008
seminar, Rickard outlined the long-term value of open and proprietary
software through a chart that illustrated the downward and upward value
of the two types of software. A third line, meantime, illustrated “good
enough.”
He said that,
initially, the value of proprietary software outstrips open source.
“I’m going to agree
that initially Microsoft Office had a high value and did things that
nobody else could do,” he said.
But over time, the
worth of proprietary software dips below open source, especially without
the support of software upgrades, Rickard said.
Conversely, open
source rises above the good-enough line over a given period of time, he
said.
But now there is a
gray area newspapers also need to be aware of.
“The content
management position for newspapers is that we are in the triangle of
death where neither the proprietary nor open-source solution is good
enough for our needs,” Rickard said.
One way of weathering
the triangle is for newspapers to work with each other to develop a
common platform, in the process potentially aiding their competitors, he
said.
“Newspapers tend to
think of technology as a competitive advantage and the answer is that
it’s not,” he said. “In very few cases are we in direct competitive
markets.”
Rickard is a proponent
of open source software, namely Drupal, an open source content
management platform. |
Listen to our
interview with
Dan Cox on News&Tech radio.
