Newspaper newsroom workflow is still print-centric, apart from a very few exceptions. The problem is that their workflows aren’t fit for modern purpose. However, newspapers code their workflows into their CMSes. You can build a robust, advanced content management system without making the tools to create content so piggishly ugly, bewilderingly confusing and user surly. Creating content on tools like Tumblr is like falling off a bike instead of trying to write caligraphy with a telephone pole. That’s why you have journalism outfits setting up blogs on Tumblr. Most newspaper CMSes are more WordPerfect from the 1980s than WordPress. It was like trying to create a web story with movable type, and I’m not talking about the blogging platform. The politics of print versus the web played out even in the tools we used to create content. Furthermore, there was an internal conflict over whether to use the web tools or the print tools to create content, and in the end, the print tools won out. However, I’m being diplomatic in the extreme when I say that the new CMS lacked the ease of content creation and publishing that I had grown accustomed to with Movable Type and WordPress. However, due to the scaling problems with Movable Type, The Guardian moved its blogging onto its main content management system. It was so much easier than anything I had ever used, especially when coupled with easy to use production tools such as Ecto and MarsEdit. However, Movable Type and other blogging platforms also make it ridiculously easy easy to create content – rich, heavily linked multimedia content. Movable Type had scaling issues, as did almost every blogging platform back in 2006 when I started at The Guardian. ![]() For two years when I was at The Guardian, most of my work was on our blogging platform, Movable Type. Workflow and how that is coded into the CMS is a huge issue for newspapers. New York Times editor Patrick LaForge said: However, one issue in this debate focused on the workflow and content management systems. It covers a lot of well worn territory in this debate, and I’m not going to rehash it. Mathew Ingram of GigaOm and Alex Byers, a web producer for Politico in Washington, both collected the conversation using Storify. There was an interesting discussion about linking and journalism amongst a number of journalists in North America.
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