Tag Archives: Drupal

03.11.11
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Does journalism need another open-source CMS?

I have to say that I’m a bit baffled by a $975,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to the Bay Citizen and the Texas Tribune, two very well funded non-profit news organisations in the US. The goal is to create a nimble open-source content management system. I guess WordPress or Drupal, just to name two open-source content management systems, didn’t fit the bill. PaidContent is reporting that news start-ups expressed this need during meetings last year at SXSW Interactive. PaidContent said:

  • Manage an integrated library of text, video and audio files;
  • Maximize search engine optimization by improving the way articles are linked, aggregated and tagged;
  • Integrate sites with social networks like Facebook and Twitter as well as bloggers;
  • Provide membership tools and integration with ad networks to help with new revenue streams.

I wonder if those news start-ups have heard of OpenPublish. The platform is a distribution of Drupal with Thomson-Reuters’ Calais semantic technology added to help deliver better related content to users. It’s got some nice monetisation features. The Nation and PBS Newshour use it. That’s just one open-source option. How does this not tick the boxes above?

I also know from my own work with news organisations, it’s highly likely that these non-profits will create a platform that is optimised for their own needs but not generally applicable. This is a larger problem with news organisations. All but the largest news orgs could use open-source CMSes and get 90% of what they need with little modification. However, a lot of news editors are obsessed with differentiating on aspects of the CMS that deliver little efficiency to their journalists and little or no benefit to their audiences. IT managers are more than happy to deliver these vanity features because it can justify a bit of empire building.

I do worry that this money will go into reinventing the wheel and deliver little marginal benefit to these start-ups and to the larger news eco-system. Wouldn’t this money be better spent supporting existing open-source projects and adapting them to journalism rather than creating another platform?

09.10.08
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Running a small to mid-size news site? Try this CMS

Steve Yelvington is one of my heroes. Last summer, we swapped stories over beer in Kuala Lumpur with Peter Ong after talking citizen media at an IFRA Asia workshop. Steve told me how he wrote a newsreader for the Atari ST in 1985 and how he got the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newsroom on the internet in 1993.

Now, Steve should be everyone’s hero. He’s working on a next-generation news site management system, and he and the folks at Morris Digital Works have pledged to release the code under the open-source GPL licence. Steve describes the design ethos of the system:

When we’re done, this will be an innovation platform, not just a content publishing and community platform. …

Open tools and open platforms are great for developers, but what we really want to do is place this kind of power directly in the hands of content producers. They won’t have to know a programming language, or how databases work, or even HTML to create special presentations based on database queries. Need a new XML feed? Point and click.

It’s based on the open-source Drupal platform, and he talks what is possible with the system.

We’re integrating a lot more social-networking functionality, which we think is an important tool for addressing the “low frequency” problem that most news sites face.

We’re going to be aggressive aggregators, pulling in RSS feeds from every community resource we can find, and giving our users the ability to vote the results up/down. We’ll link heavily to all the sources, including “competitors.”

Ranking/rating, commenting, and RSS feeds will be ubiquitous. Users of Twitter, Pownce and Friendfeed will be able to follow topics of interest.

I couldn’t agree with Steve more when he says that internet start-ups have been smart in adopting open-source tools while newspapers have failed to embrace them. That thinking has to change. Steve is looking for collaborators on the project, and I think this is a golden opportunity for news sites to work together to build a platform for their future.