Papers take different routes to content management

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.