Comments on: Does your CMS dictate your content?

By: Workarounds are temporary solution | News Videographer

Workarounds are temporary solution | News Videographer — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:06:07 +0000

[...] I certainly empathize with Chuck Fadely’s complaints about inadequate Content Management Systems on newspaper web sites. He left his comments on a post by Andy Dickinson. [...]

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 09:43:26 +0000

Thanks Julie.

I agree it’s better not to draw battle lines. I would love to see IT in the newsroom, part of the process.

By: Julie Starr

Julie Starr — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 04:54:40 +0000

Yeah, I understand why they do it too, and I also understand how frustrating it can be for them having to deal with users who don’t know html from handbags (something I was long guilty of myself, and I’m still on what’s turned out to be a sizeable learning curve). But the answer remains to work together and move forwards, not carry on drawing battlelines and getting buried in task lists.

Anyway, it’s something I think about a lot so always happy to engage in debate:)

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:28:30 +0000

Julie. I agree.

Often it’s less about the CMS - which are invariabley massivley felxible - and more about the implementation in the form of templates. Many large outfuits fall in to that old IT trap of defining a standard user and providing a solution that fits that ‘perfect user’ defintion. I understand why they do that but it often results in a lowest common denominator service.

No wonder they struggle against the tide of specific support requests.

There needs to be a lot more consultation between IT and editorial - a difficult enough job in the first place. But you are so right. It’s as much the editorial people knowing what they want to do rather than what to ask for.

By: links for 2008-01-07 « David Black

links for 2008-01-07 « David Black — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 02:27:15 +0000

[...] Does your CMS dictate your content? - andydickinson.net “the CMS is as much a control on the kind of content you can produce as it is a way of distributing it.” (tags: internet newspapers newspapersites newsrooms integration cms multimedia video journalism) [...]

By: Julie Starr

Julie Starr — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 01:57:56 +0000

I don’t know much about video specifically, but more generally your question is a good one to ask: is our CMS doing the job? The answer is invariably no for several reasons.

1. Software developers have lead-in times that feel glacial compared with how quickly we as individuals can evolve online. Most software currently in use in newsrooms was developed with one or at most two platforms in mind. And it was probably conceived several years ago and at best built a year or two ago. A lot’s changed since then.

Also, they’re getting a lot of their information from IT folk (see point two), not users.

2. IT empires (oops, I mean departments) still hold the purse strings in media companies and are almost universally conservative, bureaucratic, resistant to change, used to being in control, averse to outsourcing (that control thing again), obsessed with best of breed, scornful of users and not quite with the programme.

A sea change is required in how IT departments work within organisations of a similar magnitude to that happening eveywhere else - namely they have to open up, engage in dialogue with their users, work with their users on product sourcing and development, accept that they mistakes and accept help in fixing them, learn that being safe is good but locking people out is bad etc.

That also means users need to get technologically literate enough to be able to engage usefully in that process, and organised enough to demand to be part of it.