It’s too early to know and the company is evaluating CMSes? Interesting spin. Here’s what’s actually going on: Time Inc. uses outdated technology that was created in 1997. I’ll say that again, in all caps: NINETEEN NINETY-SEVEN. They rely heavily on a CMS that was built in 2002. So in web years, that translates to, what, around 50 or 75 years behind the times? Consider that the company that makes the CMS Time Inc. uses doesn’t even exist anymore.
As for the rest of the article, I certainly agree that a CMS or DAM environment that makes assets “smarter” is desirable…and has yet to be built. Letting publishers “easily find and use relevant content — not only based on the article’s specifics, but also on the asset’s relevance to a particular platform” and allowing “access only to assets for which sufficient rights were secured” are both awesome ideas. But no one in publishing does this well.
I’ll grant that media tech — heck, all of tech — is constantly evolving, and often in unpredictable ways, and getting digital rights from writers and photographers is its own hell. But after all these years, no turnkey solution has yet been built. It simply does not exist, and it likely will not until actual technologists take an interest in what publishing is doing and the particular challenges the industry faces. But they probably won’t, because (have you heard?) the media industry is dying, and it’s unable to monetize itself, let alone create forward-thinking systems.
Apparently at Hearst, “Our plan is to have a system where, no matter where content is created, we’ll be able to store it in such a way that it can be easily used on any platform.” Really, is that your plan? Do you plan to do that? How about less “planning,” less “it’s too early” and more doing, building, iterating, testing, shipping code? The time is now; in fact, the time was years ago.
Where are the digital editorial workflow tools?
“I’m a strong believer that workflow and technology changes the kind of journalism you put out. What I’ve seen is just how crucially important it is to have in place workflows that make sense and to use technology that understands that workflow.
For example, a CMS [content management system] that has a lot of constraints behind it will literally change the kind of journalism you can produce and the workflow. …If you don’t have a great project management system, whether you’re using Basecamp or Google Docs or whatever, if that project management system doesn’t understand how your reporters operate — if they feel they have to jump between email, IM, and text and whatever — that can actually disrupt the kind of work they’re able to produce.
Unrelated (yet completely related) recent story about how The Bangor Daily News overhauled its workflow to incorporate Google Docs and WordPress.
A great workflow can elevate your work and a bad one can really hold you back, and I sincerely hope we will see more efforts to improve processes surrounding digital workflow in the near future. Just as curation is getting rightly hailed as an essential element of filtering out the noise and making sense of the Internet, so too should great processes be invented to corral the historically awful editorial workflow found in typical CMSes. It’s overdue. Way overdue. Not just Asana and Basecamp and the like, but tools and hacks that work specifically for journalists and that journalists can finally put to work.