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More Newspapers need Drupal. And Drupal needs more newspapers.
Cross-posted in part from Eyes East
This might sound odd coming from someone learning Django, but bear with me. Kevin Anderson of Strange Attractor posed an interesting question the other day:
I have a question for the journalism industry. Instead of sinking literally millions of dollars/pounds/euros into content management systems either in the form of a payment to one of the CMS companies or for bespoke development, why not take one of the open-source systems and become part of the development community?
Well folks, why not?
Most newspapers should not be in the business of building their own content management systems, unless they happen to have the talent already on staff. And buying something proprietary, with development happening behind closed doors and out of newspapers' control, is probably going to lead to very sluggish responses to a changing market.
A better use of limited resources is customization, styling, getting the navigation down and easy and building your newspaper.com into a brand with the kind of loyalty common only among Mac users and Volkswagen drivers (admittedly, I fall into one of those categories).
Drupal isn't easy to jump into, and most newspapers, I'd guess, aren't ready. But someone needs to. Someone needs to start building the modules and templates and custom install packages that will get us closer.
It doesn't even really have to be Drupal. It could be Wordpress, or Django. Sean Blanda points to a list of magazine-style themes for Wordpress, and just ported his own college paper to Wordpress MU. See where this is going? (Django's newsworthiness, I think, needs no elaboration.)
The point is to get something open source, with a development community bigger than the guys in the back of the newsroom. The more that get in, the more we're all likely to get out of this.
Here's where to start:
- Drupal newspaper group so you know what you're getting into. Specifically, read recent posts about the Virginia Pilot's experience (and see the result) and a college newspaper using Drupal as both their online and print CMS (coded by a philosophy major, no less)
- Drupal.org to download and install
- Nick Seargent has a rundown on getting things up and running
Other Drupal-powered sites to check out: New York Observer, the Miami Hurricane (and explainer video), and DalianDalian.*
*Disclosure: I'm one of the founders of DalianDalian.
**very late update: as comments below note, the Miami Hurricane went with Wordpress.
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5 Comments
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Comment by Greg Linch on May 11, 2009 at 9:58am -
I understand why the XML import sounds so attractive to many college news orgs, but I think it represents a step backwards. I don't think college media should be shoveling (automatically or manually) your print edition online. Ideally,I think the workflow should be:
1) writers submit their content directly to the site continuously -- not on the print publication schedule
2) editors edit and publish online
3) print designers pull from the site for the print edition
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Comment by David Molloy on May 11, 2009 at 9:28am -
The single greatest advantage of Drupal at the moment is that there are efforts being made to integrate it with InDesign's XML abilities, as noted above. The downside is it's highly technical. ExpressionEngine is another promising route which is a little more user-friendly (in my opinion) though it's not open source. This is an issue that has to be considered when your staff changes on a yearly basis in a student newspaper, as you're not always going to have a technically minded individual with the relevant skills to understand a customized Drupal backend.
But, I couldn''t agree more with the idea behind this post. If a major news organisation developed an easy method of going print-to web in a readily available CMS, it's something that would be widely adopted, even if there was a fee (within reason).
I need to redevelop the college newspaper website over the summer, and I was leaning towards ExpressionEngine. However, seeing some examples and results linked to above, perhaps it's time to re-examine Drupal as an option.
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Comment by Chris Amico on May 8, 2009 at 10:36am -
Greg, you guys did well with Wordpress all around. I'm looking forward to seeing what the Daily Tar Heel does, too.
I think the lesson still stands: Building on an open source platform will get you farther for cheaper than a proprietary CMS.
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Comment by Greg Linch on May 8, 2009 at 12:31am
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The e-mail notice for the latest comment reminded me about this post. As a follow-up, The Hurricane ended up using WordPress and it's been very successful.
There has been some more Drupal news in the college realm in the past year, with orgs such as The Daily Pennslyvannian's 34st.com, Daily Illini and Minnesota Daily using Drupal. The Daily Tar Heel is developing a new site on Drupal using a company called Stunt3.
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Comment by Greg Linch on February 8, 2008 at 11:52am
- Just to clarify, The Miami Hurricane is looking to use Drupal for our new CMS--our site is still running on College Publisher.
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