(Rich Gordon)

Print audiences are shrinking, and print ad revenue is shrinking faster. Online audiences and revenues are growing, but not fast enough. The results: smaller newsholes, layoffs, buyouts, reduced foreign coverage, the elimination of sections, less state government coverage. At a time when newspapers and other traditional media need to be investing in the creation of more content, instead they are spending less. And the increasing demands associated with serving the online audience put even more pressure on news organizations.

What's a newsroom to do? I'm coming to believe that at least part of the answer has to be a radical restructuring of the news production process. A case study that might be instructive is playing out at the Medill School, where I teach new media journalism.

Besides being an educational institution, Medill operates working newsrooms for our journalism master's students in downtown Chicago and Washington, DC. These are learning laboratories that also produce journalism for client news organizations. Just like most newspapers, our journalists have historically created content in a single format: newspaper students produced text, broadcast students produced video. And just like most newspapers, we have begun asking our journalists to create content in multiple forms -- text, photos, slideshows, audio, video -- and to think of the Web as their primary publishing platform.

As we began to revamp our curriculum, and increase the demands on our student journalists, we realized that we needed new Web publishing tools. Just like many news organizations, we had been publishing news Web sites using antiquated software that made it cumbersome to add photos and multimedia. So we identified and purchased a new Web content management system, or CMS. (For the technology-minded, it's CMS400.Net from Ektron Inc.)

Let me outline the production process for a typical article in a typical newspaper, and of our Chicago newsroom. For simplicity's sake, we'll assume this article has a photo (but the same general process would apply if the article had multimedia such as audio or video):


Typical newspaper

1. Reporter gathers information (takes notes)
2. Photographer shoots photo
3. Reporter writes article
4. Photo editor chooses photo for publication
5. Editor edits article
6. Copy editor edits article
7. Copy editor or designer places article on a print page
8. Copy editor or designer places photo on a print page.
9. Copy editor or designer writes headlines and photo captions
10. Web editor or producer places article on a Web page
11. Web producer places photo on a Web page
12. Web producer writes blurb (teaser description from home page or section front)
13. Web producer places article on home page or section front

Medill Chicago

1. Reporter gathers information -- text and photos
2. Reporter writes article
3. Reporter writes headline, caption and blurb (teaser description from Web home page or section front)
4. Reporter places article and photo on a Web page
5. Editor edits the article, including photo, caption and headline
6. Web producer places article on home page or section front

Clearly, our production process has fewer steps and requires fewer people. Now, I know this isn't a fair comparison, because our newsroom doesn't produce a newspaper -- just a Web site. And I'm not arguing that a reporter can take photos as well as a photographer, nor that a content editor can write a headline as well as a copy editor. But bear with me on those points. For now, take note of these ways in which our production process differs fundamentally from that of a newspaper:

• The reporter is expected to produce all the elements (article text, photo, caption, headline and blurb).
• The reporter is expected to place his content on a Web article page.
• An editor is expected to edit the entire article page, including text, photo, caption, headline and blurb.
• The Web producer's job is just to place the article on a section front.

The key reason all of this is possible is that our content is stored in a database. Beyond that, articles are presented using a single standardized template. Web templates have been criticized because companies like Knight Ridder Digital used them to enforce rigid (and unattractive) conformity in presentation across the company's Web sites. But flexible templates can allow content to look very different depending on what elements are present. For instance, consider these four article pages built using Medill's new CMS:

• This article has text only
• This article has text and two photos
• This article has related text material
• This article has video and some related material

All of these articles use the same template -- but the pages look very different. And it's very easy for a reporter to plug his or her content into the template.

This new kind of production approach has entirely predictable consequences: Journalists discover that a text-only article just doesn't look as good online as one with photos, multimedia or sidebar material. The new CMS, we've found, motivates student journalists to want multimedia elements with their stories. I bet the same will be true of professional journalists.

Now suppose that we did want to create a print publication from the content produced in our newsroom. It turns out that our CMS stores all content as XML-structured data, which essentially means that article components such as the byline, headline and summary/teaser are marked up using a standard set of labels. The truth is, with the production system we're using, we could publish print pages with just one or two more steps.

Page design programs such as Adobe InDesign can read XML and apply print stylings (such as fonts) to the content. So we could build a whole bunch of print pages using standardized InDesign templates -- essentially, the same way we build Web sites.

For some reason, we think nothing of building a Web site using templates, but would never consider doing the same for a print publication. I'm not sure I know why. Certainly, print section fronts -- especially the front page, which drives street sales -- should be designed, lovingly, by hand, every day. But at least some inside pages could, literally, be laid out by a computer following a set of programmed rules. Especially if we could move to modular advertising positions on inside pages.

So should we program a computer to lay out our print editions and eliminate some copy-editor positions? Yes -- and no. I'm not necessarily arguing for shrinking the copy desk. What copy editors do is important. What I'm wondering is why, at most newspapers, we have separate production desks for Web and print (a structure being preserved even in newsrooms that are planning significant reorganizations). A survey conducted by one of my students found that the job functions in Web production departments (online newsrooms) look very similar to those of copy desks. The survey's findings led me to suggest an opportunity for journalism schools to incorporate Web production in the training programs for copy editors.

There is one fundamental difference between print production and Web production. In print, scarcity (limited space) drives and constrains the production process. Editors spend a lot of time trimming articles to fit the space. Copy editors work hard to come up with good headlines that fit into narrow column widths. Photographers and photo editors try to find a single image that can capture the essence of a story. Online, though, the challenge isn't scarcity, but abundance. We can easily add photos and multimedia to text articles, and headlines can be written without so much concern about length. But our newsroom production systems and processes are still on the scarcity principle.

At a time when the industry needs to do more with less, it's time to reinvent the journalism production process. A 21st century production system can and should:

• motivate journalists to produce multimedia;
• make it easy for reporters to produce and package related content themselves;
• enable the production of multiple products from a single content database;
• allow production to be more efficient;
• and enable news organizations to reach more people using more distribution channels.

By Rich Gordon (richgor@northwestern.edu)
Rich Gordon is Associate Professor and Director of Digital Technology in Education at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University.

In the abstract, what Rich says is all true. Unfortunately, content management systems have not kept up with the needs of those who must use them. Most create more problems than they solve.

Posted by  fred at April 24, 2007 8:27 AM

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