Improving your news organization’s story workflow
Check out this post on our wiki.
Since launching our new site in late August, The Miami Hurricane has not only used WordPress for our online content management but also to revamp our story workflow process.
It didn’t happen overnight but, by late September, all story editing was being done in the CMS. It’s a process I conceptualized with Editor in Chief Matthew Bunch and Webmaster Brian Schlansky (I advise The Hurricane as editor at large for online and multimedia).
What follows is a breakdown of our system. Enjoy!
Besides the obvious reporters, editors and stories, here’s what you need:
- An online content management system, such as WordPress, that allows you to save draft stories
How does it work?
- Reporters write stories and e-mail them to section editors
- Section editors edit the stories and add them to the CMS
- A copy editor reviews stories in the CMS and approves them for online publication
- A designer pulls stories from the site for the print edition
Why is this effective?
- Simplicity: No more multiple copies in spread across e-mails, on individual computers or the server
- Compatibility: No files that don’t get along
- Certainty: No wondering, “Is this is the most recent version?”
- Efficiency: Fewer steps in the overall organizational workflow
- History: You can see each saved version in the WP “post revisions” area
How could this system be more effective? Here are some ideas I’ve advocated to the Hurricane staff:
- All of our writers have user accounts, so it would make more sense for them to directly add their stories to WP.
- Currently, most stories are edited and posted on deadline days for the print edition, which comes out Mondays and Thursday. Ideally, stories would be edited and posted soon after being added.
Weigh in: What does your story workflow entail? What would your ideal process be?
Why go through the e-mail step? If your CMS allows multiple levels of access, have the reporters post to the CMS and then follow the steps above.
We learned a long time ago to have the reporter use a slug line instead of a headline. Each section editor is assigned a specific key stroke ($ & %, etc.) that is added to the slug line when he/she edits the story. The online editor (a section editor in our scheme) approves the story after an acceptable number of editors has reviewed the story and writes and headline in place of the slug line before activating it online.
How far ahead do you start planning stories? How do you keep track of the due dates in WP?
@Rich: I completely agree (that’s mentioned in the post). It’s something I’ve been pushing for since the new system began, but I’m not the boss any more
@Joey: Editors keep track of due dates on their own, but I’ve thrown out some suggestions. It may be something to revisit.
The Hurricane is twice weekly, so stories for print are planned about a few days to one week (sometimes more) in advance depending on the section. Sports is obviously a different equation because most coverage is of games and matches.
The Gazette is online only, so we also have an online workflow, which is a bit different from yours.
In our Django site, we have story concepts which are assigned to reporters (and unassigned ones, which reporters can claim). When the reporter goes to write a story, they first assign it to a concept, which marks the concept as entering our CMS.
While reporters are working on the story, they mark it as draft (which we have a drop down menu to select). When the story is complete on their end, it is marked as “Pending Review.”
Every night (we are daily), we have two copy editors look at each story, marking the story “Edited (1)” and “Edited (2),” respectively. Then, the night-shift editor does a cursory glance over and marks the stories “Published,” which sends them to our site.
At FIU, we have something similar going on with our in-house CMS.
All copy editing and article submission is done online. Our staff writers this upcoming semester will be required to log in and use our CMS to write their articles. When it’s ready, it’s sent to the editor. Once the story is ready, it’s sent to our “virtual copy desk” where copy editors are notified of a new available story to copy edit. Afterwards, it’s sent back to the editors where they can go ahead and publish it online and also download the story in a .incx format for easy importing into InDesign for the print edition.
We use Wikipedia’s diff engine to compare versions between articles and track what was changed when.
We maintain different budgets for online and print, as we treat our online and print divisions as separate publications.
[...] …and in the process go Web First. Recently CoPress’s Greg Linch wrote a great blog post on how his college newspaper The Miami Hurricane at the University of Miami was able to tranform [...]