CoPress

Lauren Rabaino published a constructive blog post a couple days ago on how the Mustang Daily is adjusting to a web-first workflow. From the looks of it, they’re asking and answering a number of questions that other news organizations will behaving further along the line:

Who copy edits when? Does the section editor look at the article first or last? Can an article be posted to the Web without the section editor’s approval? These are the questions we’ve asked ourselves these past few days. Section editors (news, arts, sports) have a huge problem with articles being posted to the Web without their approval. Gradually, we’re figuring it out.

Related to this, several of us had a conference call this morning to discuss ways in which the WordPress admin could be enhanced for editorial workflow (and address many of the technical issues organizations like the Mustang Daily are facing). For instance, I think it would be useful if editors could receive an email when a post is ready for their reading, as well as different types of statuses if, for instance, the editor needed to send the post back to the reporter for a rewrite.