At its best, a modern content management system can offer business intelligence, promote collaboration, and reduce friction in the publishing process. Unfortunately, most newsrooms — and especially legacy organizations — are held back by outdated technologies that obstruct workflows and don’t support new forms of rich media. Making matters worse, workflows are often so intertwined with the CMS that it’s hard to distinguish the technology problems from the human problems.
Last week, the Society for News Design joined forces with the MIT Media Lab and Knight Foundation for a two-day confab called “Beating the CMS Blues” to discuss the future of content management systems.
"I hate the CMS because the UX is terrible"
"… it divides technologists and journalists"
"… it pays no attention to revenue" #CMSBlues— Kyle Ellis (@KyleEllis) July 12, 2016
On day one, nearly 40 participants from organizations like Buzzfeed, Document Cloud, Fusion, The New York Times, and The Washington Post offered passionate discussion about the decisions that inform CMS builds, how the CMS can accommodate new storytelling formats, and whether building for tomorrow’s needs is a worthwhile endeavor.
Talking #CMSBlues today. Lots of people want to "decouple content from presentation". This makes me very happy.
— David Moore (@CrookedNumber) July 13, 2016
On day two, SND and Upstatement led a human-centered design workshop that uncovered more than three dozen possible “How might we” statements for further ideation. Of those, participants rallied around five:
- HMW use the CMS to better understand our users and deliver relevant content?
- HMW decouple content from its presentation?
- HMW facilitate interoperability between systems?
- HMW build a CMS that facilitates collaboration?
- HMW share knowledge and solutions of CMS problems across organizations?
“Content management systems are so important because we have to be able to keep up with the pace of technology to engage audiences and deliver content in new and compelling ways,” said Jennifer Preston, vice president of journalism at the Knight Foundation, and one of the event sponsors.
“Beating the CMS Blues” helped start a conversation about a serious problem hampering organizations from small dailies to online-only publications. Its a conversation that the Knight Foundation, MIT Media Lab, and SND hope to continue through similar gatherings that might lead to scalable solutions.