Recent quotes:
WaPo to license self-serve CMS for small publishers
WaPo also announced it intends to make Arc available to all publishers through a self-service platform, suitable for smaller publishers, which will help clients tackle video, mobile apps, and social media distribution.The end of endless scroll
Forbes uses endless scroll on its article pages, but there was no significant uptake in pageviews or time spent, so the publisher plans to eliminate the endless scroll from its article pages when it redesigns them later this year, said Mark Howard, CRO there.Say Goodbye to the Gawker Newsfeed
Gawker's CMS, Kinja, rigidly adheres to a chronologically ordered feed, with no real ability to feature or "pin" posts. This is fairly unique among publishers in our space. Buzzfeed, Vox, and Vice, to name three frenemies, all devote significant real estate, on desktop and mobile, to "featured" stories; of the three mystical axes of content organization—"latest," "popular," and "featured"—Kinja devotes space to only the first two. This can make it difficult, in a direct comparison, for Gawker's front page to stand out. Newsfeed was an attempt to move the "latest" list to a sub-blog so the homepage could be devoted to "featured." Another way of thinking about it is that Gawker's front page would become the big top-story "splash" of the previous design, while Newsfeed would be the "latest stories" rail. Ideally, this design would satisfy everyone: Obsessive readers, who could simply read the Newsfeed; regular but infrequent readers, who could load the front page to see the best of what we'd done in the period since they last visited; and drive-by social-traffic readers, who don't give a shit about our homepage since they came from Facebook. This has worked to some extent. Newsfeed has seen a slow increase in adoption as a direct destination, but after six weeks is still only at around 40 percent of what our homepage traffic is. Overall traffic's held steady at a respectable 17.7ish million uniques for February, but we won't get a gold-and-white dress photo every month, and we were seeing frustrating dips in time spent on the site. We also were worried about SEO trouble, as the sub-blogs don't reflect as Gawker.com posts to Google, but that was a relatively obscure worryNowThis scraps its website, goes all-in on social
Senior V.P. of strategy and partnerships Athan Stephanopoulos said that the decision to essentially scrap the company's website was a reaction to consumer demand, and an acknowledgement of the way people use technology in 2015. Other media companies will follow suit, he said, "unless we live in a world where people are not awake.""We're not trying to lead the industry," he said. "We are leading the industry and kind of redefining what a media company today looks like."
Perhaps the biggest change has been the reversal of our publishing process. The original idea was that articles would be written in the Microsoft Word-based print system, CCI, and then sent to Scoop, where a web producer would add multimedia, tag the content and publish it on NYTimes.com. Today, instead of writing articles in CCI and then sending them to Scoop, our journalists can create articles in Scoop and publish to web and mobile first before sending them to CCI for the print newspaper. We call this change “Digital First” — a multiyear project that will make Scoop the primary CMS for both print and digital by 2015.
The company’s attitude toward content management has its roots in the basement of Trei Brundrett, now Vox’s chief product officer. It was there that he and some partners developed SB Nation, a sports blogging website that became wildly popular when it was introduced nine years ago. Mr. Brundrett and his crew cast themselves as equal parts journalists and software developers.
The iterations range from little snippets and updates, comments to long analysis pieces and reported pieces. It's key to the model that you suit the format or genre to the particular increment of news you're putting in front of readers. If you know the site, you know this. You know what they look like, how they unfold. But the architecture of the site has never had a good way to capture those narrative arcs. If you know the site's idiom, you recognize them. If you don't, it can be a little bewildering. And even if you do recognize them the site has never had a very good way of stitching those narratives together or allowing you to trace them backwards or forwards in time. So that's one thing new we have coming and something we'll be working on over the next few months.
Writing for the web is too damned hard. It turns you into a bookkeeper. I've got files all over my hard disk and their counterparts on the server. I can't keep track of them! When I'm reading a web page that I wrote, if I spot a mistake, I have to execute 23 complicated error-prone steps to make the change.
I can't handle it. It's too much work, too much to remember. That's why my website sucks, and yours too. Because I look at the wrong words on my screen and decide that it's too much trouble to get it right.