This might sound odd coming from someone learning Django, but bear with me. Kevin Anderson of Strange Attractor posed an interesting question the other day:

I have a question for the journalism industry. Instead of sinking literally millions of dollars/pounds/euros into content management systems either in the form of a payment to one of the CMS companies or for bespoke development, why not take one of the open-source systems and become part of the development community?

Well folks, why not?

Most newspapers should not be in the business of building their own content management systems, unless they happen to have the talent already on staff. And buying something proprietary, with development happening behind closed doors and out of newspapers’ control, is probably going to lead to very sluggish responses to a changing market.

A better use of limited resources is customization, styling, getting the navigation down and easy and building your newspaper.com into a brand with the kind of loyalty common only among Mac users and Volkswagen drivers (admittedly, I fall into one of those categories).

Drupal isn’t easy to jump into, and most newspapers, I’d guess, aren’t ready. But someone needs to. Someone needs to start building the modules and templates and custom install packages that will get us closer.

It doesn’t even really have to be Drupal. It could be Wordpress, or Django. Sean Blanda points to a list of magazine-style themes for Wordpress, and just ported his own college paper to Wordpress MU. See where this is going? (Django’s newsworthiness, I think, needs no elaboration.)

The point is to get something open source, with a development community bigger than the guys in the back of the newsroom. The more that get in, the more we’re all likely to get out of this.

Here’s where to start:

• Drupal newspaper group so you know what you’re getting into. Specifically, read recent posts about the Virginia Pilot’s experience (and see the result) and a college newspaper using Drupal as both their online and print CMS (coded by a philosophy major, no less)
• Drupal.org to download and install
• Nick Seargent has a rundown on getting things up and running

Other Drupal-powered sites to check out: New York Observer, the Miami Hurricane (and explainer video), and DalianDalian.*

A quick note to readers: This post marks the official start of a new direction for this blog. As I’m back in California now and looking for jobs in journalism, expect to see more posts in the future about newspapers and online media. But fear not, China fans, the Middle Kingdom is still on my radar, and Eyes East will still drop the occasional Dalian nostalgia post, if only to stay on CLB’s blogroll. Really though, more China posts are coming. Stay tuned.

*Disclosure: I’m one of the founders of DalianDalian.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 10:42 pm and is filed under News, projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.