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WordPress Announcements News and Info

Google Docs and WordPress

Jenn Webb writing on O’REILLY radar has posted an interesting article, “How one newspaper rebooted its workflow with Google Docs and WordPress.” which covers how Todd Benoit, director of news and new media at the Bangor Daily News addressed the root of the workflow problem in his newsroom.

“Like many newsrooms, until very recently we were production heavy because we had to be. Moving stories to the web was a copy-and-paste affair, but that’s not where the trouble started. If you begin with a print-directed front-end system, as we did, how does that system accommodate a story being updated from the field? Or how would the full possibility of story assets land online, to be chosen among for print? Even simpler: When do reporters add links? The answers, as countless journalists know, are: It can’t; they won’t; they don’t. From there, it’s all production, not creation.

The Bangor Daily News attacked the problem head on, incorporating Google Docs and WordPress into a new front-end system that handles the flow of news in the digital era. As Benoit describes the solution:

… the guiding ideas we have put into practice are to match the tool to the job we need done (rather than the reverse), reduce the number of steps required and anticipate how our audience will want the information next. And the cost should be next to nothing.”

Read full article: http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/google-docs-wordpress-indesign-workflow.html

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