I wonder if there’s a third category of CMS, call it a newsroom CMS or editorial CMS, that’s missing from your original question. If it’s a choice between an enterprise CMS and a blog CMS, the latter is probably much closer to what a news organization would need, and is certainly more easily adapted to the task.

I also wonder, and am curious what others think, about the future of blogging software. Will it evolve to resemble a newsroom CMS like the one I described? Or are there enough inherent differences between the tasks of blogging and of commercial news gathering and publishing to maintain distinctions between the software that powers them both? It seems to me that the former category of software is generally geared at empowering loosely-structured coalitions of independent authors, while the latter is optimized for intense collaboration in which much of the content-creation is shared and even small efficiencies can convey a competitive advantage. But I might be wrong.

It’s inarguable that the Internet is reinventing the way news is gathered and produced, but it’s important to ponder the full implications of the word “reinvent.” It means that someone has already solved the same problem in a different context. Traditional newsrooms have decades of experience in honing the tools necessary to get a large number of people to quickly assemble a large amount of authoritative content. No CMS built for blogging has all of those tools, and most have a lot of features that newsroom users don’t need.

While a blog CMS can be well-suited for the online side of news publishing, newsroom workflow is a different matter. As a journalist, I’d expect a newsroom CMS to provide features like these:

— Robust record locking. When I start editing a particular story element, anyone else who tries to do the same should be blocked and told that I’m already in there. They should be given the option of receiving instant notification when I’m done. If they’re my boss and I went home without logging out, they should be able to pick the lock. And when they pick the lock, my editing session should end immediately, with an explanation for me as to what happened, without my losing any text that I hadn’t yet saved.

— Granular record locking. At the same time I’m editing the body text, other users should be able to edit the metadata and any other text elements, such as headlines or photo captions.

— Audit trails. In order to figure out where errors originate, newsrooms need an easily-navigable record of every change to every story — text and metadata.

— Autosave. If my browser crashes or my computer dies, I need to be able to log back in immediately from any workstation and resume my work exactly where I left off.

— User-configurable access control. My editors and I sometimes need to hide sensitive stories from the rest of the staff, sharing content with specific other users or among our entire team.

— Private notes. I want to be able to type my interview notes into the CMS, because it’s easy to use and I can access it from anywhere. But I don’t want any of my colleagues to see those notes.

— Treatment of stories as a collection of parts. A single multi-tabbed window should show me an assignment’s metadata (name, description, pub dates, status, staff, etc.); body text; related elements like headlines, subheads, captions; and related files (photos, graphics, videos, PDFs). A story is all of that stuff. In addition, I want to be able to further aggregate related stories into content packages, with easy control over which parts of the package go into the paper versus online.

— Support for multiple, complex workflows. I might want a story workflow that advances through configurable statuses like these: Proposed -> Assigned -> Private (where I can write without anyone looking over my shoulder) -> Ready for Editing -> Edited -> Sent to Web [and/or] Ready to Print. Another newsroom will do it differently. Photos, graphics and videos should have their own workflows.

— Efficient listing of all content. My newsroom’s CMS should display a scrollable, auto-refreshing list of stories that I can easily filter by originating desk, destination section, author, editor, status, pub date, content type, etc. I want control over the details displayed in those lists — do I want to see two lines of the description, the names of associated files, thumbnails? Once I’ve customized a list, I want to be able to save it with the options to share it with my colleagues and to receive an email or IM notification when a new story gets added to it. If I’m a copy editor or page designer, I want to be able to display several lists at once in separate windows and have the system remember my window layout.

— A text editor that’s optimized for reporting and editing. The word processor should show me only the features I need. If I’m a writer in a newsroom, I don’t need buttons to change fonts, apply styles, edit HTML source, insert images into my text, etc. The web CMS (Expression Engine, Joomla, homegrown) puts the pieces together using predefined templates. My job is to deliver my pieces as efficiently as possible.

— Communal spellcheck. Unless I’m a notoriously bad speller, I should be allowed to add to a central spelling dictionary while checking my story. Some of my colleagues should be able to edit that dictionary directly.

— Integrated instant messaging. I want the ability to IM my colleagues about content-related issues without having to leave the CMS. That gives our newsroom a dedicated IM channel for performing our actual jobs. This editorial IM system needs to let me send messages to users even if they’re not logged on, with the option of sending the message to their cell phones.

— Integration with Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress. While their profit margins are shrinking, most newspapers are continuing to make money, most of which still comes from the printed version of the product. Exporting tagged text from the CMS for manual import onto a page won’t cut it; this integration requires a UI that lets page designers place content directly from the CMS.

— Real-time topic categorization. My newsroom’s CMS should support automated categorization and entity scanning, so that my story about nuclear power will automatically get listed in the new “Environment and Energy” section of our web site. And the system should automatically identify the companies I mention in the story and their executives, so that we can deliver the story to readers looking for mentions of them.

— Versatile automated output. Based on the metadata I enter and the results of automated categorization, my published story should be delivered instantly to multiple digital platforms in the format required by each, whether that be a flavor of XML or a direct insertion into another database.

Having listed all of those features, now is probably a good time to confess that I own a company, NewsEngin Inc., that builds a newsroom CMS that does all that (http://newsengin.com). But (believe me or not) the long feature list is more for the sake of argument than advertising. If it were true that newsrooms could get by with a good blogging system, we wouldn’t be selling our system to cost-conscious newspaper chains that already have the resources to configure and customize a blog CMS.

:-)

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@mikeindustries.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Since that is not going to happen I will add that , assuming the question you pose is not one of saving a buck, then yes it does seem very much like the same content could be delivered through blog style CMSes. I would think that any system they use would need some good approval workflows. Can’t see why that couldn’t be added into any blog software

http://elections.foxnews.com/
http://allthingsd.com/ (the most bloggy of the three since their redesign)
http://www.expressandstar.com/

Most one-off or internal CMSes I’ve seen have had pretty weak interfaces – in an open market as products they wouldn’t survive. With only a little bit of extra work in the beginning you can make the off-the-shelf open source CMSes, particularly Drupal and WordPress, absolutely sing and work within whatever design, organization, etc you like.

But it’s after the initial roll-out that the real benefits start. WordPress has maintained backward compatibility in templates for 3 years now. As the platform you picked continues to innovate and improve you get all those upgrades for free, often things that would never make the cut for an internal CMS. (For example we just added Google Gears support to speed up the interface.)

I’m expecting a commercial CMS backed by an OS framework, such as Expression Engine 2.0/Codeigniter to step into the void here and offer extensibility as well as a path for migration. Migration is the kind of thing that Commercial solution can leverage, whereas, ideally, the user would only need it once.

The newspaper industry is about power and control. Publishers don’t like being told that they’re doing it the wrong way and they don’t like smaller companies coming along and telling them that they can do it better. When it comes to online publishing, companies in Switzerland are slowly coming to terms with blogs, despite the fact that they have been around since 1998 (in their current form, when Blogger became popular). Even the company I work for, who has followed my blogging and personal website development and journalism since I joined them, is still reticent about changing the way they do things and to consider allowing journalists or contributors to run their own blogs. Newspaper publishers promote their products and don’t like to lose control over the overall content. However hands-off the editor in chief pretends to be, there is always a level of control, someone looking over the shoulder of the person writing.

Blogs may well be adopted to keep up with current trends but in a professional publishing environment, they will never take over the role of professional, structured journalism. Journalism is and will always be a team sport. However much personal publishers (or “bloggers”) contribute and however important and relevant they are or become, they will never match the commercial and focused success of a team of professional journalists within a regular newsroom environment. There’s just too much money at stake. Any CMS – whether open-source or commercial – which covers the needs of a blogger, a corporate site manager and a publishing team will continue to be the most sought-after software tool in modern publishing.