👓 The year you actually start to like your CMS | Nieman Journalism Lab | Eric Ulken

Read The year you actually start to like your CMS by Eric Ulken (Nieman Lab)

"If we do it right, users benefit from a feedback loop that helps make our work more valuable and relevant to them. And no journalist ever again has to wear their clunky CMS as a badge of honor."

Without saying it directly, there’s a very IndieWeb flavor to this piece. I’d love to see more journalists and technologists who are working in journalism contributing to improving the web. The Nieman Lab’s collection of Predictions for Journalism in 2019 also has some other IndieWeb-centric articles for those who might be interested.

Eric Ulken, product director for newsroom tools at the USA TODAY NETWORK, has a great list of UI elements in the article that many journalists, newsrooms, and even average people would love to see built into content management systems. I hope that as people build and iterate that they write about their experiences and open source pieces so others can use and leverage them.

Personally, I think that W3C specs like Webmention, Micropub, and Microsub can help change the tide in the coming year.

Some things your tools will soon do for you — if they don’t already:

Automatically find and link relevant background material.

Suggest topics and contextualize newly created content as part of a bigger story arc, when relevant.

Show which topics, story forms and content types, in the aggregate, are resonating with priority audience segments and help you take action based on that info.

Dynamically alert you when there’s potential for promoting your work on other platforms and help you prioritize those efforts.

Keep track of the things you’ve published, show you how they’re doing with key audiences and suggest follow-up opportunities.

Call out popular evergreen content that could use freshening.

Run headline tests and other content experiments directly from the authoring and curation environment.

Identify missed opportunities and help you find out where your content fell flat with readers.

Enable the creation of mobile-first multimedia narratives and other non-text story forms.

Help you productively interact with your audiences and help them inform your coverage.

Calculate — at the staff, team and individual level — effort spent on things that don’t serve audiences well (thereby helping you devote more time to the things that do).

Elevate your phone from in-the-field last resort to full-fledged content creation and management tool, because the best device is the one you have with you.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Today’s leading-edge content tools are integrated context, collaboration and insight machines. We’re moving from unidirectional publishing of articles to organizing all our work and closing the feedback loop with our customers. I call this “full-stack publishing”. ❧

This sounds a little bit like what the IndieWeb is building for itself!

December 21, 2018 at 08:02PM

And while content analytics tools (e.g., Chartbeat, Parsely, Content Insights) and feedback platforms (e.g., Hearken, GroundSource) have thankfully helped close the gap, the core content management experience remains, for most of us, little improved when it comes to including the audience in the process. ❧

December 21, 2018 at 08:00PM