Photo: The Press, Christchurch NZ, by Flickr member Mathew Harrison Blue
I’ve not seen a lot of new publishers talking about exactly how they’re moving their content production from a print workflow to the web, but once you do see it, you understand how things are changing for that community, and why it’s going so slowly: tools for collaboration are only recently beginning to spread around the community.
This article shows the workflow at the Bangor Daily News using WordPress, InDesign, and Google Documents. It’s interesting if you’re accustomed to working with writers–you can see firsthand how difficult it is for an author to change their day-to-day tasks. The most basic aspects of news-writing change as editors shift from not only creating content, but curating it.
Previous workflows saw editors writing, then handing off to another editor to find and insert links, which seems very odd, and probably generated a lot of dissonance between written and referenced work. Most of my identity as a writer online is in the curation of content I perform. The choice of source colors a piece in nearly every case.