Kim Farnell on the perils of content management and using templates
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ords can be pesky things. Sometimes, they take on a life of their own and have to be organised, controlled. Even more so now that so many of them are turning up unsupervised on the internet. Obviously the only answer is to get them under control,to manage them in some way. That’s exactly what a content management system (CMS) is supposed to do – a process that is becoming the bane of many journalists’ lives as systems are rolled out across news organisations, radically changing working patterns and jobs. Content management is the set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information. Along with newspapers, many other organisations like e-commerce websites, educational institutions and use content management systems. In newspapers now it may be increasingly contentious but it isn’t a completely new idea – in many ways, it’s been happening for years. Defined sections and lay-outs are reserved for things such as weather reports, TV listings and classified ads. Using a CMS extends this to news. Editors get a limited number of templates to choose from for section fronts. Each spot has a number, and the section editor decides which story and photos go in particular holes. At some point, someone needs to check that all the holes are filled and that everything looks OK. On the plus side, a CMS makes it easy to create and update content quickly. And, of course, it can save a fortune. If reporters directly input stories to template lay-outs, you can bypass sub-editors and production editors. On the negative side, a CMS makes it easy to create and update content quickly. Many systems don’t have the ability to track revisions in text meaning that it can be impossible to tell who messed up or to restore older versions of edited text. Content managements systems are simply a form of new technology that can make journalists lives easier – depending on how they’re used. The problem comes with the attitude that sub-editors and page designers are no longer necessary when reporters can type their copy into boxes. Reporters are expected to write their stories straight to page, supply headlines, and get it right first time. As well as
the obvious tasks of checking their writing is grammatically correct, they also need to be alert to potential libel, reporting restrictions etc. And they need to be prepared to fit more work into the working day. The idea that stories are ‘content’ and a product that can fit neatly into boxes gives rise to the idea that you’re writing for computers rather than people. And it results in a fundamental shift in attitude from the model that something is mocked up and approved before being printed to one that allows publication of copy that can be changed and deleted once it’s live – or when it’s too late. The approach that some newspapers are adopting towards using a CMS is summed up in an Atex workflow memo sent to Johnston Press editors by Paul Bentham, JP’s managing director. Best practice is for all pages to be templated – those requiring bespoke lay-outs should be processed through the central hub. All locally written stories must be ordered out to reporters and written using Incopy to fit the requested page shape... Editors need to ensure that the policy of ‘right first time’ is embedded in the newsroom culture. They should not however continue with the old practice of reading every story. Editors should evaluate the risk for each story based on content and the seniority of the journalist and act accordingly. It was the content of this memo that prompted the NUJ to write to the Press Complaints Commission to complain that
when it goes wrong Bedfordshire’s free Times & Citizen newspaper has a
circulation of more than 58,000. It also now has one of the most famous front pages ever. Last summer the paper accidentally ran the headline headghgh. Helpfully, the instruction strapline for the main story ‘like this if needed’ appeared directly above. Apparently, the front page had been sent off with the correct headline intact, but somewhere along the line it reverted to a template. A bemused reader snapped a photo on his phone and posted it on Twitter. Within a few hours he’d sent it to the journalist
Grace Dent, and on Friday morning the comedian Peter Serafinowicz retweeted it to his 391,000 followers. It was then picked up by the Guardian’s Media Monkey and appeared in the Huffington Post on Saturday. By then, the original photo had received 57,000 hits. Within a couple of days, CitizenBB, who originally posted the photo, had put the t-shirt up for sale. If that were the only incident, it might have been forgotten more quickly. But it is far from being alone; there are many examples. There have been blank spaces galore elsewhere: the accidental decapitation of a jazz band in The
Scarborough Evening News, and the familiar ‘write caption, standfirst or byline here’. There has been plenty of talk about misaligned or even missing pictures, and journalists having problems in formatting the content properly. And more than enough warnings that with fewer staff and fewer checks, more errors would get through. But no-one expected the t-shirt.
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