Why ‘publisher as a platform’ is here to stay
The content management revolution is already upon us.
New media wunderkind Ezra Klein made big news in January, announcing that he and a crack team of some of the world’s best explanatory journalists would be shacking up under one new roof.
But Klein and company — a group of writers and editors who had spent years writing for legacy print outlets — dove headfirst into a new venture with a company, Vox Media, that some people had never heard of. It made total sense for one reason.
The future of compelling digital content is new technology.
Ask any journalist, and they’ll tell you that the typical content management system (CMS, for short) is well past its expiration date. In fact, Klein told the New York Times in April that antiquated digital publishing mechanisms were a large part of the reason he chose to start his new venture where he did.
While The Post is an excellent publication, [Klein] said, he felt that the conventions of newspaper print journalism in general, with its commitment to incremental daily coverage, were reflected in publishing systems, which need first and foremost to meet the needs of printing a daily paper. And he wanted to create something entirely new, which is why he and two Post colleagues ended up at Vox Media, a rising digital empire that includes sites like SB Nation and The Verge. Vox, he said, had the tools he was seeking.
Most prominent within that new toolbox? Chorus, a “platform built from the ground-up for digital-native authoring, publishing, and distribution; and focused, high-quality community.”
If the content management system you’re familiar with is the primate, systems like Chorus are highly evolved homo sapiens.
Chorus allows Vox Media’s digital offerings to tell stories in new, creative ways that appeal to a variety of audiences, niche or not. The system offers writers, editors, and the community they cultivate to access features most bloggers would kill for: automatic updating and monitoring of comments, easy-to-manage permissioning, a sophisticated-but-simple story assignment tool, effortless tagging and social pushing, and more.
But the advanced CMS also enables — and encourages the development of — the seamless integration of new content features, like the ability to “flip” between an article and the interview transcription that powers it. Such features provide readers with choices that weren't available before, customizing the way users engage with all types of content — including what Vox Chief Product Officer Trei Brundrett calls “differentiated sponsorship elements that are truly integrated.”
Despite data journalism’s recent popularity, Vox.com — as well as other new digital ventures in explanatory journalism like ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times’ The Upshot — have a pressing issue. There’s never been more things to explain, but finding the right way to explain them is more challenging than ever. Or, as The Guardian recently positioned the problem: “more people are interested in the topics to which data-driven journalism can add than they are in data-driven journalism itself.”
Such an existential crisis leads to an uptick in framing content on things like videos, interactives, or election-forecasting machines. A new platform like Chorus makes housing those things possible.
So while articles on topics like the future of the Internet to nefarious otters make for fascinating reading, Chorus’ presentation of information is the real star. Consider Vox’s “cards”: the concept isn't exactly new (well, it’s…a slideshow), but the new condensed treatment better serves reader interests — namely, reducing digital drag by making sure they spend the most time on content they already know they are interested in.
But not everyone has access to a shiny new CMS.
Companies that aren't able (or, frankly, willing) to flex some technological muscle are falling behind. Ex-titans like About.com — which uses what Digiday has dubbed a “creaky dial up-era CMS” — are scrambling to figure out how to get on trend. But the biggest challenge is usually philosophical. The key? Realizing that the separation between compelling content and compelling products has long gone the way of the 56k modem.
“While some of the tenets of the profession we formerly knew as journalism have remained, workflows, business practices, participants, and competitors are all very different,” explains Cindy Royal, an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University, in a recent piece for Nieman Journalism Lab.
“Because we work in tech.”
