Is a CMS Out there that Journalists Actually Love?
If we as journalists and news consumers want more high-quality news, we should consider re-thinking the tools that make news production possible.
After a semi-successful crowdfunding campaign you take a small step back and you ask yourself: “Now what?” You have enough money to start, but not enough to deliver the fully fledged product you promised. So you need to roll up your sleeves and improvise.
This happened during the summer of 2016 in Athens, Greece, at our offices at AthensLive, right after our campaign. We were ambitious young journalists supported by experienced visual journalists and we wanted to create an innovative international news outlet. Most importantly, we had a mission to start a publication that would produce news from Greece in English for an international audience.
Back then, Greece was in the midst of both a Euro-Debt Crisis and a massive refugee crisis. We felt that the whole world needed to know about this in an innovative, social and factual way. We dreamed that we could start a news outlet that would not be as boring as other Greek news outlets, with a different business model, not based on advertising or reliant on a local media mogul.
We started AthensLive News on social media and we wanted to take it a step further, which meant creating our own platform suitable for multimedia stories for our 516 subscribers.
But due to our few resources, our team was divided in two different groups. Those who preferred a website, for all the obvious reasons, and those who did not like websites at all because “only our moms read websites nowadays.” And our moms are not our audience. (❤️YOU MOM!)
In 2016 social media were slightly different than today. Facebook’s algorithm was endorsing original and engaging video content and everyone was heading to Twitter when there was breaking news. Instagram was the perfect place for photos, with huge engagement. Instagram stories were exploding, while Medium was just getting bigger on the web, attracting more and more publishers. Youtube remained the safe haven for your videos, as always. We had the sense that no one was reading news on websites anymore and that the formats of websites were boring like the news of mainstream media. And who wants to learn the latest news in a boring way?
(Actually while this post is being written I can hear CUNY students behind me talking about how boring the coverage was during recent student walkouts.)
So the decision we made was to stick to a “social first” publishing model, while being a non-profit—Greece’s first journalism non-profit. We aimed to explore different storytelling formats on social media because a website would be costly. We wanted to pioneer, as a team, a social model, as an experiment. It took us a year to realize that the interest in Greece was falling and that only certain issues from or in Greece were being addressed by the international community. According to our analytics, the community—a mostly European community—was interested in topics such as refugees, LGBT issues, environment and culture.
One of our goals for 2018 is to build a platform where we would have the ability to publish and monetize at the same time without any traditional advertising. We’d like to report on certain topics from Greece, follow them up and — of course — have some revenues exclusively from our content based on micropayments or donations by our readers. Both without any paywalls.
This technology-focused journalism labyrinth was what led me to the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, and this is the problem I’m trying to solve. How will journalists from small countries like Greece tell stories that matter towards an international audience? Can these reporters rely on a community that has been created around those countries or specific thematics? Is this sustainable?
My initial answer was simple and possibly naive: a CMS, a Content Management System, our own custom made, FUN CMS.
Most of the CMSs nowadays are built to serve very specific news cases following a standardized process of news gathering and storytelling. And because there is this breach of trust between media organizations and the public, more and more people believe that the news should be more analytical and it should not be about who breaks the story first, but about quality.
In our very European case —with 30 different languages and cultures— everyone is during the last years very eager to hear and learn about their neighbors. In Europe we talk a lot about each other but we don’t talk to each other. There are many common social, environmental, political and other issues that everyone is facing and a debate needs to be sparked for change. A debate that is necessary for the relationship between the reader and the reporter. And what’s a better way to engage in this debate on a multimedia platform?
At AthensLive we are addressing an international audience. Since a big part of our audience doesn’t know every single detail about Greece, we wanted a CMS that will contextualize the story. We wanted to enable unemployed journalists and high-skilled journalists from Greece to be our contributors and give the chance to every reporter to work with a high quality and advanced storytelling tool. Some of our team said that we should provide a home for freelancers of the new age.
A CMS that would enable journalists to easily create multimedia stories and follow them up because they matter to the community.
According to the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, there are 402,000,000 internet users in Europe right now. More than half around 59% of the internet users are users/consumers of the digital news market in Europe which is an amount of 237,000,000 people. The 6–14% of this total is paying for online news already today spending an average of 10€ / month, making it a 5.7 billion € market. And it is expected that a larger number of people, compared to previous years, is now willing to pay for news.
On the other hand freelance work in journalism is on the rise due to the collapse of legacy media around Europe and the transformation of labor in the 21st century. There are more than 150,000 journalists, citizen journalists and bloggers that constitute a critical mass for content flow and stories.
Not only publications with a multi-million budget should have the privilege to build their own CMS. Freelancers should also have access to a top-notch and technologically advanced CMS that allows them to tell stories that matter globally.
A CMS that enables journalists to easily create, share, pursue and monetize multimedia stories that matter, globally.
Joshua Topolsky, founder of The Outline, in his article “Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved” nailed it.
“In media we tend to think of the platform (say, a CMS) as the machine that gets our stuff from one place to another (from an editor to a front page, for instance). We should be thinking of it as a big, beautiful, weird tool to make new stuff altogether.“
So in this long journey, because we have to start from somewhere, the very first step I’m taking is to build a widget/plugin that connects journalists and their readership, letting them know when a story needs to be followed up and help them financially. With this I will be able to learn and understand more about four vital points:
- How do we measure traction and what amount and kind of traction is necessary when you you launch a beta version?
- How can we quickly solve any technical issues that might appear?
- Is there the potential of a community-based publication that focuses on following-up important stories from all over the world on a regular basis?
- Is follow-up essential so that journalists can secure a steady income and help their readers remain up-to-date with important international issues that are many times “lost” among the thousands of articles published daily?
In a few words, my goal during my fellowship at the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism is to create the blueprint for a tool that journalists really LOVE to put their stories on, because their stories deserve it, the community they are serving deserves it, and this relationship is, in my eyes, the future of journalism.
I would greatly appreciate feedback, so feel free to email me at tassos@athenslive.gr
It is very inspiring to be surrounded by great journalism educators such as Jeff Jarvis and Jeremy Caplan and a cohort of media workers that explore journalism innovation under the prism of sustainability at the Tow-Knight Center in CUNY J-School.
