Superdesk – An End-To-End Platform for News | Hacker News Reader

Superdesk – An End-To-End Platform for News

superdesk.org

121 pointsnikolay19 comments

Developer working in large international media company here. Views not my employer's etc etc.

This looks fantastic.

It's never going to get anywhere.

Most (if not all) large newspaper CMSs are either a) large cumbersome things that have been in use for decades and are never going to be replaced because Stockholm Syndrome, or b) custom in-house-built and fit the particular editorial workflow of that organisation perfectly because the developers have taken time to listen to the journalists and implemented exactly what was needed. I don't know of any news organisation that's successfully migrated from one third-party CMS to another.

Hey. I work for a large media company also. And I agree with you in everything that you say.

But one thing I got to agree with you, this looks fantastic. I'm willing to try that soon or later cause I just wanna to see the looks and feels.

One thing that I believe tough is that if the platform is extensible enough may be easier to convince media companies to use it. Unfortunately is more a political game than an useful one.

Hi there, I am the head of Sourcefabric, and all I can tell you that based on the inquiries we are getting, you are considerably underestimating the appetite for change in major media organizations. Perhaps dropping some of Superdesk promo materials in front of editors and biz people may produce surprising results.

"Selling" Superdesk is actually not hard at all. Our main challenge currently is to cope with the demand. Hence the "We're hiring" badge.

Regarding who is it for, it's for all, rich and poor alike. Think of Tesla Roadster to Tesla Model 3 analogy. We wanted to build something that will be second to none. And luckily we've bumped into great, open minded partners among national new agencies, who have helped us shape it into an already very powerful system, that can substitute their aging enterprise CMSs and open the road to innovation down the line. And if it's good for the bigger fish, the minnows will enjoy the ride too. (more about it at some other point).

What we want to do is provide the best technology to all news media and help arrest the erosion of the sector. We have many ideas and concrete plans. If you want to help us, come join us. We need you.

From what I can tell (very much an outsider), news orgs are having to run leaner all the time and something like this might actually get traction.

Frankly, news is being disrupted. Something tells me they will be looking for more streamlined ways of doing things. I don't know much about your software, but who did you work with in Australia to get this resolved? Was it a New Ltd paper, or Fairfax?

Australian Associated Press.

Aahh .... My company (Spaceman - now shut down) built the software that AAP are currently using! Just curious - has much additional development been done on it?

Good point. I believe that SourceFabric's target audience is mostly in poorer countries and developing nations, where news organisations neither have the resources to build their own CMS, nor a more comprehensive workflow management system like this. They've been doing this for a good number of years, and I think are only daring this "big leap" after observing the needs of such organisations for quite a while.

For what it's worth, Superdesk is in newsrooms in Norway, the UK and Australia. Our plan, though, is to get the same tools into developing countries. We believe newsrooms are the same no matter where you go, Basel to Bamako.

I worked with media companies in latinamerica, an almost no one was willing to move to another CMS, nor add new functionality to the existing ones.

I hope this is gonna start changing soon, because the main issue is that people in charge of media is old for the most part, so they kind of hate change and prefer to keep things as they are.

Presumably it looks awesome and attractive for small/independent outfits though? And possibly that puts a pressure on larger corporations in the long-term, as they decide to check out this 'Superdesk' all the new hires are asking about?

I'm not sure about this Superdesk, or if I like it, but I think that you're underestimating the number of small papers, nonprofits, magazines, political groups, and trade press outlets that are desperate for something that isn't garbage. Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, or some monstrosity that some contractor conned them into laying off staff to afford have them on the verge of suicide, and their workflow consists of "the shared drive."

Large papers in the US are represented by about four companies, and the Tribune companies are clearly sharing a CMS. They're really irrelevant to the general market for CMSes.

You are probably right, but I've worked with news sites using Wordpress and they love the fact that almost everything they want could be added to the platform.

I work for a moderately large regional newspaper, and I could see us implementing this. There's enough of a mindset shift underway here that something like Superdesk could gain traction.

The Norwegian News agency NTB, think Reuters on shrinker-pills, has deployed it. Not bad.

On the one hand, bravo! For much of my career I dreamed of something like this. On the other hand, I quit dreaming about it a few years back, when I realized that the future is not in a monolithic, do-everything platform -- a kind of uber-WordPress -- but in a constantly evolving bundle of small, sharp tools (the UNIX philosophy).

There are plenty of great tools out there for managing processes and workflows, for scheduling, for communicating, and so on. The way forward is to just grab the best of what's out there at any given moment for a specific need, and press that into service until something obviously better comes along.

But I look forward to playing around with this, and I wish them the best of luck.

That site has a bug in it. When the width drops below 833 but above 798 the menu items shift downwards and hover over page elements.

I found this out because my browser window happened to be that size when I opened the page.

PS - Windows 7, Chrome 51, Windows DPI 125%, page zoom: 100%, Chrome's font size: Large.

I've reported that as a bug ticket. Well spotted.

Any demo installation of this for us to click through?

Oops, thought these was a end-to-end encryption solution for news distribution.

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