If you have professional writers why not just teach them markdown and git?
Instead of spending engineering $$$ building, maintaining and operating a complicated editor?
Instead of spending engineering $$$ building, maintaining and operating a complicated editor?
>> why not just teach them markdown and git?
> writers are not professional coders.
Furthermore if you're just writing the text of the article, you don't even need markdown, just a textarea. They used to do these on typewriters after all. Newspaper articles traditionally lacked anything but plain text. No bold, italics, or subheadings.
> Markdown covers the basic text markups
> but does not define how to format all these embedded media
> a modern newspaper has
Is this really a good assumption? Journalists are making complex documents with central interactive features and lots of data visualization. It seems a lot like classic waterfall thinking to assume that reporters could perfectly envision that and toss it over the wall for a separate team.
1. Most articles have simple layouts, like this one, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/us/politics/trump-trans-p...
2. Most reporters were journalism majors, which teaches research, interviewing, and writing. Graphic design is a separate discipline. It is possible for one person to be good at both, but rare.
3. Companies tend to cut up work, especially big companies, like the New York Times.
4. Complex articles like this one, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/entertainment/v..., aren't tossed over the wall. But that doesn't mean that one person did it all either. I'm sure there was back and forth between the writer and designers, and likely an editor oversaw it all.
On the graphics desk we know how to use git— we use it for js/css—but still write words in google docs.