Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

> ReCode will become part of Vox’s expanding digital empire, which includes the popular sports site SB Nation, as well as the technology site The Verge. ReCode also will gain access to Vox’s publishing platform, Chorus, which has been a key in luring marquee journalists including Ezra Klein.

Just goes to show how journalists (either the journalists described, or just the NYT author here) are charmed by the mystique of the CMS. I don't care if Chorus is made in Angular 5.0 [1], the robustness of a CMS is not one that makes much difference to the content producers, particularly writing-focused reporters...And the parts that need to be really nice UI/UX (such as slideshow/gallery/quiz creators) aren't necessarily intrinsic to a CMS. A CMS makes a huge deal in ease of publishing...but for most writers, they don't see much difference other than the rich-text editor. It's certainly at the far bottom of reasons to join an organization as a reporter.

[1] it's Rails 3.x IIRC, but perhaps Chorus also encompasses their suite of static publishing tools such as Middleman:

http://product.voxmedia.com/2014/5/29/5759244/vox-media-ruby...

https://source.opennews.org/en-US/learning/evolution-news-ap...

I don't understand the obsession with journalism CMS.

Articles about Vox Media never seem to fail to mention Chorus. As a news consumer, I don't give a crap about how the sausage is made: I want accurate reporting. I find Vox Media, of all the new media groups, to have a most embarrassing level of sloppy and inaccurate reporting. I can't tolerate blatant and lazy errors.

The focus on tools seems misplaced to me. They desperately need a quality system.

Journalists focus on the tools because so much of the initial Vox PR was about their tools. It's become a part of the established lore, even if it really doesn't make all that much sense.

Saying you don't understand journalism's obsession with CMS is like journalists saying they don't understand HN's obsession with programming languages.

"But it's what you do that matters, not how you get it done!"

Yeah, sure.

It's more equivalent to caring about what language HN is written in.

That's accurate. I think the obsession with programming languages on HN is also misplaced. Choice of programming language is far from the most important aspect of the SDLC, as I see things.

I'm admittedly an atypical HN reader.

For me it's worse: all I see are constant overheads between trivial prefix-free equivalents...

But then I also love C and hate everything Python with a passion, so go figure.

The CMS they use doesn't force them to use a different language. A better equivalent would be people arguing over emacs vs vim

Ah, but when every publisher has their own system, going from place to place can make for some pretty rough transitions. The question comes down to whether you work for the system or if the system works for you.

The focus on the tools in entirely justified. The reason is this:

You really should not be looking at it as a CMS. It is a complete workflow system. In short, these are the systems that the business depends on to write stories, edit stories, publish stories, syndicate stories, promote stories, and so on.

An advantage of a proper system is not merely 10% efficiency: 1. It can impose a process, where none existed before. Perhaps, this can be a quality check process. It can be user feedback process. It can be promotion of journalists process. A process can improve operations and the outcome.

2. It can automate a process. Even if process exists today, if it is not automated, it may not be enforced. We do not have measurement on how well the process is adhered to; who is using it and who is not; what the costs of not using the process are.

3. It can optimize a process. If we can automate and measure, then improvement is natural.

In addition to all these process improvements, something like Chorus can even improve the way it is reaching the customers. For instance, the costs of pushing to different channels is negligible. Their cards based context education system is considered innovative in the industry.

If you look at the existing publishing platforms, you will understand how CMS can change the game. See more about Chorus here: http://pfauth.com/publishing-platforms/vox-medias-chorus . If you want to see the competition that the rest use, see: http://www.ccieurope.com/solutions/NewsGate/ (this is the new version-- think about the previous version and then you can understand the excitement about Chorus).

Thank you for a thoughtful response.

I appreciate your argument that these new CMS systems are better thought of as improved "journalism life cycle" management systems, to borrow a more familiar jargon.

Given that view, I would have to say that these tools are not good because the system output is not good. Every PLC system I've been a part of has a quality assurance component, and in the case of Vox Media, that quality component doesn't seem to be sufficiently engaged. More worrying to me is that when edits are made at vox.com (and I assume, perhaps in error, at other Vox Media sites), the changes tend to be as silent as possible. I can never be sure of the accuracy of the article I'm viewing. In addition, there are frankly immature actions of Vox Media staff (seems to be concentrated at The Verge) that signal to me that the company culture is problematic. I expect journalists to have an air of professionalism, like Walter Cronkite. I get the feeling that Vox Media is a bunch of bloggers acting as journalists, when the original concept (as I understood it) was that it was journalists that could respond with the speed and flexibility of bloggers, thanks to the Chorus system.

Maybe I expect too much from internet journalism. If you'll excuse me, I think there's some kids on my lawn I need to chase away.

A low friction, high power CMS is hard to do - I maintain from time to time our in house and it will probably get lowest possible scores on any usability ranking.

Considering what Vox.com has turned into lately - not sure that mentioning Ezra is good thing. The old Wonkblog was classes above that crap.

We're on Rails 4 now for the general "Chorus" codebase (but you're right, we include a number of varied apps under the same umbrella when talking about our platform)

Many of the people involved are doing more than rich text editing. They're curating and packaging stories. They're promoting these packages within and outside of their site. They're enriching stories with images and meta data. Sometimes there are editing and approval workflows. It's not all as simple as it seems.

When you've got a bunch of specialists, integrating the pieces is the challenge. Usually, you've got people responsible for broad swaths of the process: journos learning marketing; marketers learning copy editing; editors learning SEO. The CMS is where a lot of this gets created, integrated, and published.

Wouldn't high-quality-CMS be important to bring down the cost of publishing-- to the point of determining the sustainability of the publication itself?

The established media companies are struggling, if I had to describe in one line, because contemporary revenues cannot sustain their traditional cost structure.

You would otherwise need staff to coordinate between photographer, and onsite attendee and social media curator finding tweets to go with that story, and generally different parts being curated by different team members.

You also want to optimize the "review" workflow, to maximize the page views by landing the story quickly vs. other publications.

So maybe the best CMS in the world saves you 10% in costs over an averagely competent CMS.

It's not really a material difference in terms of sustainability.

You are correct in stating that established media companies are struggling because of their cost structures. But those cost structures are mostly salaries (and capital investments in buildings etc) rather than something that a magic CMS can fix.

Put it like this: when a "new media journalist" uses their mobile phone to take a picture for their story (instead of a staff photographer) that has made a bigger difference in terms of cost structure than the worlds-best CMS can make.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com