Choosing a website solution for your newspaper or magazine is at the heart of determining your online publishing strategy.
Why are you publishing online? Is it because you simply think you must? Your competition is online? You want to reach more readers? More advertisers? Build a new revenue stream from online advertising?
All of the above reasons are very common motives for creating a newspaper or magazine website. A website will allow your current and prospective readers and advertisers to quickly gauge your professionalism or niche at the click of a link. Media buyers thousands of miles away will make a decision on the strength of your online sales pitch, which is working for you 24/7. Worthy content that does not make it to print will be viewable online at zero expense. The benefits go on.
Ironically, the greatest benefit of moving online is perhaps mostly overlooked – the ability to manage content. Content Management Systems (CMS) are the engines that drive 99% of today’s websites. Simply put, they enable a website owner to easily manipulate their site’s look and feel, upload articles, images, videos etc and publish live at will. No HTML, no coding, no experience needed. CMS technology means everyone and anyone can have an online shopfront.
But the implications for newspaper and magazine publishing are far greater. Publishers manage content and advertising, often through to printed publications. In one 32-page publication there will be 350 – 500 objects (a title, author, image, caption, text, ad, section title etc). Prior to Content Management Systems, smaller publications managed these objects with whiteboards, spread sheets, grids, lists, complex filing systems, a bit of magic and a lot of stress.
Going to press with an image that is missing a caption or an article without a by-line was all common symptoms of the ‘train-crash’ production cycle.
A good Content Management System for publishers should account for the specific needs of print publishing. A CMS for a local car-sales yard wanting to improve sales will vastly differ from a CMS that manages an array of writers, with various user-level approval structures and an export-to-print button.
A CMS newspaper or magazine website should be more than an online presence, it should reduce your workload and streamline your content management processes.