Rethink your workflow
If you follow me on twitter you may have caught a momentary vent yesterday that I think could be explained:
"We need to rethink our workflow" ARE YOU LISTENING? Of course not, you don't Twiiter[sic], do you.
You see I had just got out of a demo of some “next gen” print publishing software that promised to have better support for the web (and since the vendor’s current offering has ZERO support for the web, I suppose anything would be “better”). To be fair, the software really did look like it’s on the right track, treating news content in a media agnostic way, but I strongly suspected some marketing droid had convinced upper management that this new version was a silver bullet that would magically save a gaggle of FTEs on the web side of the house, and therefore we must buy it.
I didn’t ;). I maintained that we could accomplish most of what was being offered on the screen by “rethinking our current workflow” and taking advantage of the software (and developers) we already have in-house. I think it’s called “doing more with less,” but I digress.
“Rethink our workflow? I don’t know what that means,” the crusty old editor said.
I realized that that moment that for all this guy’s knowledge and skill in the newsroom, he didn’t recognize that our current workflow of pulling web content out of the print publishing system after it’s been formatted for the page is fundamentally flawed. 90% of the code to “export” this content for the web deals with “de-printing” it and where do you think 90% of the bugs occur? I’ve talked about this before.
By “rethinking our workflow” I mean nothing less than “exploding” the notion that we’re a news paper and really becoming that news organization we talk about being and, just like in the fancy demo, treating our content — be it text, photos, video or smellovision — in a media agnostic way. Publish to a database, not a paper. Stop writing news stories in a pagination system. Submit content for general editing and then release it to the print and web editors. Let the print editors “printify” their print products (edit for length, add pull quotes and deck heds, suggest headlines) and let the web editors “webify” theirs (package multimedia, links, tags, web heds).
But… what if the web site doesn’t have the same pull quotes?!? What if the headlines differ?!? OMG What if we italicize something in print and the web doesn’t?!?
I’m sorry but who the hell cares? I’d challenge questions like that with, “where’s our video in the paper?” or “I clicked on the teaser box to see the story and poked a hole in the paper, was that supposed to happen?” In this brave new world we need to take way better advantage of the media we’ve elected to support and right now we’re not. We can’t do it as long as we’re funneling one through the other.
We need to rethink our workflow.