To piggyback on my Friday posts about the death the of the news article (here and here), here’s an introduction to another wonderful CMS tool called Storify. It allows the user to create a story out of curated social media. It’s a lot like ScribbleLive in that the content is creates is an assemblage of a lot of different types of media from a lot of different types of sources. What seems to separate the two is that ScribbleLive appears to be more reporter-friendly (there are so many different ways to input your content), while Storify is more of an editor’s tool. Imagine if they joined forces!
Lessons news websites can take from the advent of ScribbleLive
ScribbleLive is an incredibly nimble and embeddable CMS that allows news sites to post any type of content, from Tweets to text messages to voicemail to user comments, in real-time. It replaces the article with a chronological flow of information, like a Twitter feed, but with more content diversity.
The discovery of ScribbleLive lead to a couple of thoughts.
I may be a little late to this party, but doesn’t this kill the article or at the very least, wound it? I’m all for narrative and good writing. There’s nothing like a well written 500-word piece of quality journalism. But maybe this is the medium showing us how a news story is going to look, not worrying about how it has.
This leads me to wondering why the best CMS ideas are being generated by private start-ups and not newspapers and other news sites? Shouldn’t news sites be on the forefront of CMS development? Each news website dumps tons of cash into their CMS and what do any of them have to show for it? Why isn’t this a revenue stream?
I think there are multiple reasons for this. But the one that has occurred to me today, the one that seems the most insidious, is that news website content management systems have always been built around the article, this static piece of content that was designed for print. It has always been the limiting factor in the development of news CMS’s. Perhaps its time that newspapers take a good look at ScribbleLive and think about what their CMS’s should be able to do. Perhaps its time that they move away from this article-based mode of thinking.
