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 This item appeared in the September, 2009 edition of The Publisher.

Behind the scenes at Canada’s daily and community newspapers, companies are making significant adjustments this year to the way content is produced. While readers will notice only slight differences, the work flow changes are huge on the editorial side.

“What the reader sees is a paper that is very familiar but a much more dynamic news environment across all our platforms,” said Scott Anderson, senior vice president of content for Canwest Publishing. “We need to figure out how to do more multiplatform things with the resources we have at hand.”

After reviewing content management systems in the US and Europe, the company chose Saxotech as the software to implement at its dailies to replace outdated systems. The inaugural launch was at the Calgary Herald, followed by the Edmonton Journal this past summer. The Vancouver Sun and The Province are preparing for the shift right now, a change they hope to complete before the 2010 Olympics in February.

“Ours, like many others, was really a legacy system that was installed in the 1990s and very print-centric,” said Anderson. “The web wasn’t a factor then. We wanted to get away from the notion that we are stockpiling content for a newspaper to be published late at night.”

The Kitchener Waterloo Record was the first newspaper in the Torstar group to implement a completely new platform—CCI Newsgate—when it launched the new system July 13 for online and July 20 for print. The Hamilton Spectator will be the next paper to make the shift.
The Globe and Mail recently enhanced its digital and mobile content using software from Vizrt, Mobiletech and CCI, a European company.

The new system also opens up the digital bottle neck at The Record. Where posting was limited to two or three people with the old system, now the entire copy desk can post.

“If you keep posting, people will keep coming back,” said Karlo Berkovich, associate editor for online content at the Record. He was the paper’s first online editor when he started three years ago.

There are many theories of how to handle online copy. The Record has adopted a web-first model. Before the change, editors would do an ‘overnight dump’ of all the print editorial copy onto the website.

“Now it’s a continuous news cycle, as close to 24/7 as we can get,” Berkovich said.

Anderson believes in tailoring content to each of the platforms.

“I’m not a fan of the web-first phrase because I really want people thinking about what’s web-appropriate,” he said. “The big challenge for all of us is ‘how do we differentiate this content?’ because if the newspaper is simply a collection of all the stories that were posted to the web at 11 PM last night, that’s not working.”

Sudbury Northern Life, a community paper published twice weekly, launched a new content management system July 14 following six months’ work by the paper’s own website division. They had outgrown the old content management system (Cascade Server from Hannon Hill), says the publisher, Abbas Homayed. He was reluctant to say what the new product is other than it is on a Microsoft .NET platform.

The results were immediate—website traffic tripled—even during the summer, which is traditionally a slower time, says Homayed. The classified section is now completely open (before the change, customers had to e-mail their requests), and the newsroom can handle a vastly increased volume of stories. The biggest strength is the online video, says Homayed. The paper won best video initiative from the Suburban Newspapers of America.

The paper remodeled its website two years ago, and recognized that more change was needed.

“It’s easy to have a website that looks pretty, but you have to start with the newsroom,” said Homayed.

Staffers have new job descriptions and all reporters have digital and video cameras. The paper also has a full-time video editor.

Changing work flow behind the slick websites is critical, agrees Anderson. “One of the mistakes papers can make is to bring in news technology and simply replicate the production and reporting system they used to have. Then they wonder why it wasn’t successful.”

All agree that the era is over when the digital initiatives were in a separate division. “You don’t want to replicate the work flow that you had with the old technology,” said Anderson. “We’re not just in the newspaper business anymore.”

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