Right now many news organisations are struggling with tough choices between scalability versus flexibility when it comes to content management systems. And some news orgs find themselves almost collecting CMSes because there isn’t one CMS that does everything. That’s not a huge problem as long as they can ‘talk’ to each other, but APIs and XML portability are relatively new ideas.

But, like I said, that’s a blog post that’s been sitting in the back of my head for a while. However, the Center for Citizen Media report also talks about tech development models that work and provides a call to action by news organisations.

Thanks. The inflexibility of the standard news CMS is something that I’ve thought about since we discussed my post. I would love to continue a discussion about how the CMS should evolve for the community building and storytelling that forward thinking journalists like you want to do. Further, although blogs aren’t the most interactive, they’re an important stepping stone for both professional journalists and their audiences.

Tom,

Your project is fascinating. Best of luck with that.

Now here’s two blog posts that may interest you. Jeff Jarvis opines about community building in a great post titled “Whither Magazines?” at BuzzMachine — see http://www.buzzmachine.com/2006/11/10/whither-magazines. However, I think that the Creating Passionate Users blog has some interesting commentary about the potential downsides of community building with its post “The Dumbness of Crowds” at http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/01/the_dumbness_of.html.

An absolutely cracking post and something that I’ve been talking up in Project Red Stripe - The Economist’s internet innovation - which I’m working on.

The other parts of people’s lives are vital to news organisations. They’ve got the community now, and still have the window of opportunity to enable it.

However, what will really knock this idea out of the park is when organisations take news and lived experience and whack up the data optimisation to 11. Find out what people near you read, buy, eat and everything else in between.

I am going to ask every one on the Project to read this.

The author of that post at Bivings is a friend and sent it along. The only thing I would add to the 16 ways that media can use blogs is one way that media organisations are using blogs: To make up for the lack of flexibility in their own content management systems. That’s for another post.

But Steve has a pretty good list there.

Nice redesign on Multimedia Meets Radio.