A Content Management System (CMS) is a software application that is used to manage digital content in a consistent and organized manner. It has all your content stored in a database and displayed using pre-defined story templates that your audience likes.
Why have a CMS in your Newsroom? To make your job easier for you. A CMS lets you -
Create and modify the stories then and there; so that you don’t have to juggle b/w the doc files.
Store all your content in one single place; so that your authors, editors, and admins have more time telling stories and less time managing it.
Create and manage workflows; so that assigning the responsibilities and monitoring it becomes easier.
Publishing and distribution; 10 tabs for social profiles and a few more to measure the performance? Not required once you get a CMS.
Why your CMS is not good enough for the post COVID world?
Look at the number of stories going live every minute. Readers are all about real-time information now. Twitter recently shared that for Q1 2020, the average total of monetizable daily active users was approx. 164 million, up by 23% - what they got last year.
It is raining content. So even if your CMS has got every feature Newsrooms drool for, it might not be a good fit anymore if it is incompetent at managing the number of stories and traffic you deal now with.
Choosing the best CMS for your news website -
- Security - It has become easy to gain access to your content and users’ data. Exactly why you should consider using CMSs that offer two-factor authentication and protection against DDoS attacks (machine or network resource made unavailable to its intended users).
- Multilingual Functionality - Over 75% of internet users don’t communicate in english as per TranslateMedia. These users require the content to be translated into their native language. Also, the big media groups that are catering to an international audience are bound to publish content in more than one language.
- Content Distribution - Enterprise Newsrooms that have a marketing team to ensure consistent engagement need an omnichannel distribution. Consider using a headless CMS (makes content accessible via an API) or its hybrid variant - decoupled CMS (allows changes to be made to the format without affecting the content) - for this.
- Seamless Integrations - You need to deliver a rich, interactive user experience to every user screen. See if your CMS automatically converts your content to a Twitter card or if it appends your name to social share post on the story.
- Customer Support - For your own peaceful future with the CMS, it is recommended that you keep an eye on the reviews that target customer support of the CMS.
- Search Engine Optimization - Ensuring that page title, meta-data, URL, alt-tags, etc are all in place decides your news visibility to a large extent. Therefore, it is mandatory to get a CMS that is SEO friendly.
- Responsive Mobile - There’s no convincing needed here. It’s about the user experience after all. You need a CMS that uses the technology CSS3 and preserves the look and feel of the website across all the devices with responsive designs.
10 Most Trusted News Website Content Management Systems:
The successor of Newscoop, Superdesk is a well designed CMS that is very flexible in terms of integrations with legacy systems as well as third-party applications. Superdesk is an open-source web-based newsroom software. The editorial workflows are pretty straight-forward and most of the customization doesn’t require any intervention from the support team.
- Pricing: Not provided by the vendor.
- Features:
- Customizable Templates
- Document Indexing
- Full-Text Search
- Image and Text Editor
- Version Control
- Clients: NTB, AAP, KOBINET
WordPress VIP is an ECMS (enterprise content management system) well suited for large-scale media publishers. It is designed specifically to manage high traffic without compromising the performance. It is considered costly and isn’t very flexible. It has strict coding standards which makes it suitable for only large media houses.
- Pricing: Not provided by the vendor. But as per the internet, WordPress VIP would cost you something around $5,000 to $25,000/month for up to 5 websites.
- Features:
- Audio Content
- Customizable Templates
- Document Indexing
- E-forms
- Full-Text Search
- Image Editor
- SEO Management
- Text Editor
- Version Control
- Video Content
- Clients: News UK, New York Post, USA Today Sports Media Group
Joomla
Developed by Open Source Matters, Inc., Joomla is an award-winning open-source CMS for publishing web content and app content. It is built on a model view controller web application framework that can be used independently.
- Pricing: Joomla doesn’t have a free version and neither does it offer a free trial. It’s pricing starts from $199/year. Also has a $399/year plan that offers additional features.
- Features:
- Multilingual
- Search Engine Friendly
- Mobile Friendly
- Unlimited Design
- Flexible & Fully Extensible
- Multi-User Permission Levels
- Clients: SPARKK TV, KOMPAN, INNIO
Drupal
Drupal is a free and open-source web content management framework, since 2001, written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal is easy to set up and provides a back-end framework for at least 2.3% of all websites worldwide. Its modules are easy to install and are used by millions of people worldwide.
- Pricing: Not provided by the vendor. There is a free version available.
- Features:
- Audio Content
- E-forms
- Full-Text Search
- Text Editor
- Video Content
- Website Management
- Clients: Fednot, NOYB.eu, Tidal health
Contens
Contens is the central platform to successfully run international websites, intranets, extranets, landing pages, and newsletters. With Contens companies manage all kinds of structured digital content and distribute it in multiple channels.
- Pricing: Not provided by the vendor. You can schedule a demo for free.
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- Customizable Templates
- Document Indexing
- E-forms
- Full-Text Search
- Image Editor
- SEO Management
- Text Editor
- Version Control
- Website Management
- Clients: EURO, Discovery Channel, DAMP
Quintype is a digital publishing platform designed for media organizations. A new age CMS software to assist digital media organizations in creating interactive content by way of engaging storytelling elements, analytics-driven distribution of content to increase engagements, seamless end-user experience across channels, and provides tools for audience engagement and monetization.
- Pricing: Not shared by the vendor
- Features: It has 4 different solutions catering to 4 specific needs of newsrooms - Audience engagement, Content creation and publishing, Distribution, and Monetization.
- Clients: BloombergQuint, TheQuint, SWARAJYA
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Hocalwire , is a simplified Newsroom CMS platform focused on Digital Media Publishers. Hocalwire's CMS takes a holistic view of the needs of a media house and enables ways in which your content can get maximum exposure which translates into more reach and revenue. The predominant focus of Hocalwire is to bring structure and transparency to the way content is created, distributed, and monetized.
- Pricing: Self-Serve Plan starting $100 /month, Newsroom Plans Starting $500/month. Free Demo available on Request.
- Features:
- Content Ingestion & Automation
- Custom Workflows
- Inline Image Editors & Content Gallery
- Schema Support - Newsarticles, Movies, Books, Review, Fact Check
- Social Media Automation
- Ads Management
- H-Analytics (Publisher Analytics)
- Custom Modules - Elections, Cricket, Movie
- Clients: Livelaw, Madhyamam, MediaOne, Logical Indian, Boom Live, Thanthi Group,
ExpressEngine is an open-source CMS. It is famous for its flexibility and customization capabilities. If you are a web developer looking for a CMS with a specific set of features, ExpressionEngine might be the one for you.
- Pricing: They offer a free trial but don’t have a free version as of now. They take a one-time fee of $299 right at the beginning.
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- Customizable Templates
- E-forms
- Full-Text Search
- Image Editor
- SEO Management
- Clients: Disney, GARMIN, BMI
Pimcore makes it fast and easy to manage product information. It can integrate, consolidate, and manage any type and any amount of digital data. Enrich, cleanse and classify data records in the user-friendly platform. Provide the data to any channel such as commerce, mobile apps, print, digital signage. Pimcore is used by more than 80,000 companies in 56 countries and is recognized as a Gartner 'Cool Vendor'.
- Pricing: Pimcore offers a free trial. Pimcore's Open Source Community Edition is free of charge. Starts with $1800.00/month.
- Features:
- Content Syndication
- Data Modeling
- Data Quality Control
- Digital Asset Management
- Documentation Management
- Master Record Management
- Version Control
- Clients: Bloomberg, GREY, Telin, POLITICO
Kentico Xperience promotes itself as a digital experience platform as it combines content management with digital marketing capabilities. It lets you reuse your website content in your mobile app, email campaigns, and other channels. You can create the landing pages using a drag-and-drop page builder and keep your content consistent and compliant with flexible workflows. It also offers translation of content to any language.
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- Enterprise - $17,999 / year
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- Customizable Templates
- Document Indexing
- E-forms
- Full Text Search
- SEO Management
- Text Editor
- Version Control
- Website Management
- Clients: BizStream, Komerční banka, The Kitchen Yard
Blogging Platforms that shouldn’t be confused with Newsroom Platforms
Apart from these nine, here are the five blogging platforms that people often confuse with the Newsroom platforms given the similarity in their fundamental features - Content Creation, Editing, and Publishing.
- Ghost
- Tumblr
- Medium
- Jekyll
- Blogger
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