March 11, 2011
Texas Tribune, Bay Citizen win Knight grant to build open-source news platform
Two leading new nonprofit news organizations have just received a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to develop a free open-source publishing platform. The goal of this software, to be jointly developed by the Texas Tribune and the Bay Citizen, is to help other online news organizations engage readers, manage content, and earn revenue…
Knight announced this $975,000 grant today at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, TX.
According to Knight: “At the first Knight Foundation gathering of news startups in Austin last spring, organizations revealed their struggles to find a publishing platform that is low-cost to implement, while flexible enough to allow constant innovation in content delivery, audience engagement and fundraising.”
Matt Waite, principle developer of Politifact and now a journalism instructor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, tweeted this reaction: “The Knight announcement today is a real opportunity. It’s a CMS with the benefits of a framework. ...It has a generic content model you can inherit and extend all you want, seamlessly integrated.”
The platform, which includes a content management system, will:
- Manage an integrated library of text, video and audio files.
- Maximize search engine optimization by improving the way articles are linked, aggregated and tagged.
- Better integrate sites with social networks like Facebook and Twitter as well as bloggers.
- Offer membership tools and integration with advertising networks to help online news organizations cultivate new revenue streams.
It will be interesting to see whether this effort will draw upon the large code base and developer networks for existing popular free open-source content management systems such as Drupal and WordPress. Those platforms are already widely used by many news startups, and they’ve attracted substantial module collections and developer communities. New platforms that are built completely from scratch sometimes languish due to a small developer pool and sparse module offerings.
Also, it’ll be interesting to see how easy it might be for existing news sites that have already committed to other platforms to integrate with, or switch to, this new one.
The News for Digital Journalists blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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Tags: local news, business models, grants, advertising, content management, software, platforms
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By BarKan, 03/14/11 at 4:10 pm
>It will be interesting to see whether this effort will draw upon the large
>code base and developer networks for existing popular free open-source
>content management systems such as Drupal and WordPress.
It *will* be interesting as both the Texas Tribune and Bay Citizen are built on Django, a Python framework, while Drupal and WordPress are PHP and Drupal is more CMS than framework and WordPress is a CMS.
The thing about CMSes is they come with their own assumptions and prejudices built-in. Ask anyone whose tried to inflict “constant innovation” on a CMS how that went ...
By jheasly, 03/16/11 at 8:50 am
Interesting read. I am a continued user of Wordpress…
By Kelster, 03/17/11 at 11:08 am
Interesting read i am a continued user of Wordpress
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By Kelster, 03/17/11 at 11:09 am
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