Digest 9/14/2020

Media’s worst content management systems; Bob Woodward defends Trump tape decision; Profile Discourse, round two

AGAINST CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

You’ve written a story; it has been edited and fact-checked; permissions have been cleared for accompanying images or graphics; and it’s ready for publication. Time to send it out into the world so it can be enjoyed or brutally panned by the masses, right? Not so fast! The copy and images have to go into a content management system, or CMS, a piece of software that newsrooms use to publish and edit web content. The systems aren’t known for being especially reliable — they’re prone to glitch, freeze, butcher embeds, and in my personal experience, erase one’s work altogether. We put out a call for CMS horror stories in an attempt to determine which was The Worst, and it turns out they are all Very Bad. Here they are, in the words of those unfortunate enough to have used them.

Méthode

Used by: The Washington Post (print), the Wall Street Journal

Rating: Eight out of nine Dante’s Infernos

Described by one anonymous WSJ staffer simply as “hell,” here is a screenshot of what it looks like to attempt to search for something in Méthode, the CMS previously called “especially cumbersome for creating multimedia posts” in a Digiday piece on CMS catastrophes.

The same CMS is also used for the print Washington Post, per a source who clarified the web uses a different CMS, which is actually pretty good. “If you’re writing for print, at least for the section I worked with, you had to submit via Méthode and save it in a very specific arcane folder that took forever to load and format,” said the source. “I basically wrote everything on a [Google] Doc beforehand and re-formatted it in Méthode because I was freaked out about losing work, but it constantly froze — even when implementing basic edits.”

Custom NPR CMS

Used by: NPR

Rating: “Sucks”

NPR uses its own CMS, which one anonymous source described as “if Life Alert were a CMS.”

“It fucking sucked,” they continued. “If you had spaces in the wrong place on a headline, it would crash. If you uploaded a photo in the wrong part of the post body, it would crash. It would get stuck on loading forever if you used [quotation marks]. QUOTES. Like for quoting people. It would also revert to old versions of a post and tell you two people were in it at once, even though no one was in it. It also just looked like it was built for children. Or incapable adults.”

The tipster said they heard the CMS was being upgraded to something new. “Life alert but with facial recognition, maybe,” they said. 

Backstage

Used by: VICE 

Rating: 10 out of 10 bugs

Vice uses Backstage, the website of which declares it is “Content Management that works the way you want it to.” Does it?? Per an anonymous staffer, the system is “clunky and so slow and sometimes you just, like, can’t embed various elements? After a story publishes and you need to hop back in to fix a typo, sometimes it just won’t update and product has to go in the back end and make the change! Block quotes and pull quotes work, like, 40 percent of the time.” Another source said that a coding bug often left articles stuck in boldface or italics, which could only be fixed by changing the HTML.

So is VICE getting a new CMS? Nope! Here’s an excerpt from an email recently sent to the whole staff:

“Are we getting a new CMS? The Global English launch will be in our current CMS and the product team will be training everyone on what changes will happen in Backstage so that we’re unified there and no longer flipping stories. However, the product team is also conducting research / interviewing editorial leadership about improvements and a path forward for a better user experience of CMS in the newsroom.”

“I have no idea what that first bit means —  VICE freaking loves to restructure shit — but the bottom line is, despite many complaints, no new CMS,” said the source.

BLOX

Used by: Lee Enterprises papers (local papers including the Arizona Daily Star and the Missoulian)

Rating: Full-body hives

One former Lee staffer described the CMS as a “disaster.”  “Sure, it was ugly, and cumbersome, and not very intuitive, but the worst part was a weird hiccup that would auto-publish and email out stories before they were ready,” they said.

The problem came from “news bursts,” an option on the CMS for publishing breaking news that would push a story to the top of the website and send out an email. “Basically, if you wanted to get a news burst ready, and you ticked off in BLOX that something was going to get a burst…it would [publish the story] automatically as soon as you checked it — even if you hadn’t hit the publish button yet,” the source told Study Hall. 

“More than once, a reporter made a file of an off-the-record tip to get it ready to publish as soon as it could be officially confirmed, and an editor accidentally clicked the box too early because they were setting the story up, and off the story went! You can unpublish or edit a story online, but you can’t do anything about the email.” Stories that were still being edited (and had notes between the editor and the reporter in the body) were accidentally published, too. 

The source also mentioned that reporters and editors had different versions of the CMS, which meant that editors would have to duplicate reporters’ work into a new file. “I don’t know if that’s just how BLOX works or if my newsroom was just dysfunctional,” the source added. “Could be either, honestly.”

Base

Used by: Alt-weeklies like the Washington City Paper and Nashville Scene

Rating: Basically a ghost

Base was developed for alt-weeklies owned by the now-defunct SouthComm Business Media, acquired in 2018 by Endeavor Business Media. “You can see Base in action on the unfortunate websites of alt weeklies too cash-strapped to transfer to another CMS, like Tampa Bay Creative Loafing, Nashville Scene, and the Washington City Paper,” wrote an anonymous source. “Since SouthComm is completely dead as a company, the offsite IT team that runs Base does not give a shit about any concern anyone at any of these companies has. The CMS…does not work, and as an added and hilarious bonus destroys the quality of any uploaded image displayed in the text.” 

WordPress

Used by: Study Hall, formerly The New York Times

Rating: Ten out of ten, by 1990s standards

Anonymous sources at Study Hall describe the popular CMS WordPress as “pretty easy to use, actually,” other than a formatting quirk that leaves double breaks between paragraphs copy-pasted from Google Docs. Another Study Hall source said that while the functionality is okay, the backend looks like it hasn’t been updated since 1999. “It makes me feel like I’m working on a Blogspot blog, but at least it doesn’t suck as bad as Patreon.”

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LONG(SHORT?) READ OF THE WEEK: To accompany the general digest theme of Online Hell, here’s an oldie-but-goodie from Quartz in which programmers dreamed up and then manifested the most hellish, dystopian methods imaginable for entering one’s phone number in an online form. My personal favorite:

@marypcbuk @Ploogle @paulomgaspar @jeffbonhag @stelian @ftrain @sbisson The final solution for this problem. pic.twitter.com/62kZVFCRkM

— Ale/xander P. (@_iamale_) April 19, 2016

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— Remember last week’s Profile Discourse, when everyone was like, “Oh no, this profile subject liked the piece — seems problematic!” Ahahaha. Simpler times! Here’s an ethical clusterfuck: The writer who profiled Chrissy Teigen for Marie Claire has since gone to work for Chrissy Teigen. I think Joan Summers at Jezebel got it right: it’s hard to blame the journalist for taking the job, but Marie Claire should have killed the (very effusive) profile. 

— Bob Woodward is defending his decision to sit on audio from February March of Trump saying the virus was deadlier than the flu and admitting he was downplaying the threat of COVID, claiming he didn’t exactly know what Trump had known earlier in the year until May. But he still had that audio from his on-the-record interviews with the president, so…? It seems unlikely that an earlier release of these interviews would have made much of a difference, but I don’t think that’s the point — Woodward still had an ethical obligation to release them. 

— The podcast boom continues! As of Sept. 21 famed tech reporter Kara Swisher will host a podcast called Sway at the New York Times in which she interviews people about power and influence. Swisher is now the host of approximately 45 podcasts.

— The Intelligencer profiled New York Times media columnist Ben Smith, formerly known as BuzzFeed Ben. What a whacky, eccentric guy! He eats his employees’ food! He stands behind them and stares at their screens?! (No thanks!) He loves to be yelled at! What a character!

— A Media Matters analysis found that most corporate broadcast TV outlets, in covering the wildfires consuming the West Coast, failed to make the connection to climate change in their broadcasts. PBS Newshour stood out in this respect, describing the fires as linked to climate change in both segments it aired on the subject. 

— Joe Sabia, SVP of creative development at Conde Nast Entertainment and host of Vogue’s “73 Questions” series, has resigned after six years at the company. His resignation comes amidst leadership shakeups amid accusations of racism at the company, though Sabia claimed to Variety his departure has nothing to do with the scandals. Idk, his colleagues do not seem heartbroken to see him go!!

— That character Ben Smith at the New York Times published a deep dive on the scandal at The Intercept over the publication’s failure to protect a source who leaked a classified report, and who is now, as a result of The Intercept’s failure, serving a prison sentence of five years and three months. The resulting scandal ate away at the newsroom in the aftermath, Smith found, having reviewed internal documents and correspondences. “The documents fall short of revealing a conspiratorial cover-up. Instead they show an extreme version of the human errors, hubris and mismanagement familiar to anyone who has worked in a newsroom — and the struggle of The Intercept to live up to its lofty founding ideals in dealing with its own errors.”