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Part 2 in Glide's three-part series to finding your perfect content publishing system.
Hands up if you are an editor or writer who likes your company's Content Management System?
Hands up if you like it when your company changes its CMS?
Whenever we ask those questions, at publishing companies or events, it's rare to find editorial staff who answer yes. The content industry is filled with love-hate relationships between users and their critical tech, people resentful of the CMS they have, but who know so many of its quirks after years of use that migrating to a new system seems even scarier.
Ugh. Basically, for editorial teams CMS are often necessary evils, not valued workmates.
That's a shame, but not a big surprise. While any serious publishing operation needs its CMS to wear many hats, to suit marketing, product development, subscription and ad strategies, data usage, and much more, it is the long-suffering editorial users creating and crafting content that run into CMS shortcomings most abruptly. It's essentially their "office", after all.
More than any other users, content teams have to deal with content disappearing or not being where it should be, observing how 10-minute jobs can drag on far longer, how stories get buried by Google because they were slow to get published, and how new ideas get spiked because the effort of doing them is just too much. It is usually them who sense audience disappointment first.
If editorial users are unhappy with their CMS, they may silently knuckle down and find workarounds - but no workaround hides the momentum and revenue lost if they are blocked from making the things audiences love.
After all, what use is content if it is not being seen?
So read on for insight into getting a better CMS for editorial people - avoiding disappointment down the line, and working better with your tech team to get a system which actually helps you achieve happier audiences.
They say you shouldn't criticise someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes. The jokey version goes that you can then be as rude as you want because you're a mile away, and you've got their shoes! Jokes aside, understanding the realities and challenges your tech team routinely face will help you get a much better CMS and supercharge your eventual combined productivity — finally allowing editorial and technology to pull in the same direction.
Gasp! Was that our secret we all kept from the bosses? That editorial teams and tech teams are sometimes at loggerheads over their CMS? Finger pointing, arguing, blame shifting? Yup, it happens. Should anyone be surprised, when editorial and tech are often asked for such contradictory things and pretty much set up for one of them to lose? Neither 'side' likes it. Believe me, as much as editorial hates working with a bad CMS, so does tech - yet they also have to try and "fix" it while being obliged to pay for it too.
Putting yourself in the shoes of your tech team will give you insight into the often insurmountable challenges tech teams historically face. Not all CMS are the same you see. In fact despite doing very similar things, two separate CMS even within the same publishing company could easily share not a single line of code and leverage totally different concepts and tech. In layman terms, one's written in Finnish while the other is calculus and herbs.
Why should that matter to you in editorial and content teams?
Well, these days it shouldn't (we'll come back to that) but in the past big publisher and news CMSs, and the entwined spaghetti of customisations required to make them work better, were an interlaced mish-mash of multiple different people's work. The progress meter of development would show code and libraries written years apart and mixing the efforts of open source, in-house teams, 3rd party vendors, individual devs, and off-the-shelf components and integrations. And if the whole thing was built from scratch... well, that's the sort of money that could have funded a suite of new product launches, and the complexity to make CTOs go prematurely grey.
Anyways, want the good news? The newest cloud SaaS CMS end all those problems. They are good enough in out-of-the-box form to match or exceed the best in-house systems built over years, at a fraction of the cost, and flexible enough to never need bespoking.
The new breed of CMS are all about letting you and your tech colleagues focus on your audiences, working together and benefiting from a system of opportunity not hamstrung by a system of obligation. The imperative for CMS today is to exhibit qualities that ensure wins for both the business and the consumer, for content people and for technology teams. In short, they should make your life better and proactively help you out-fox and out-box your competition.
So let's take a look at how you can turn these market changes to your advantage, and be friends again with your tech team.
To get the best from the new CMS transforming the ways of getting content out to the world, it's vital that editorial teams are actively engaged with the change process as early as possible — or you risk frittering away many of the benefits new tech can bring.
We've seen how editorial teams can become disengaged from technical progress on projects, by choice or otherwise. When that happens, the chances of being given the keys to a shiny new system that actually feels like it was conceived with insight into your role are slim.
There's precious little room for sentimentality in a busy publishing environment: be prepared to get a bit pushy before the new tools arrive to make sure you are up to speed in how they work and advocate for your people and the changes you want to see. Get stuck in!
This isn't about asking for different fonts or prettier buttons in your CMS. We're talking about how to transform the creation and distribution of your content for the better. Embrace the changes it allows: take your tech leads for lunch, ask what capabilities it has and what problems it solves for them. You'll have a better understanding of their position if you have insight that it - say - will save hundreds of thousands a year in hosting costs alone, and significantly speed up the sites and channels it controls.
Engage with the possibilities the CMS opens up. You can now create all your content digital first? Great! It's the most efficient method, and nowadays it's trivial for a system like Glide to flow content onwards into print, so you get rid of multiple content creation workflows and repeated work.
And get excited! Excite your team, excite your commercial people — the CMS landscape is changing more now than in the last 20 years. Freed of old commitments to manage old tech, your business and team can unleash your ambition for your content — but you have to grasp the opportunity.
Glide CEO Denis Haman started his career in publishing as a Production "bod" at The Sunday Times broadsheet in the mid-1990s. He and his colleagues made sure off-stone times were hit, separations were present on colour pages, tabloid sections were correctly paired and sent to print, and basically make sure the paper come out.
On reflection, Denis can't say with certainty they were all particularly appreciated by other editorial staff, given that much of what The Production Bods did looked a bit boring and out of sight from the cut and thrust of the newsroom.
But what they also did, often unseen, was develop and configure in-house print CMS, optimise workflows, architect and mastermind technical projects, manage flatplans and adplans, and overall keep the whole frenetic show on the road. They were also the last line of defence in ensuring the paper looked good, often catching pesky literals or fixing widows and orphans. Backroom staff? More like backroom heroes!
As digital publishing advanced, but making money from publishing became harder, production departments were often the early casualties to the savings axe. Dedicated subbing teams were often the first thing skipped, with the reasoning that headlines for machines are easier than headlines for humans - early SEO advice rarely involved making the writing more complex or engaging.
Production needs however have not disappeared, and the critical bods now have different titles more redolent of the age: SEO Specialists; Homepage Editors; Social Media Managers; Journalists.
Yup, Journalists are now part of the Production crew too. To ensure targets are met, digital (or digital-first) journalists now need to be considerably more production savvy then their peers were a decade ago. Writing a good headline now requires the skill and understanding of today's more sophisticated SEO. And they need social media savvy to get that content shared on social, as well as the analytics nous to learn what content works and why it works.
Amongst all this, having the knowledge of the CMS to know what content to surface where and how to make the site sing is just another weapon in the armoury.
For the journalists of tomorrow, it is no longer optional to be hands off with any of these topics to be successful. A good CMS will make a lot of this easy or even automate large parts of it — but it's something journalists need to be vocal about getting access to.
It's natural to get fired up thinking about all the cool new things a modern CMS will let you do. But don't ignore the old content and data you have tucked away — it can become fresh again.
Old content and data gets archived out of CMS for lots of reasons, most commonly because at some point it just stopped making financial sense to migrate it from one system to another. Migrations can be time consuming and costly and when faced with a giant library of ancient data which might not have been seen for years and now needs a lot of cleaning to make work in a new system, well...let's it can fall down the pecking order.
If there was no burning ambition within the Editorial Team to use the legacy data or build revenue around it, then it likely never going to be revived. But newer systems and cloud tech can make legacy content worth dusting down and investing in again.
From an SEO perspective, site authority and rankings can be significantly aided by the sort of quality content which an established publisher will have in its archives: you can cherry-pick the best to boost authority on topics you choose, and give search engine spiders more to get their teeth into in areas you want to rate highly.
And we haven't even mentioned how AI engines may want to get their teeth on it - hard to do a deal with an AI firm if you don't even know what content you have or have access to it.
Old results, old listings, old articles, old features, old image libraries — all things which underpinned your brand success for years — are just the stuff to help move your site out of the shadows and into the light if you're up against some tough competition from upstarts.
Additionally, modern CMS are so easy to flow data into and use that entire new data-driven products are now viable when they could not be in the past when data was cheap but using it was expensive and such things needed separate CMS or custom tooling to manage.
Today, new cloud CMSs with flexible APIs, like Glide, manage complex data as smoothly as any other content, dropping the investment barrier to a fraction of historical levels.
If you have reams of old data tucked away in a vault, it's time to start seeing what you can do with it.
In the milieu of rolling out a new CMS within a major publisher, it's easy for editorial training to focus on what your team needs for Day One, and not much more. But don't stop at learning just what you need to to get going: today's modern cloud SaaS CMS grow new features at such a pace compared to old monolith and in-house systems.
As an example, Glide makes between 25 and 30 releases per year, with features large and small which open up new ways to work with content and do more with it.
To ensure there's no loss of opportunity, we think it vital that one or two of your key editorial staff should be as up to speed with your CMS's capabilities as anyone on your company's technical team is. Those people can in turn help editors and colleagues really kickstart new ideas and plans based on the new features, or be the people who get hands-on to work the levers on sites and apps.
Why? While tech staff can know CMS intimately, they can't be expected to predict editorial plans and ideas like content people can. Knowing what's possible will lead to more "Ahh! So now we can do that!" moments which spur growth.
'That' might be a new paywall strategy, or catering to a new platform, or using legacy data more, or covering events in new ways.
We'll be the first to admit that CMS training struggles to captivate minds like your new products will, but the two are interlinked and build on each other when planning new products.
In the old ways of CMS tech, you had an idea and worked out if the CMS could do it. Now, CMS tech should proactively lead you to new avenues to play in.
Know the CMS, know the future!
We have spent time in this instalment outlining how any new CMS should cut problems and workload for editorial and tech teams in equal measure. So what are the best ways for you to magnify those benefits and turn savings into growth?
It's all well and good to strip away a massive tranche of costly low-yield work from developer plates while speeding things for editorial and making content go further - but Glide's philosophy is that helping developers and editorial people work closer together is when the magic happens. This is where you, they, and your colleagues from product, form a train of new ideas and new products, and are able to build and test them quickly to see what works and what doesn't.
This is revolutionary. Previously, the pace and cost of CMS development was such an impediment to front-end product growth that it skewered lots of ideas before they got going: it's hard to make a business case for a new idea if the proof of concept takes three months of CMS bespoking just to get up and running.
We want you to be able to see results in days or weeks, and trust test results to make informed decisions on turning dummies into launches. When this is the norm, you look to tech and product team meetings with enthusiasm.
Earlier we highlighted why having a CMS expert in Team Editorial pays off big, and this is a perfect example. Imagine being able to sit with tech/product personnel and saying "I know the system allows this, so here's how I think we can turn that into a new launch...."
It reshapes the nature of the conversation.
So after launching with your new CMS — don't sit back and reflect. Get the meetings booked, and start targeting the new things you can do.
This is part 2 of Glide's three-part series to finding your perfect publishing system.
Part 1 - Editorial teams: How to get better a CMS and better results
Part 3 - Product teams: Build faster, test quicker, and launch more
See how the Glide headless CMS enables your tech, editorial and product teams focus on business objectives, not broken technology. Request a demo today.
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No matter where you are on your CMS journey, we're here to help. Want more info or to see Glide Publishing Platform in action? We got you.
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