Newspapers on Drupal

What a great group to start up. I'm the Internet Manager for Gold Country Media, a collection of newspapers on the outskirts of Sacramento, most notably the Auburn Journal, although I'm located in Roseville. I've been a lurker in the Drupal community for months, but now that I've committed pretty much all our future web-based projects to the Drupal platform, I wanted to start interacting with others who could help me hack through this jungle. We hopefully will have our first Drupal project launched in February.

I've made test installations of Drupal before and, frankly, found its philosophies and implementation confusing, unfriendly and unnecessarily techy (concepts not explained in English). The prospect of editing themes and tinkering to achieve custom results seemed daunting.

Now I see this group, I'd like to ask your views on using Drupal to run an online news(paper) for journalism school students. That is, something with which undergrads can be introduced to and would practice the fundamentals of online journalism, from story publishing to blogging.

Hello all, I'm the interactive director at McClatchy's Lowcountry Newspapers, The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette. We were the instigators of McClatchy's adoption of Drupal as a community publishing platform, and have continued to use it not only for blogs and story comments, but also as a general application platform.

Hi, I am Engel Sanchez from Solunion Group, based in Dominican Republic and working for several online newspapers in Latin America en USA Latino. I am a fan of Drupal. I am just waiting for the 5.0 general release version so I can start playing with it for some sites. All current newspapers use another solution, and I want to evaluate our direction, going with drupal or keep our current cms.

Engel Sanchez
Solunion Group

Thank you, Nikolai, for setting up this group.

My name is Jason Erdahl and I'm Director of Technology at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Like Andy, my paper is a part of the McClatchy Newspaper chain as well.

We recently rolled out our first Drupal site, buzz.mn, a community site for neighborhoods/cities in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area.

Given that YourHub.com has built a nice business out of reverse publishing (or "multi-purpose publishing", as we call it here) its online products to print, we're very interested in the discussions here on using Drupal to drive content to our print system, DTI. We've had some success in driving content from vita.mn to its companion print product, but it's not pretty. :-)

...or what are Service links (http://drupal.org/project/service_links) in the Drupal world.

http://www.techmeme.com/061211/p11#a061211p11

Hi,

I'm Geoff Burke. I am the Web Manager for the Georgia Straight newspaper, an 40-year-old alternative weekly in Vancouver Canada.

We went live on Drupal 4.7 at the beginning of November (www.straight.com) after going through quite an arduous project to move over more than 20,000 articles from our home-grown IIS/MS-SQL/Coldfusion system. Our biggest challenge was creating a module that displayed articles by section (news, music, Movies, etc.) for a given issue. Teething problems mostly now aside, things seem to be just fine.

We (like everybody) are still trying to figure out our direction on the web. But, I moved us to Drupal with the idea that, while not having everything we need as a newspaper, it should be flexible enough to rapidly build what we need. It's been a steep learning curve however, luckily, we have some great Drupal resources here in Vancouver who have helped us.

I'm Andy Perdue from the Tri-City Herald in Washington state, USA. I'm the interactive media director here. We're part of McClatchy, and Drupal is a big part of our current and future strategy. I currently run four Drupal-powered sites, three for the newspaper and one for a nonprofit group with which I'm affiliated.

One of our more interesting projects is TriCityForum.com, a free-flowing, Drupal-powered forum that coincides with our Saturday editorial page (which has the same name). The page pushes people to the Web site, and the Web site drives content for the page.

As the introductions continue I'd like to start a substantive discussion: What roles can/should Drupal play as a content management system for print output?

Here's some context: I've been involved for the last couple of months in a background conversation in which one of the memes is the need for a single, unified system that can output to Web, print, audio, video and as-yet-to-be-defined channels.

I'm going to quote (without attribution) from a private email:

"It would be wonderful if a one-person weekly newspaper journalist could cover the news and write it up (with photos, video, audio clips) in a clever content management interface that would, in some wonderfully automated way, result in not only the production of a Web site, but also the creation of packaged files from which a low power FM broadcast can run, a community access cable TV program can air and, of course, a newspaper can be printed."