Posted by djudd on June 4, 2009 at 2:15pm
I'm wondering if anyone here can offer a little advice on handling something as simple as an author byline in our workflow.
Our reporters write their stories in NewsEditPro from MediaSpan, and later on in the day our editors drop those into our InDesign pages. Those same editors also handle uploading the stories to our website everynight. This leaves me with the problem of the story being entered by someone who didn't write it.
Is there a slick way to handle getting the right author name on a story?
I'm just wondering what other people in the industry are doing before I go trying to re-invent the wheel.
Comments
author cck field
How about just adding a noderefernce to the article that points to the author user/node?
Also, by pure coincidence, there is a new module that came out a couple of hours before you posted this question: http://drupal.org/project/cck_author - of course I haven't seen it yet, but it might be helpful for you in the future.
Fielded data?
Can NewsEditPro support fielded data?
We use IQue (also from Mediaspan) at some of our newspapers, and we're modifying its standard configuration to include a discrete field for the byline. Transporter exports the data as an Atom feed. When we load it into Drupal, the byline is actually treated as a term in an author vocabulary. (For editorial nodes, ownership != authorship in our system). This allows presentation of all a reporter's bylined stories as a taxonomy term page.
Separately, we associate staff user accounts with taxonomy terms, allowing a "mini-profile" on the taxonomy term page to link automatically to the reporter's /user profile page.
The version of NewsEditPro
The version of NewsEditPro we use is several years old. Up until recently, no one was really interested in our website, so it's only been since I took over IT duties that we've had any real focus on the web.
Our version of NEP is basically a glorified database with no central server. It doesn't support XML in any way, so there's no real way to tie our editorial system to the website.
Perhaps when the economy begins to recover we can look at updating our software.
yhager, thanks for the tip on the module. I'm interested in seeing where that goes. I had considered using CCK, but was curious if there was something more common in the industry first.
Thanks.
NewsEngin
You might take a look at NewsEngin, which is hosted in the Amazon cloud and costs $20/month per login (no capital required). It's designed for multimedia newsroom operations, integrates with InDesign, outputs any format you like. We're preparing to move reporting operations onto NewsEngin in Topeka, feeding DTI for pagination and Drupal for Web.