Emmanuelle Chevallereau, Editor in chief at Le Monde / rédactrice en chef en charge des publications numériques au Monde
Jesse Lewis, Multiplatform editing chief at The Washington Post / chef d’édition multi plates-formes au Washington Post
Poul Madsen, Executive Editor in chief at EkstraBladet / rédacteur en chef exécutif à EkstraBladet
Moderator / Modérateur : Jean-François Fogel, Associate professor at Sciences Po Journalism School / professeur associé à l’Ecole de journalisme de Sciences Po
CMS = real change or just improvement ?
Chevallereau (Le Monde) : new statistics that gives information about what people read. In Le Monde their editorial comes first but data and new tools of the CMS are really helpful to improve the content.
Poul Madsen (EkstraBladet) : it is fifty – fifty. Even in our company we couldn’t create one CMS for everybody. The main problem is that it’s too complicated for journalists to use a CMS designed for everybody.
Jesse Lewis (The Washington Post) : real change. Now everybody can be connected within the CMS. It is faster than ever. “With the new CMS, reporters have more control over their stories… As long as there’s good internet connection, the reporter can connect all the elements [of a story] inside the CMS” (…) Reporters can work faster, do more stories, and get more feedback than in the past« .
What should be in the CMS and what should be left out of the CMS ?
Chevallereau (Le Monde) : The more you put in the CMS, the more power you give to the journalists. « If you put more fonctions into the CMS, you give more power to the journalist and less power to non-journalist experts« . People in the newsroom were afraid the metrics would give too much power to the advertisers etc. In fact, the opposite happened. These data and new tools gave new opportunities.
Madsen (EkstraBladet) : inside the CMS we have the tool to do simple infographics and everything, so very helpful.
Lewis (The Washington Post) : again, with the CMS you are giving more power to the reporters on their work. With access to Twitter, you can share on Twitter at the same time the article is published.
Is it still possible to think about a single publishing system ?
Lewis (The Washington Post) : You have to go on multi platforms to get the audience now. We saw it before Facebook changed its algorithm.
Madsen (EkstraBladet) : from our point, if you have money to get a multi platform CMS, you can be everywhere.
Chevallereau (Le Monde) : we have multi platform tools. In our CMS, our editors can know in the mean time if an article is taking off, and then we can take it higher or put it on social media. It was a big job for journalists before and now it is very fast for journalists to spread all the information on all the devices.
Will CMS give us better journalism ?
« These tools are helping journalists by giving them more opportunities to tell their stories and to have people read their stories » answers Poul Madsen (EkstraBladet). According to him, the problem with today’s CMSs is that journalists are asked to do everything around publishing, but some time they should be kept for reporting.
Crédits photo : Jules Boudier