It's 10 p.m. - Do you know where your CMS is?

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Comment by Jack Beaudoin on January 19, 2009 at 2:44pm

Amen, David. I should have been clearer in my original post that we're a small B2B publisher and our internal motto is "I'll do it." We've found ourselves in the mercy position, and we've learned the kinds of things our vendors told us we didn't need to lean because we couldn't get them -- the vendors -- to accommodate us. Or we could, but it was prohibitively expensive. Or prohibitively slow. Nobody cares about your business the way you do.
Having said that, we've got a couple of EXCELLENT vendors who truly give us a hands-off experience.

Comment by David Cardillo on January 19, 2009 at 2:32pm

It's been my job in the past to provide exactly the kinds of solutions I'm frequently asking of my current IT staff, so it unnerves me to no end when I get the response, "I'm sorry, Dave, but I'm afraid I can't do that." The #&$* you can't - I used to do it daily.

It took me about 10 minutes to root my company desktop (another hour to hide it real well, shhh...). I remote login to our printers and tweak settings. I poke enough in things to cause the guys who currently have the job I used to at least some mild aggravation - it sure would concern the hell out of me. Though, it probably helps a bit that I'm the first stop for everyone in my group for all things technological. (lack of toner among them)

Do I need to know any of this? It's complete Greek to people who are better at my current job than me. But when I ask for more disk space, I don't accept "no" for an answer, because I know how easy is [or should be] to add more. When FedEx comes to demo their new web interface for shipping, and smugly declares "the Macintosh doesn't work," I know enough to look at the sophomoric code and notice that none of their <form> tags are closed.

Is it necessary for an editor to know how to use tables in InDesign? Is is necessary for most endusers to know the name(s) of their incoming/outgoing e-mail routers? Is it necessary for your plumber to know how to use an excavator? (ask my sister-in-law that one)

I think the point of the question was, do you know what's possible? Do you know that you shouldn't format columnar data with tabs or (gods forbid) spaces, though you may not know how to set it up? Do you know how to get your work e-mail on the new laptop you just bought, when it's 4 am on Sunday? Do you know to be careful of the sewer main when you dig, or where it might lie?

I'm not a retoucher, but I know more than enough Photoshop to know what's feasible (no, you can't clone in the top of your cover model's head).

A friend once told me that if you ever think of owning a restaurant, you'd better be prepared to step in and cook when your chef says he's walking without more money. See, it's also about being at someone else's mercy. I don't mean to disparage you or your company - what makes truly responsible, competent people stand out is accountability, and transparency. I know you're doing a good job, because I can see it. The only way I know I'm talking to someone honest is when I check what they're telling me.

Comment by Sean Fulton on January 2, 2009 at 1:12pm

I disagree with the idea that an editor must know these technologies to do his or her job. As a former editor for many years at a large publishing company, the only times I was forced to take matters into my own hands was when corporate (be it IT or the web department) was unable or unwilling to do what we needed doing in the time frame we needed.

Now as a CMS vendor to the publishing community, I see exactly the same thing. Large companies hindered by over-worked IT departments, or smaller companies that choose incompetent vendors to develop their online solutions. Usually it's not so much that the companies are incompetent, just that they do not understand the needs of an editorial team well enough to meet them successfully.

I can say without hesitation that our customers do not take CSS or PHP in hand on any of the sites we have built unless management specifically tells them to for cost reasons (ie., they would rather have someone in-house make changes then pay us to do so).

We provide training to editorial, art and production teams on how to update and manage their sites, but because of the excellent, Enterprise-class software we use, and the fact that our team understands the underlying business goals of a publication web site, the site is built so that editors can do what they need to do without learning the underlying technology--ie., it's built properly.

I've been doing this for 12 years, in my experience, people who feel like you two do have just had bad experiences, either with your vendors or with your in-house resources. But those experiences--while I agree are wide-spread--are not universally true and you should not settle for a life like that.

After all, editors are skilled at collecting and processing facts, not code.

It's like people who say they don't like red wine, for most of them it's just because they've never had good red wine.

Anyway, Happy New Year!

Comment by Keith Gregory on December 11, 2008 at 10:57pm

Jack- I would agree with your take on knowing about the CMS for the non technical people. When I was at Source Media, the person I worked with started life out as a stats editor, and slowly taught himself html PERL and some other programming & web languages, and he slowly built out our groups websites.

Now, this wasn't the standard operating process for the company- it was a bit of stealth development going on as there was a central group for development, and if other publishers saw what our group was doing with essentially its own in house developer, they would have wanted their own- at least I would have hoped given our site revenue was in the A class of sites.

But the key is we were able to develop new offerings quickly with short discussions between myself on the sales side and my stats editor turned web product manager colleague. I tend to think online is about coming up with lots of good ideas, and trying them. They should be cheap enough to build & try, unlike in the print world.

Now with AviationWeek.com, I have had to figure out different ways of trying to create customized offerings for advertisers without becoming bogged down in projects that don't move- life in a big company. But, one of the tools we use for our blogs is Pluck. And finally, after numerous discussions, I have finally worked out a method that our developers can easialy support that allow us to offer advertisers their own sponsored blogs.

It was quite rewarding to give the presentation, and to have the client feedback be that they 'HAD to have it'!