Editorial platforms
A publication is an archive before it is a homepage, and the archive is the part that has to survive the rebuild.
What this is
Newsrooms that editors can run without us.
The failure mode of a newsroom site is not design. It is a system where publishing anything slightly unusual, a live blog, a correction, an author who is also a source, an article that must be unpublished, requires a developer. Editors then route around the system, and the structure you designed decays into a single free-text field within a year.
So the content model comes first and it is built with the people who will use it. Sections, authors, categories and articles as real records rather than tags on a blob; corrections and updates as first-class events; preview that shows exactly what will publish. Structure that an editor can actually work inside is structure that stays intact, and it is also what makes an archive searchable a decade later.
The front end has a narrower job than it looks: be fast on a phone on mobile data, be readable, and stay that way as the archive grows from hundreds of pieces to tens of thousands. That is mostly a rendering and caching decision, and it is made early because it is expensive to reverse.
What’s involved
- Content modelling
- Articles, sections, authors, categories and the relationships between them, designed against how the newsroom actually files copy.
- Editorial workflow
- Drafts, scheduling, embargoes, corrections and live preview, including who is allowed to do what.
- Archive, search and feeds
- Pagination that survives scale, on-site search, RSS and sitemaps, and stable URLs the archive can be cited by.
- Distribution
- Newsletters, social cards and syndication, wired to the same records rather than maintained separately.
How it usually goes
- 01Audit the existing archive
- What exists, how much of it, and which URLs currently earn attention.
- 02Model with the editors
- In a room with the people who file copy. A content model designed without them is a content model they will work around.
- 03Build, migrate, verify
- The new system, the old content moved into it, and a redirect map checked against the live site rather than assumed.
- 04Train and hand over
- The newsroom publishes without us before we consider it delivered.
What we won’t do
- We will not put a paywall in front of content the publication has a public-interest reason to give away, without saying so first.
- We will not design a model that requires a developer to publish an ordinary article.
- We will not migrate an archive without a verified redirect map. Losing indexed URLs is losing the audience that came with them.
Where we’ve done it
- Business Report
An independent Kenyan business publication, rebuilt as a server-rendered newsroom its editors run themselves.
- COFEK
A rebuild of cofek.africa for the country’s consumer watchdog, an organisation whose credibility is the product.
Next
If this is the shape of your problem, describe the part that breaks if it isn’t right.
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