Einar Thorsen

Professor of Journalism and Communication at Bournemouth University

Publications | Conferences | Teaching | Projects

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Using WordPress as a news website v2 (list of 32 useful plugins)

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William Davis and Lauren Rabaino’s posts about how Bangor Daily News adopted WordPress (and indeed Google Docs*) as part of their publishing workflow (it even feeds InDesign) has inspired me to revisit my own post about using WordPress as a news website. That was a slightly crude list of plugins that might be useful in adding functionality to WordPress required to implement important features for journalism and effective newsroom routines.

We are currently embarking on a redevelopment of a news website for our postgraduate journalism programmes at Bournemouth University, so I welcome any thoughts and suggestions on experiences with the below plugins – or indeed how you have implemented WordPress as a news website in your organisation.

* I remain unconvinced by using Google Docs as part of an online news workflow since it removes the writing process from the hypertext environment of the story (read: digital storytelling). There are other benefits, for sure, including better ability for real-time collaboration and subediting, but I’m not certain those outweigh the negatives.

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Edit Flow – newsroom workflow plugin for WordPress

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I have just come across the Edit Flow plugin. Currently at version 0.5.3 it promises to deliver a unified plugin for implementing a newsroom workflow within WordPress. In other words:

  • Custom post statuses (e.g. assigned, draft, pending review, pitch, waiting for feedback).
  • Editorial comments to provide feedback on posts.
  • Email notification of changes to posts.
  • Custom user groups.
  • New post meta-data (e.g. description, due date, location etc).

The authors promises to bring additional features in the future and are currently conducting a survey to gauge priorities from their user base.

Currently the plugin offers similar features to what can be achieved from Peter’s Collaboration and Post Notes plugins, which I have used on other news websites. The idea of unifying these features in a single plugin specifically targeted at newsroom workflows is interesting though… and it will be interesting to see if this effort can provide an even better solution to this challenge. I’ve installed it and testing now.

Update: slides from Andrew Spittle describing the philosophy behind the plugin and functionality future releases.

How to show ads to only search engine visitors using Who Sees Ads – Weblog Tools Collection

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    Klint Finley:

    "Perennial Weblog Tools Collection community favorite Who Sees Ads can be used to show ads only to certain visitors – such as people who have arrived on your site from a search engine. It’s a useful way to improve your click-through-ratio, and please your regular readers by hiding ads from them.

    This is a quick introduction to using the plugin. Showing ads only to search engine visitors is extremely simple – Who Sees Ads can do much, much more. Check out the links at the end of this article for more information."

    External link

    Del.ici.us tags: wordpress wordpress-plugin advertising webdesign

Bringing Living Stories to WordPress – Google News Blog

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    Eric Zhang, Software Engineer at Google:

    "We first showcased Living Stories in December through a two-month-long experiment with the New York Times and Washington Post. We got great feedback from both readers and publishers. Our next step was to open-source the Living Stories format, allowing publishers to build on it using Google’s AppEngine infrastructure. We then released a version of the code that runs independent of our infrastructure. Since then, a number of publications have shared their ideas for ways we can offer additional tools to help them create Living Stories.

    The WordPress plugin is a direct result of those conversations. We hope the plug-and-play solution will make it easy for you to get a Living Story up and running in almost no time at all."

    External link

    Del.ici.us tags: google googlenews aggregator wordpress plugin news future