Photo: Adomas Aleno | Unsplash
Building a centralized content sharing platform for newsrooms
Making discoverability, republishing and sharing a priority
Big thanks to our Climate News Task Force partners who helped us ideate the feature list, conduct interviews and gather input to inform the needs assessment phase of this project.
Though widgets, pixels and collaboratives have tried to make it easier for newsrooms to republish each other’s work; a centralized, efficient and reliable way to make it happen has proven elusive. Newsrooms are often emailing each other or cutting and pasting from each other’s websites to share and republish content; which is time consuming, clunky and requires having someone dedicated to discovering or sharing the work to get it republished.
Addressing this need was one of the biggest takeaways from interviews and a survey RJI and the Climate News Task Force did over the past few months to conduct a needs assessment for the ideal content republishing tool. We talked directly with and received input from a variety of professional newsrooms, student newsrooms and journalism organizations across the country. These included the Chilkat Valley News, The City, KOSU Radio, Deep South Today, WNCN and 32 others.
We are setting out to build a platform to not only make it easier for newsrooms to share work for republishing, but to expand the reach, impact and discoverability of republishable content that aligns with your values, mission and audience. Before we began building, we wanted to make sure that we had a solid idea of what newsrooms actually need, and don’t need, in such a tool. We asked newsrooms what tools, widgets or plugins work well for them now, what about their current republishing system they like and, looking forward, what features they’d want if we built a new one.
Overwhelmingly we found that even newsrooms that tried to utilize a widget or a republish button with a pixel (which is supposed to make it easy to find where your content was republished) still spent too much time looking for republishable work, trying to get their republishable work to others and often, skipping the plugins to just cut and paste. We heard repeatedly that one huge downside of current systems is that the buttons/pixels/plugins don’t easily include data visualizations, videos, or interactives. And the tracking abilities of these to accurately measure republishings also seems to be very hit or miss, with a lot of people saying that they don’t work most of the time.
Another major takeaway was that a lot of newsrooms primarily only republish text with photos, but would love to be able to republish data visualizations. After data visualizations, video was the next priority.
Interviewees also emphasized that it is time consuming to find republishable work, even from regular collaborators, as it takes a lot of time to scan multiple websites to see what would be interesting or important for their audiences, cut and paste the relevant content and then republish it. So discoverability was also a top priority, with many interviewees highlighting that they’d like the platform we build to make content highly discoverable with a kick-butt search function that includes keywords, location, topics and type of media content to help them find republishable content faster and more accurately.
We asked interviewees to prioritize potential features from an initial list. Here were a few of the features they ranked highest after discoverability and ability to share data viz:
- Ability to send/recieve corrections on content shared or republished
- Ability to track/see who has downloaded/republished a piece of content
- Ability to identify rights/usage restrictions on photos, videos and data visualizations
- Ability to restrict editing to just the headline, lede/local hook or nothing at all
A few other potential features that surfaced organically during these conversations were:
- Ability to set up alerts for content from certain newsrooms, locations or topics
- Ability to message newsrooms on the platform to suggest more in-depth collaborations
- Ability for freelancers to track republishings of their work by their byline, since the work was most likely submitted by a newsroom they worked with
- Ability to send an alert to tell newsrooms on the platform if you are planning to cover a big event others might want to plan for and republish
Features that interviewees said would be nice, but not vital, were being able to upload stories in multiple languages, set embargos on content and set expiration dates on content.
Our next step is to bring a developer on board who wants to help us build this platform. We’re looking for a developer that will help us design it from the ground up to make it as easy and accessible for hundreds of newsrooms across the country to find, share and republish journalism.
If you have a suggestion for a feature you’d like included that we don’t mention here, a developer you think would be a good fit, or just want to reach out to get on our list to get updates on this project: email me.
Cite this article
Duncan, Kat (2025, Aug. 25). Building a centralized content sharing platform for newsrooms. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/building-a-centralized-content-sharing-platform-for-newsrooms/
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