Closing a Chapter on Newscoop, Our Original Newsroom Management System
Since its inception in 2001, Newscoop has powered media organisations around the world. As one of our first instances of a digital newsroom software, it has helped Sourcefabric become Europe’s largest developer of open-source tools for media and journalism. Although we are entering a new era with Superdesk Publisher, our next-generation platform for digital journalism, we must first close the chapter on Newscoop.
Newscoop is an open-source CMS aimed at optimising the functions of a newsroom. With an enterprise-standard journalist’s dashboard and a templating engine that supported formats ranging from HTML5 to mobile, Newscoop made efficiency and flexibility standard parts of our publishing software. Newscoop’s open technology has been innovative in itself. .Some of its key features include:
• multiple author management
• issue- and section-based publishing
• geolocation
• multilingual content management
As of September 2017, we will no longer be developing or supporting Newscoop ourselves, although the code will remain available to be forked on GitHub. To close this chapter, we would like to take a moment to recognise the contributions Newscoop made to digital journalism among independent media organisations worldwide, since the most important element of its legacy are the stories that journalists have been able to tell.
Open source in the Balkans
One of the more intriguing Newscoop clients is Insajder, a transparency-focused media organisation based in Belgrade, Serbia. Insajder was originally an investigative TV program whose authors created more than 120 episodes that aired between 2004 and 2015 on TV B92. With the help of Newscoop, the creators of Insajder interviewed more than 500 people and displayed over 1,000 items of evidence of fraud, graft and crime in Serbia and the region.
Powering online newsrooms in Latin America
Similar to Insajder, El Faro offers an award-winning mix of investigative reporting and longform journalism about crime and corruption, only in El Salvador. Founded in 1998, El Faro was the first ever online-only news site in Central America. Carlos Dada, El Faro’s editorial director, had this to say about Newscoop: "Sourcefabric's content management system has made publishing so easy for us that we now have more time to focus on the important stuff: producing high-quality journalism."
Further to the south, Brasil 247 delivers a daily mix of local and national news from all over Brazil. Brasil 247 is another longstanding Newscoop client. We have worked with the editorial team over the years to keep improving the site, especially in terms of being more responsive and easier to navigate for readers. Those efforts paid off. Earlier this year, Brasil 247 achieved the milestone of reaching 4 million daily visitors. Over 70% of its traffic comes from returning visitors, who spend an average of six and a half minutes on the site.
Enhancing digital accessibility through open-source media management
Our open-source culture and innovative mindset has also come to one of our own backyards: Berlin. This is where Kobinet Nachrichten (KN) fits into the Newscoop puzzle. The largest German-language website dedicated to news for people with disabilities, Newscoop helped KN meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Hubertus Thomasius, Kobinet Nachrichten’s head of IT, stated that "Newscoop lends itself particularly well for developing responsive CSS and this adds to the attractiveness of the CMS for developers looking to build accessible websites."
Efficient custom solutions
Our Swiss client TagesWoche originally approached Sourcefabric with the brief of building a convergence of news feeds, editorial content, and community input that published effortlessly to print, online, and mobile platforms. When asked what he appreciated most about his experience of working with Sourcefabric, chief editor Remo Leupin responded: “The efficiency of their problem-solving and their openness towards unconventional ideas from the editorial team."
As we mentioned, Superdesk Publisher will pick up where Newscoop leaves off. If you want to learn more about our new multi-channel publishing platform, go ahead and visit Superdesk Publisher now.
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