Who, what, when, where and why

Rewriting, refactoring and resource allocation.

Sourcefabric's CTO Paul Baranowski looks at the current tech stack for Newscoop, looks at the big picture and answers that ancient question: should we rewrite or refactor our code?

Digital Radio Week at the EBU.

The European Broadcasting Union hosted the Digital Radio Week event in Geneva, Switzerland. Standardization around an open source and royalty-free codec could be just what the radio industry needs to make the switch from analogue to digital happen on a global scale.

Frequency response: Community radio and tactical media.

What future is there for independent radio? Adam Thomas, Community Manager at Sourcefabric and organiser of the Test Signals festival, reviews the Test Signals conference at transmediale. In a digital age characterised by live status updates and connectivity, the festival set out to question both our ability to respond to and our responsibility to act on threats against our freedom. The Radio Tactics panel set out to discuss both the obligation towards, and means to support, independent broadcasting.

Mapping and geolocation with Newscoop 3.5.

One of the major features in Sourcefabric’s Newscoop 3.5 has to do with “geolocation,” which is another way of saying “maps.” The new mapping features let reporters and editors mark a point (or points) on a map where a story happened, and it lets web developers and journalists create maps that can display those points for the single article or for all the articles in the issue or section (and lots of other variations too).

You might ask “what’s so special about that? Why can’t we just use Google Maps and call it a day?” The answer to that has to do with what you as a publisher believe will make you money not just now, but in the future as well.

Widgets and thinking like a dandelion.

Douglas Arellanes sets out the importance of "thinking like a dandelion" in the newsroom. Sourcefabric's CMS Newscoop  has widgets created for common functions like managing articles, RSS feeds and authors to achieve just this.

Radio journalism and Africa's democratic process.

We live in challenging times, says Jonathan Marks. Just as newspapers in Europe and North America are looking for new business models, broadcasters and publishers in developing countries need to re-examine the way they operate, especially as funding from non-government organisations is either reduced or drying up altogether.

A magazine theme does not a magazine make.

Providing services on Newscoop - it's easier than you think.

I recently had to do a round of "speed geeking" at a conference. "Speed geeking" is a play on "speed dating," where you get two minutes to pitch for a software project and hope that it resonates with people. While making my pitch, one speedy geek asked me, "Newscoop is cool, but why should I invest time and effort into learning it when I've already invested a great deal of time and effort in learning how to develop for <$CMS_name>?"

My very short answer was: "Because it's not about your needs. It's about your client's needs."

Journalism is back.

Lone, brave, alternative blogger voices are out. Leaner, and proverbially meaner, newspapers high on tablets (as well as profit-churning, too-tough-to-die TV and radio) are in. Structure, long form and paywalls are in vogue, freeform and free are out. Old-school trumps new ... Journalism is back.

Exploring new forms for radio and software

ON2: Test Signals brought together software developers and radio practitioners to demonstrate, discuss and develop new ways of applying software to radio over three days in October 2010 in Berlin.

Campsite is HTML5 / CSS3 ready

The big challenge for CMS web publishing today is the migration of sites to HTML5 and CSS3. Where other CMS systems struggle to clean up their code and alter their skins and templates, Campsite is HTML5 ready out of the box. The key to Campsite’s flexibility is our enterprise level templating engine.

Django Software Stack

We have been looking in to what software stack to use for our next web products. This discussion used to be (oh, 5-10 years ago) a lot simpler, mainly involving choosing an operating systems, a language, and a database. But now it’s about higher-level things like out-of-the-box support for commenting, activity streams, ajax, cloud storage and a whole lot more.

The future of radio is now: ON festival Basel, 14 - 19 June

Find our more about the radio event at ART|Basel. And stay tuned to updates and links about the future of radio, coming up in this article, such as streams, mindmaps, etc.