Publishing
Le Figaro using Drupal
Le Figaro, the oldest and second-largest national newspaper in France, started using Drupal for its social features on http://www.lefigaro.fr. It is still using its old web content management system to serve its main content, but all of the social features such as comments on articles are now provided by Drupal.
I met the engineering team, including Le Figaro's Chief Technology Officer René Wallendorf, for lunch when I was in Paris last week, and they were very happy with Drupal. The integration project was delivered on time, within budget and was considerably cheaper than the alternative solutions they had investigated. All things combined, this should be a big win for Drupal, especially in France. Vraiment très cool!
Some of Le Figaro's print publications. Le Figaro is also the official translator of The New York Times, pictured in the middle of the photo.
Left: Chief Technology Office of Le Figaro. Right: the community manager of Le Figaro.
Forbes Russia using Drupal
The website of the Russian Forbes magazine was recently redesigned using Drupal. Ypa, ypa, ypa!
BBC using Drupal
BBC Magazines is the magazine publishing division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Turns out that they have a number of magazine websites built on Drupal:
- BBC Music Magazine
- BBC Countryfile Magazine
- BBC Focus Magazine
- BBC Who Do You Think You Are Magazine
- BBC History Magazine
- BBC Home And Antiques
Can you feel the love? (Hat tip: Usamah)
Linux Journal using Drupal and Mollom
Linux Journal is a monthly magazine focused specifically on Linux. Linux Journal switched to Drupal in 2005, and hasn't looked back since. Last year in October of 2008 Linux Journal decided to turn to Mollom to protect their site against spammers.
In a case study on Mollom.com, Linux Journal Webmistress Katherine Druckman looks back at one year of using Mollom, and explains how Mollom has helped the Linux Journal staff focus on building community, rather than having to deal with spam.
To give you an idea of how much pain spammers can inflict (and how much Mollom can help); there have been many days when Mollom has blocked almost 10k spam attacks against the Linux Journal website. Last year, Mollom blocked more than 1.5 million spam messages for Linux Journal alone.
Linux Journal was the first magazine to be published about Linux, and has been an important contributor to Linux' adoption. I started reading Linux Journal back in 1997, and I still read it today. We want these kind of publications to be wildly successful in promoting Open Source software. So on rainy Mondays like today, it is stories like this, that motivate me to work on Drupal and Mollom, and that make me hate spammers even more.
The Industry Standard using Drupal and Mollom
The online media industry continues to face readership and revenue challenges. They are burdened with the task of not only providing the content but gaining more user interaction in the form of reader comments. Comments by readers are beneficial to sites because they show created readership and mean more eyeballs to that particular page or article. For publishers, more eyeballs means more revenue.
The Industry Standard is a news and analysis site owned by IDG, a large publishing organization that publishes over 300 magazines in 85 countries!
The Industry Standard re-launched on Drupal in 2008 with the goal of engaging with new readers and encouraging them to contribute comments and content. They also wanted to allow readers to comment anonymously, something that most news sites do not do. The Industry Standard felt that anonymity gave readers more freedom to express their comments, and would encourage more frequent and detailed commentary while expanding traffic and tying the publication into the many other online conversations taking place around technology.
Ian Lamont, The Industry Standard's managing editor, had prior experience managing online communities, and knew that the relaunched publication would need a comment filter that could encourage quality comments while sifting out spam and trolls.
According to Lamont, having anonymous comments is hugely important to The Industry Standard. "We really believe that most people don't want to deal with the hassle of registration. Because we are relatively small, if we only had registered comments, there would be far less reader engagement on the site. As it is now, we can have dialogues with unregistered users, which is really important to building voice and an online identity."
The Industry Standard is using Mollom to help them remove the barrier to visitor participation, allowing readers to comment anonymously and eliminate spam vandalism. Since the re-launch in 2008, Mollom has blocked 800k spam messages in 539 days and blocked more than a thousand attempts a day with peaks up to several thousands a day. Cool!
Reuters using Drupal
Anyone who reads the news knows that Reuters is a major news agency; in fact, it is the world's largest international multimedia news agency.
It's also clear that Reuters is very interested in experimentation with "new media". They have established http://labs.reuters.com to package and highlight some of their technical innovations. Labs.reuters.com has an iPhone application, experimental social and community APIs, lots of semantic experimentation, and even a really neat "Face Search" application. The neatest thing, though, is that it runs on Drupal 6.
Let's think through this again. The world's largest international news agency uses Drupal to highlight the innovative features and applications they think they may want to deploy in the future. I don't know about you, but I like the way that sentence sounds.
CNN using Drupal
Cable news network CNN just released CNNgo.com into beta, fully developed with Drupal. CNNgo is a guide to six of Asia's greatest cities. What is interesting about the site is that they are looking to complement their professional editors with local bloggers, opinion makers, and the very people that form the soul of these cities.
As a traditional publisher, you have to figure out how to turn audiences into participants because it opens the doors for better advertising and new monetization opportunities. I think CNNgo.com is a great example of how companies like CNN can use the power of Drupal to implement a social media strategy through an add-on site.
