Publishing
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.
Content Here reports on Drupal
Content Here, a strategic research company founded by Seth Gottlieb, recently released its report called Drupal for Publishers, a twenty-four page "vendor neutral analysis" of how Drupal succeeds in meeting the unique needs of newspaper, magazine and radio/television sites. The report is available at Content Here's website, in return for a $100 fee via PayPal.
Drupal has had a lot of success in this market, and as the report notes:
In addition to growing, the Drupal community is changing. Originally used for small sites ranging from individual blogs to small community-of-interest sites, Drupal is being adopted as a publishing platform by big-name media sites with millions of unique visitors per month. Early adopters include theonion.com and mtv.co.uk, both with high traffic volumes that silenced doubts about Drupal's scalability. It seems that every day another recognizable media brand announces their migration onto Drupal; most recently Mother Jones, Recovery.gov, and Virgin Radio have been identified as Drupal sites.
Seth passed me a copy of the report and it does address many specific areas that sure to be of interest to publishers and editors of media sites. In particular, I noted the report featured a review of Drupal's basic content entry, workflow, and editorial controls, subjects close to the heart of any publishing platform. In addition, the report includes a number of case studies of other popular sites in the report, including The Onion, NowPublic, FastCompany and MyLifetime.com.
The report is targeted at technology review committees at large media and publishing companies that are considering Drupal as a potential platform. If you're in such a position, or are working with a client that is, this report may be very helpful. It is one of the best analyst reports I read on Drupal.
Edipresse blowing love kisses at Drupal
Pierre-Jean Duvivier, Head of WebFactory at Edipresse, shared some remarkable data points with me. Edipresse is one of Europe's biggest media and communications companies. It is a traditional print company that publishes more than 200 titles, including some leading European newspapers (i.e. Le Matin, Le Temps, and 24 heures).
Pierre-Jean told me that they converted 11 newspaper and magazine websites to Drupal in 18 months. The reason for adopting Drupal was that it is cheaper, faster, and more stable than their old content management system.
Today, some of Edipresse's biggest media properties are on a shared Drupal platform that delivers 30 million pages a month. Since they switched to Drupal, they cut their global IT cost by 75% and grew their online traffic by 220%. On average, it takes their internal Drupal team 40 days to migrate an existing newspaper site to Drupal, so I think we can expect to see more Edipress sites moving to Drupal.
I've mentioned it before. Many large media companies are in bad waters. Although traditional media companies have had enough advance warning that the internet was changing their game, either they underestimated the risk or they figured it wouldn't apply to them. Many have waited so long to embrace the web and to adjust their business models accordingly that their existence is now being threatened. With advertising revenues declining, and a global economic downturn upon us, life isn't getting easier as a traditional publisher. Edipresse has set a great example of how Drupal can be used to help turn the ship in a record time.
IFRA using Drupal
IFRA, the world's leading association for newspaper and media publishing, knows how to set an example: they are switching their websites to Drupal.
IFRA has 3,000 members from the newspaper industry in about 80 countries. Besides staging the newspaper industry's largest international exhibition every year, IFRA also organizes more than 100 regional exhibitions, international conferences, seminars, workshops and training events worldwide.
Their main website, http://www.ifra.com, is already using Drupal. The migration to Drupal is still a work in progress, but according to Berger Schmidt, IFRA is switching all of its websites from Lotus Notes to Drupal this year.
Jacksonville using Drupal
Jacksonville, the largest city in Florida, is using Drupal (and Mollom) at http://jacksonville.com. The Florida Times-Union is the major daily newspaper in Jacksonville and Jacksonville.com is its official website. Cool!
