FAQ

Superdesk is a newsroom management system. It is an end-to-end news creation, production, curation, and distribution platform. Built by journalists, for journalists, it has a modular software design that enables news organisations to pick and choose the functionality relevant to their business. Superdesk is open source, free, platform/device neutral, low-cost and easy to update.

Yes - and more. Superdesk is a superb tool for creating and managing content, but it’s so much more. Most CMSs are built for a single medium (print, online, broadcast) meaning that they usually don’t work well when it comes to multiple outputs (web+print, web+mobile, print+tablet, print+e-reader). They are also not great at integrating inputs from different channels (wire services, RSS, social media). Worse, though, is that because so few are open source, they’re much harder to change once they’re in place. Superdesk is flexible, not monolithic. It can serve as a bridge between systems that can’t talk to each other. Its focus is on enabling journalists to do their jobs the way they want to.

While Superdesk was designed with the specific needs of newsrooms in mind, it is not only for large-scale media organisations. If you maintain an informational site, update it continuously and want to author articles and curate your text archive along with your multimedia assets, you should take a look at Superdesk. While designed to handle the content needs of the very largest news services, Superdesk is also at home with niche, boutique, ad hoc and even hobby publishers.

If you are publishing your content via API or in any of the news wire formats (NewsML-G2, ninjs) or via email, the answer is yes. This method of publishing is through other applications reading our API. We are in the process of creating a separate publishing component that will make publishing more intuitive and easier for any platform. If you are interested in contributing to the development of the publishing component and helping to shape the features and functionality, we are actively searching for contributors and partners.

We built Superdesk because we saw nothing, open source or commercial, that could tackle every bit of today’s workflows and then be expanded (thanks to a modular design concept) to handle tomorrow’s workflows as well. We saw nothing, either, that would allow a news outfit to integrate existing systems that are still doing an acceptable job with needed new components. Superdesk will play nicely with parts of your existing kit (think DAMs and DBs, for instance) until it makes business sense for you switch entirely. Superdesk allows you to proceed at your own pace and on your own terms.

Yes! Superdesk features a flexible Ingest component. The Ingest allows you to configure multiple content sources using a combination of delivery mechanisms and data formats. For example, news files in NewsML 1 format delivered to a FTP server, news files in RSS format delivered via a Web URL. Superdesk supports the most common delivery mechanisms and several different data formats, including NewsML 1, NewsML-G2, ninjs, NITF and RSS among others. Also, the Ingest component is designed to be easily extended to support both new delivery mechanisms and data formats as they emerge.

As many or as few as you like! Superdesk is designed to meet the needs of both small and large-scale operations.

We do have a plugin for WordPress. If you are interested in publishing to print, please get in touch.

Yes. With the Superdesk Planning module, it’s easy to plan content, create events and planning items, and assign coverages to a desk or a specific user.