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Superdesk Features

Let Superdesk handle the tedious tasks while your journalists focus on the news. We’re more interested in saving journalists from being used as robots than we are in the fantasy of robots becoming journalists.

A clean and intuitive design enhances focus and productivity

Interface of headless CMS Superdesk

We are proud of the Superdesk user interface and work spaces. It has been designed for ease of use by journalists while providing a consistent overview of workflow and production for newsroom managers.

This elegant simplicity hides incredible flexibility and power. Customisation by users to suit their individual needs and preferences gives them the control to ensure that their workspace is optimised for what their work demands and how they like to do it.

Journalists have private spaces for working on story ideas, hidden from search, and they can edit and maintain personal dictionaries to cover unusual words and proper nouns that they use frequently. They can also build up a library of abbreviations which may be expanded when typed; one might want GSK to expand to GlaxoSmithKline, for instance, or DWP for Department of Work and Pensions.

Powerful customisation options

Superdesk’s flexible customisation tools for a digital newsroom

Create a more productive editorial environment with the Superdesk suite of customisation tools. As an editorial user, you can create desks on the fly for breaking news stories or special events, such as the Olympics, the World Cup or a national election. You can also set up a widget to monitor football scores, or follow the progress of a space probe.

Similarly,anyone can create custom workspaces in Superdesk and configure them to provide views into any stage on multiple desks at the same time. No need to switch views back and forth between desks.

As an optional extension to Superdesk, the Analytics Module can be used to generate reports around productivity parameters such as desk activity, user performance, the number of corrections or time spent producing a story. Date ranges can be customised, and reports can be scheduled and automatically delivered via email.

Easily create and save custom searches

Newsroom software with a search query tool

With powerful Elasticsearch functionality built in, Superdesk allows editorial users to create complex search queries across multiple repositories and ingest sources and display real-time results either in a dashboard widget or the monitoring view. Such custom searches can also be saved and retrieved again later, or may be shared with others in the newsroom.

Newsroom automation

Superdesk Newsroom Software - tool for newsroom automation

Superdesk comes with a variety of tools to accelerate and automate news production. At any time during article creation or editing, a journalist may choose to make a template of that job. One example would be market open/close reports from each major global index every weekday.

A finance journalist could set up a template containing all necessary wording and metadata (including output destinations) and tell Superdesk to create it in a chosen stage on a desk at a certain time of day, and specify on which days this should happen.

Build new products and services with user-friendly content profiles

Superdesk Newsroom Software - tool for creating custom content profiles

In Superdesk, you can create profiles that define elements of content and metadata to suit new products or customers, or a new style of article tailored for sport news on mobiles, for example, You could create a profile to accept a feature video, with text below that and several pictures. Then you could refine it further or put it right into production as an editorial user, all without generating any IT change-requests whatsoever.

A better way to copy edit

Superdesk Newsroom Software - toggle format tool for spotting copy errors

It's easy to go word-blind: we've all read over our work and missed obvious errors. Superdesk can help. When giving your copy a final read, toggle to a custom view that changes the font size, background colour and line breaks so that your tired eyes see something fresh. This gives you a fighting chance of catching a slip-up you might otherwise have missed.

Add context to stories with text annotations

Superdesk Newsroom Software - tool for adding text annotations to content

Looking for a way to add more information to a story without sending readers away from your website? Whether it’s fact boxes, footnotes or jargon busters, Superdesk allows you to add more detail to articles in a variety of ways. For example, in a story about the launch of the newest smartphone, you might include a link with the name of the previous model that provides information on how many units it sold and its main features.

Maintain a paper trail with file attachments

Superdesk Newsroom Software - widget for attaching files to digital newsroom content

Both in and out of the newsroom, it is a requirement to build a higher degree of traceability into the content cycle today. Keep the documents associated with a story as it moves from one desk to another or between content stages in Superdesk and account for what you published, as well as when and how. You can attach any non-text file to any news item in Superdesk with this feature.

Other features

Would you like to learn more about future development of Superdesk?

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