Superdesk Planning Component Launches in the NTB Newsroom
We’re excited to announce that the Superdesk Planning Component has officially gone into production at Norwegian news agency Norsk Telegrambyrå (NTB). The component is a new module designed for integration with our open source headless CMS Superdesk, and will enable you to seamlessly integrate editorial planning into their workflows to boost the efficiency of your operations.
Developed in collaboration with news agencies the Australian Associated Press (AAP) and NTB, this latest Superdesk module will allow users to plan content ahead of time for elections, festivals or any other kind of event, supporting ingest from outside calendars and easy integration with third-party applications or publishing platforms.
“Planning is at the heart of the newsroom in a news agency. Integrating it into the CMS makes the process of planning more intuitive and a natural part of the workflow. Superdesk planning component makes it easier for reporters and editors alike to contribute efficiently to keeping calendars and schedules up to date.”
Nina Merete Eldor - Planning Editor at NTB
Sticking to our policy of creating tools ‘by journalists, for journalists’, the first concept for Superdesk Planning Component was the product of a two day workshop held at our head office in Prague, with our customers NTB, AAP, Finland’s news agency STT and Czech news agency CTK all attending. They all shared their most pressing needs in the newsroom and agreed on the key four qualities that the proposed editorial planning tool should deliver: efficiency, integration, flexibility and automation.
After months of work, this first release of Superdesk Planning Component answers to all these requirements and more, offering users one hub in which to consolidate their forward planning tools, editorial calendars, and assignments. Third party applications and publishing platforms can be easily connected, and Superdesk Planning Component is flexible enough to function as a standalone application (as well as integrating natively with Superdesk).
“We at Sourcefabric say that our tools are made by journalists for journalists. The Superdesk Planning Component is exactly that - we have involved editors in the process from conceptualisation to prototyping and testing. Although there are many different workflows among our customers, I think we have a very powerful universal planning tool designed by real experts in the field.”
Karel Petrak - Project Manager at Superdesk
In the era of the 24 hour news cycle, and with newsrooms needing to do more than ever with fewer resources, Superdesk Planning Component comes with a host of features designed to help newsrooms keep up. Editors will be able to plan coverage ahead of time by creating events, planning items or defining coverage activities and then assigning them to a desk or a journalist. The content created for an event will also include the event metadata, meaning users won’t have to fill it in themselves later on.
As well as having the capacity to ingest event data from external calendars like Google Calendar, Superdesk Planning Component will allow newsrooms to create and manage their own events using the metadata fields defined by the EventsML standard. Geolocation can also be added to event planning in the form of a map showing the event’s location, and an inbuilt address book can be used to easily access contacts for a story without having to comb databases for their details.
