News-Record.com

Yesterday I spent a fair bit of time with newsroom technology maven Herb Everett, figuring out how we can use Publicus, our online publishing program, to blog. The N&R Interactive folks (Charlie Stafford and Stephen Paschall, primarily) have asked us to do this because they want all our bloggers to be using our Web-publishing program, Publicus (a/k/a Saxotech Online), rather than our current blogging tool, Movable Type, within the next few months.

The main reason is that we want to get all our content into a single, searchable database, which will make searching easier and more productive for us and you alike. (That, in turn, will make the site more attractive to the advertisers whose money pays my salary.) Also, because the blogs currently are hosted in a separate environment that requires time and money to maintain, using Publicus to blog will save us both. The change also will free at least a small amount of money (for software licensing) to be better spent elsewhere and reduce the number of page templates that have to be maintained and upgraded as we tweak our designs.

If we want to do something online, we can have no tool at all, the wrong tool, a tool that will do the job but isn't perfect and the perfect (perfect in the sense of "best mix of 'available' and 'appropriate'") tool. For blogging, Publicus falls into the third category, and I think our bloggers can work with that.

Preparing for the change is not sexy, and it's certainly not something we can point to online and say, "Hey, look what we're doing!" and be able to impress you on the spot. Also, it's kind of a mind-numbing time-suck if, like me, you're not a programmer. (Actually, the programmers may feel the same way.) But it's essential to making life easier down the road for both you and us as we work together to build the kind of online presence we all want.