As newsrooms start deciding how to spend their budgets next year, a number of publications have asked us: ‘how does Camayak differ from our CMS?’. Put simply, Camayak doesn’t compete with your existing CMS, as much as it does with the tools you use for organizing and editing your content before it reaches your CMS: for Google Docs, spreadsheets, email, whiteboards, Word and any task management tools you may use.
Here’s another answer we gave to someone recently by email:
“Camayak is more of a pre-CMS tool. It’s highly likely that only 5-10% of the newsroom will ever engage with the website CMS, which means you have a bottleneck of people who are responsible for online content (often as a secondary concern to the print product). Camayak engages 100% of your staff, so you can produce content more rapidly and recruit more people to work with remotely, before either publishing directly to your website (like WordPress) or pasting it in to other tools (e.g. proprietary CMS or InDesign). Essentially: Camayak focuses on production, while most CMS are honed for publishing/display.”
Camayak also offers things that a typical CMS might not, like:
– revision-tracking
– automatic progress-tracking (no need for manual updates)
– automated prompts for tagging and deadlines
– assignment creation/pitching and pitch conversion
– personal profiles that let you monitor what people are working on
– real-time newsroom activity feeds
Note: if you’re using WordPress as your CMS, Camayak imports all of your tags and categories: allowing them to be set within Camayak before publishing, which means none of your staff need ever log into WordPress to produce and publish their content online.
In case you’re still not entirely sure of the distinctions, here’s our support site and introductory video to help clarify:
