Written by Roman Heindorff, Camayak CEO
Journalists and editors, generally speaking, are resourceful people. Any industry that relies on the internet, particularly those where salaries are subsidized by passion, demands excellent, free tools. Journalism’s mandate of openness and sharing also fits snugly with the ethos of the open-source development community. If you can hack something, gain re-usable skills in the process and not have to pay for the privilege, it’s probably valuable.
After all, who spends money on a proprietary CMS when WordPress and Google Docs are free? Many don’t: they build their own or employ in-house developers to maintain and support their publishing platforms.
Showing newsrooms what they can gain from working with best-of-breed tools is a big part of what companies like Chartbeat, Dropbox and Camayak need to do well in order to grow and keep helping newsrooms remain competitive. Here is a talk that I gave recently at CUNY, as part of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism-hosted meetup.
Researching the top 10 editorial management tools? Check out our list.