I think in the shower. Or at night while I am supposed to be sleeping, but aside from that this morning my mind took me back to a comment that Mark Comerford made at the Highway Africa conference in Grahamstown a week or two ago. The plenary was centred on a discussion surrounding what is and is not journalism in relation to new forms of media - blogging in particular. He said that essentially a blog is merely a content management system. Now this got me thinking as I was washing my hair, because he is right. A content management system serves the purpose of organising and facilitating the collaborative creation of documents and other content, and has been very successful in terms of building and running "Digital Newsroom" type multimedia websites that I have been involved with in the past year (see State of the Arts, Commons Sense).

But how does being a CMS make blogs any different from any other news site or website for that matter? I realised this morning that actually every website that collates information and presents it in a logical/readable/easy to access form is actually a CMS. One doesn't really think of a online news publication as a content management system, but it is. Just the same as a blog, just the same as a forum too. It may seem like stating the obvious, but I guarantee it that people don't think this way. They are stuck in the "old media" mindframe that isn't so concerned with the most efficient storage, maintanance and editorial workflow process available.

Then I got to thinking further that if you really want to be valuable as a media worker, this is the area to get into - developing and maintaining really good CMS's that make everybody's life easier. Working with other journalists who don't interact regularly with online publications in terms of producing content and loading it onto the system is a challenge. They don't understand how CMS's work or how they can make your life better. There seems to be a big gap in the market... I want to fill a spot.

posted by Cat Murray @ 07:06