My husband and I once made a bet. He said most journalists don’t lug cameras or edit their own footage — they’ve got a whole crew for that. Picture the movies: a news van parked outside, giant cameras, producers barking into phones.
As a former reporter, I took that argument personally because one of the reasons I left journalism was that 10 years ago, most of us were suddenly expected to do everything: shoot our own video, edit it, produce it, report on it and write about it. (I had to win this bet: that night’s kitchen cleaning was at stake!)
With dwindling advertising revenues, the rise of social media, iPhone video and audio quality rivaling professional gear, and slashed newsroom budgets, my job was no longer the same. My husband – who’s nowhere near journalism – argued it could not have possibly stayed the same. What with the speed of news! It would be insane to own the whole story lifecycle.
He was wrong. It only got worse. My BBC friend confirmed she’d become a Swiss army knife over the years. With one exception. She does not publish her own stories.
“I write in Google Docs and then send it to my editor,” she said. “Online editors do the rest.”
I asked my Wall Street Journal friend, and he confirmed as much: “I don’t know what happens when I send my story in.”
It is ironic because modern technology can simplify complex approval chains and the publishing process that journalists and editors have been struggling with for years. It is one thing I wish I had been trained to do when I was working for a local newspaper. Not my own video work – I’ll never be as good as my cameraman. Not my own producing – it is a full-time job to manage contacts, build relationships and conjure them on the spot when the news breaks.
But publishing to my website? Loading stories into WordPress or Drupal while fixing a rogue comma, deleting an extra paragraph, or correcting that politician’s name? That I could do. That I would have loved to do because my name – my byline – was literally on the line if I made a mistake.
It would have also made my life as an editor easier. Running a team of 10, I was drowning in emails notifying me of copy changes. It was endless back-and-forth. Keeping track of different story lines, who said what and when, which version reflected the story angle originally assigned to cover but overlooked in the process… The collaboration was painful, and deadlines were often missed.
Content Publisher for Google Docs takes care of that and more. It is a web content workflow tool that empowers teams to directly publish content from Google Docs to their site. That’s marketing language. Now, let me tell you what it actually is.
It means that what you see in Google Docs is what you are going to get online. You have your live article preview (exactly how it would look on your site), image library, AI helpers taking care of your meta and tagging, and more. In short, you and your editor are in control. No, Content Publisher doesn’t allow you to go rogue and publish something without your editor’s approval. There are granular permissions to govern publishing privileges. But you are in control of all versions, with a shorter path to make a correction, if needed. No more tickets to the web admin asking for a correction, no more readers asking for a retraction.
One could argue that this would add an unnecessary step and give journalists yet another thing to do. But as a trained journalist upholding high ethical standards, you would probably uphold my end of the story and relate to this experience. My copy was changed without my awareness more times than I could count. After going through a few rounds of editing, I would still sometimes find a story that didn’t quite match the original.
Here’s an example of my article for the BBC Travel about Sausalito, a small bohemian town outside of San Francisco, CA. It has a long subtitle to lure the reader in: “Combining the feel of a Greek fishing village and a glamorous French Riviera resort, the San Francisco suburb is home to quirky artistic communities and eucalyptus-framed views.” Only the last five words of this subhead are true.
I’ve never been to a Greek fishing village or Cannes in France. I don’t know how the comparison came about. The people of Sausalito would be offended to hear they were called a suburb. You get my point. I was not in charge of the final version. I don’t blame the editors – they were short on time and they had probably dozens of stories to edit. But had we worked in a single space with a simple workflow and clear version control, that subhead would have been different.
It’s an innocuous error, you may say. Who cares if Sausalito resembles a Greek village or not? Sure. This was a simple example. The more complicated one was with another media company I worked for. I would send my video stories only to find them aired with a different script, but the same footage. The script would be altered to reflect the political stance of the country that owned the TV channel. As a result, I quit, and so did many of my colleagues.
Back to the Content Publisher. With the tool, your Google Doc becomes a single source of truth. Nothing gets lost in translation; nothing gets lost in the copy-paste process, which happens a lot if you are posting to Drupal or WordPress, while cleaning up extra paragraphs and accidentally deleting sentences.
No more unaccounted editing changes that didn’t get copy-pasted on time. This happens a lot, too. Some stakeholders (your VIP editors) can jump in last minute, make changes and then freak out because someone on the web team has already posted the story online.
The media business has changed a lot in the last decade. With the rise of AI, one could argue the industry needs even more help than before. Preserving authentic voices matters. To that extent, journalists are not above publishing their own articles. Look at Guy Raz, a creator of How I Built This and Ted Radio Hour. He has a Substack, an account on a self-service platform for writers who want to skip an editorial workflow. He probably still has to copy-paste from Docs to Substack, but as his August headline reads, “You Can Always Change Your Story.”
With that publishing power, time savings can be immense, not to mention cost savings. I estimated that Content Publisher speeds up my publishing process by 10 times for a long-form article. (It took me 20 minutes to publish this blog after copy-pasting it to Drupal and only three with Content Publisher.) Imagine how much time could be saved if every writer and editor could skip the CMS training process and daily pasting routine and eventually control their own workflow. I have recently interviewed a local NPR web crew about their publishing process. NPR is always short on funds, but they employ a web admin whose sole job is to copy-paste into the CMS. What if that budget went back to hiring another journalist? A lot more stories would be told.
My husband was still skeptical, though. With the bet settled in my favor and the kitchen being reluctantly cleaned, he asked: “Fine, but what about Anderson Cooper? Does he write, film and publish his own stories?”
Probably not, I said. But he should.
