Bangor Daily News uses Drive API to cut production time so reporters can work from the field
The Bangor Daily News has witnessed and according on quite long list of moments in yank history since it initial visited press back in 1889. From world wars to native fires, peace protests to vote laws, we’ve lined it all — keeping the folks of Maine up thus far and within the loop. And we’ve unbroken it bushed the family on the way: our current publisher, Richard J. Warren, is that the great-grandson of our founder, and his sister is our chairman of the board.
The last decade has been particularly riotous as our business has modified apace. With folks reading news on-line rather than in print and therefore the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, we tend to’ve re-evaluated however we outline ourselves as a newsroom. And our inheritance systems we tend tore holding U.S.A. back as we tried to vie with a replacement wave of digital-only publishers.
One of the most important problems we tend to moon-faced were slow, overpriced systems that unbroken reporters within the newsroom rather than finding and researching stories within the field. With an outsized newsroom flung all across the state, ancient desktop and native server-based programs simply didn’t cut it. To file a story, reporters usually sent their editor associate degree email with a Microsoft Word attachment, and therefore the story would got to be traced and glued into our native system. To push the story to our web site, somebody traced and glued it into WordPress, adscititious pictures and hyperlinks, formatted it, and printed it. If the newsman filed a more moderen version of the story, the method started back from the start and every one changes were lost. the method was painful for everybody concerned.
That all modified after we affected to Google Apps. currently we tend to use the Drive API to complete the method in a very single click. we tend to connected Drive, WordPress, and Adobe InDesign to form a tedious and slow method easier and quicker.
In our new system, reporters and editors write their stories in Docs, mistreatment cooperative period written material, comments and revision history to form method fast and painless. we tend to then use the Drive API to capture the text of the story, strip out comments and written material notes, and push it on to our web site — no repeating and pasting. The text conjointly flows into InDesign totally formatted, creating the assembly of our print newspaper easier, quicker and cheaper similarly.
We conjointly use the Drive API for project budgeting, that is however our newsroom tracks and prioritizes articles mistreatment data like wordcount, category, story importance and calculable submission time. Editors use the budget to arrange our on-line content strategy for the day and choose what’s going to go into succeeding day’s paper. As a newsman submits a budget line to let his or her editors grasp to expect it, a Doc is made via the API, keeping everything tied along and straightforward to trace.
Google Apps prices next to zilch and lets U.S.A. work the method we wish. rather than payment many thousands of greenbacks a year on advanced systems, we will pay that money on reporters. And in associate degree business wherever seconds, pennies and suppleness matter, Google Apps has helped our business specialise in what’s extremely vital — breaking news that matters to Maine.