Workflow matters: a case for shovelware

Love it or hate it, “shovelware” is a big part of any print publication’s online presence. Shovelware being content that was originally supposed to appear in print being converted for the Web.

Many have argued against this concept of repackaging material for the Web, with the general tenet that the industry is not doing anything new, and is simply repackaging old content. While I agree somewhat, the biggest problem is that the process is not automated.

Workflow matters. With the right flows in place the amount of work that goes into posting content on Web can be minimal. Just look at products such as Tumblr. Now most news outlets need a more sophisticated model than Tumbler, but the idea is the same. If you make the delivery of the content painless, there is more room for innovation and more time to improve the quality of that content.

Currently, I’d bet that most newspapers have a chain reaction goes something like this:

1. A Web editor must spend hours repackaging, tagging, uploading content.
2. Stuff goes wrong with said process.
3. Web editor plays clean up
4. Web editor doesn’t have much time for anything else.
5. Time for the next issue.

Too often the Web department is comprised of talented programmers and journalists who have to spend more time maintaining the Web presence instead of improving on it. This creates the illusion that Web departments are understaffed, when in reality their processes just suck. It is for this reason we see job ads for computer jesus types. Instead of trying to innovate the flow of information, most companies are just throwing more bodies at the problem hoping for the best.  This also hurts in hiring “wired” journalists who spend more time maintaining content than creating it.

There are a few new technologies such as XML tagging that shoot to make the InDesign/Quark copy-and-paste-fest a little less arduous. But the company who first can offer a news agency a seamless way to quickly transfer all of there print content will rake it in.

The Web is meant to streamline the delivery of content. That is why a group of guys can cover the tech industry better than whole corporations. But most print media seem to satisfied with sticking a few people in the back room and have them deal with the problem instead of addressing the core issue: until we build a solid foundation on which to innovate on, we’ll never do anything exciting. Until that all changes, the little guys will forever have the advantage, and will continue to eat your lunch.