Image via CrunchBase
The New York Times has created a tool that tracks changes in a browser-based text editor. The tool, called Integrated Content Editor, or ICE, allows online journalists and editors to work collaboratively without overwriting one another’s edits.
Marc Frons, New York Times chief technology officer, told told Poynter that when journalists work together, they need the ability for many people to change copy. The changes have to be catalogued and archived, so there is a record of who has done what. According to Poynter, ICE is more sophisticated than the “track revisions” function in WordPress. ICE highlights the changes and, instead of appearing on another screen, they appear in the text editing window.
Frons said that when the Times originally built their CMS, their systems were entirely print based. The CMS was designed for managing content and not for creating and editing it.
“But as time went on and it became clear that we were doing more and more for the Web, we said, ‘Why don’t we reverse the paradigm?’ … Instead of writing in the old newspaper CMS and trying to put links in and add metadata and do all these things for the Web, let’s do all of that natively and then transfer all that content into the newspaper CMS,” Frons told Poynter.
ICE currently only works with WordPress and TinyMCE, but the Times has released the code on Github, so other developers can use it.
Local Business? Join the Marketplace
Recent Comments