Content management technology represents a critical piece of any customer-facing stack, but becomes truly foundational for a media company, where publishing content is not just marketing, but the product itself.

Media companies have always risen to the forefront of CMS adoption and have driven significant innovations in this segment, including features like scheduled publishing, collaborative workflows, metadata-driven lists, image carousels, content planning modules, and much more. Along the way, media companies proved crucial to the early development of CMS platforms from the likes of Adobe, Brightspot, CoreMedia, Drupal, WordPress, and others.

Yet today among media CMS licensees I see frustration above and beyond what their enterprise peers experience with this technology. For sure the stakes are higher in the media business. But something else seems to be going on. Mismatches abound between perceived needs versus actual budgets, ambitions versus capacity, technology choices versus focus, and of course: vendor hype versus reality.

What’s a media leader to do?

Vendor Comparison Service

Two years ago, the International News Media Association (INMA) in partnership with the Google News Initiative (GNI) launched a nifty comparison and review service for news media-oriented CMS platforms; Real Story Group contributed research and analysis to this effort, including adding new reviews late last year.

It won’t allow you to create a broader Web Content & Experience Management market selection in the way the RealQuadrant Short List Generator would do for our subscribers. But, the service now allows you to filter twenty solutions by various attributes, specific to the media vertical – most importantly the type and size of media firm – and delivers pithy analysis along with some supplier pros and cons. I encourage you to try it out to learn about specific vendors.

But what does this tell us about the larger media CMS marketplace, and the dilemmas facing media leaders like you?

The CMS Marketplace for News Media Companies

In the INMA / GNI / RSG project we bucketed vendors into six categories. It’s worth exploring these categories a bit to illustrate some of the challenges facing media companies. While media customers may seem spoiled for choice in CMS suppliers, the trade-offs for licensees can prove bracing. Here are some quick category summaries.

Toolkits

Every mature marketplace supports a couple of toolkits for licensees with outsized ambitions – and ideally an even larger set of in-house developers. These vendors get driven by the needs of their most sophisticated customers, who can afford the ambition of tailoring everything to their specific needs. Consequently, the platforms too frequently get oversold into environments where most other media firms would have insufficient resources to truly exploit the benefits.

Print-Centric

These vendors play a significant role in a market where print distribution, while declining, still remains profitable, and many publishers hold out hope for hybrid delivery models. However, a print-centric solution is unlikely to inspire a digital-first transformation – nor will it encourage cost reduction in the production of print editions. At the risk of sounding harsh, mostly these are vendors you will leave, eventually, rather than license anew.

Ecosystems

Major open source projects Drupal and WordPress famously support massive module and developer / support / hosting ecosystems, though cobbling together the right mix of add-ons and expertise remains a surprisingly difficult hurdle for many media firms. 

The ever-popular (and beguiling!) WordPress has multiple different distributions falling into separate categories, but still engenders a lot of confusion in the marketplace; so much so that the INMA / GNI / RSG project now sports a dedicated tool to make sense of WordPress flavors and plugins. 

Meanwhile Drupal appears to see declining interest among media firms, as news-specific distributions atrophy and the platform becomes more technically complicated with each major release.

Simpler Packages

Is there a core set of media capabilities that any small news organization might want, and could they be packaged simply and cheaply so editors need not ever worry about the technology – or busting their budgets? Several vendors are trying to answer this question, yet the fact that none have reached lift-off suggests limits to this approach. Still, these solutions offer promising jumpstart packages for micro-publishers in particular.

Traditional CMS Platforms

If a general purpose CMS can handle any kind of content, could it not also be a reasonable fit for a media business? In fact, many vendors have traditionally supported media customers, incorporating their specific needs into the product. However, don’t assume they include services that would be considered fundamental in the media context – such as subscriptions, paywalls, or ad serving. And it can be a significant effort to adapt them to the practice and daily process of, say, a large editorial newsroom.

Regional Players

The GNI / INMA / RSG project identifies twenty very representative "regional players," though some dozens of others around the world likely also fit the bill.  These vendors helpfully address all the usual regional variations around language, budgets, culture, and business models, but also tend to serve as more holistic design-build agencies, optimized for smaller media companies looking to broadly outsource all their digital scaffolding. This strategy carries risks for any media organization, but still works for many.

Caveats

As an analyst firm, at RSG we like to create two-dimensional boxes when the real world is more complicated. Vendors like Naviga, BLOX, and WordPress defy clean categorization. Hopefully if nothing else, the chart above suggests an eclectic and multidimensional marketplace.

Lingering Frustration

Amid fragmentation and declining margins with publishers, the vendor marketplace has not grown as robustly as we’ve seen in the enterprise CMS landscape at large. Yet customer frustrations run deeper. The main challenge here is that most media outlets are small- to mid-sized businesses with big-company CMS needs.

The evolution of media-specific tooling was supposed to close this gap. At a time when traditional CMS vendors increasingly eschew the media sector, a somewhat awkward and sometimes murky collection of smaller players remain. Very few of the vendors in the chart above have hit critical mass, though they do tend to command loyalty from the media licensees who stick with them for the long haul.

In a quest for more revenue, many of those same vendors have built omnibus digital management platforms with creative services and other consulting to boot, designed to simplify a publisher’s world by addressing all digital needs in a single package.

Almost inevitably, these Swiss Army knife suites get complicated and weighty in their own right, and beget major vendor lock-in risks, but also engender loyalty where resource-strapped licensees are willing to overlook shallow feature sets and quirky design choices.

Simultaneously, WordPress still offers the illusion of affordability, the promise of ease of use, and the choice among hundreds of plugins to take care of any needs a media customer may have (the INMA / GNI / RSG WordPress tool allows you to compare more than 140 of them). It has also been bundled into not just one, but several publisher-focused packages of plugins and services. In reality, WordPress almost never turns out to be simple....or cheap.

The rise of omnibus suites gets to the heart of what you might consider a “CMS.” Should the platform manage your entire website (and mobile apps)? Should it support revenue-generation and pay/reg walls? Handle audience management and segmentation? Serve ads? Conduct outbound marketing and social interaction? Smaller publishers often favor this bundling, while larger media firms typically pursue more best-of-breed strategies, though we’ve seen many well-reasoned exceptions. 

Frustration ensues, however, when vendor and licensee find themselves architecturally mismatched.

Looking Forward

So your CMS choices can get complicated, but on the bright side, media companies do enjoy manifold choices. Ultimately a lot hinges on your overall digital sophistication. If you want to offer readers more than what a simpler, packaged CMS offering provides, you need to get beyond content management technology as an opaque black box and get serious about what’s inside any platform, as well as what it will take to make that solution work for you. Put another way: publishers and product leaders should approach CMS technology with the same spirit of curiosity, understanding, and skepticism that their editorial brethren bring to their daily work.

At the same time, I’d discourage you from over-buying CMS technology. It is an axiom of the software world – and not just for media companies – that functional richness begets technical complexity, and technical complexity requires developer talent. As a baseline, only consider solutions that your team can truly master without constant outside intervention.

Ultimately, the best CMS is the best-fitting CMS. The INMA / GNI / RSG vendor comparison tool is a very useful step in the right direction for news organizations, but should only precede, rather than conclude, a test-heavy selection process.

Fortunately, the same agile methodology for platform selection that RSG advises in the enterprise world also works very well in the media sector. We’ve enjoyed working with media companies in particular, since stakeholders seem to be exceptionally motivated around CMS platform success. I’m happy to exchange interesting stories off-line.

If you’d like help evaluating your CMS choices – however you define them – drop RSG a note.