Top media challenges solved: how editorial workflow software transforms your content game

Publishing workflow software: your friend and ally

Content creation, editing and reviewing, collaboration, approval and publishing, digital asset management, and compliance and security. This may seem like a long list of activities, but they are only a few of the things that our customers in the publishing business, journalism, corporate communications, and marketing are juggling on a daily basis.

Challenges and responsibilities that can be tackled with an editorial workflow system. These systems offer a structured approach to handling content production, ensuring efficiency, consistency, and collaboration among team members. Let's see how editorial workflow software can help you deal with the main challenges media companies are dealing with.

Challenge 1: Demand for fast content production

In the age of instant news and viral content, media companies must produce and publish content quickly to stay relevant and competitive. That's one of the reasons we see an increase in the adoption of publishing software to revolutionize content creation workflows.

Der Spiegel has been known for its investigative journalism for over 70 years. Its brand has a weekly readership of more than 16 million and is therefore one of the most important news publications in the German-speaking region.

WoodWing partner a&f systems set up a pilot environment for Der Spiegel to create future editorial  workflows. They first presented these workflows internally to assess their effectiveness with the purpose of refining them before implementation. The results:

• a future-proof system, with Der Spiegel’s digital production system tightly integrated with WoodWing Studio for print publications
• faster time-to-market due to process automation and optimization
• a solution that is ready to deal with new customer requirements
  
  

Challenge 2: Safeguarding quality

Rapid content production is one thing, but you don’t want to compromise on the thoroughness of editing and fact-checking. Publishing inaccurate or lower-quality content can ruin your carefully crafted reputation in the blink of an eye.

Ensuring the accuracy of what you publish in a fast-paced environment is critical, even more so with the rise of misinformation and fake news. The same goes for maintaining your editorial standard, which is extra challenging when scaling content production.

Hearst is one of the world's most successful private media and information companies. Hearst Magazines, a unit of Hearst Corporation, is one of the world's largest publishers of monthly magazines, with 21 American titles and nearly 300 international editions. Its team spent about six months evaluating WoodWing Studio and found that the offered features enabled them to quickly enter the tablet and mobile publishing arena. The system also streamlined the editorial review and quality assurance process, essential to each publication's daily routine.

Challenge 3: Reusing/ repurposing content

A crucial component of modern editorial workflows is the reuse of existing content. By repurposing previously created materials, you can maximize the value of your content assets, save time, and maintain a consistent message across different platforms.

This might include updating outdated articles, adapting blog posts into social media updates, or transforming research reports into infographics. Effective content lifecycle management, therefore, not only focuses on producing new content. It also strategically capitalizes on and refreshes existing content to meet current needs and reach wider audiences.

Aller Media is one of the companies that seriously invests in reusing and repurposing existing content as broadly as possible, optimizing the monetization of available assets. It uses WoodWing Studio for the distribution of content through mobile apps and digital channels in a fast and effective way.

The intuitiveness of WoodWing Studio allowed users to work with our customized templates within ten minutes. This is what we were looking for.

Iben Rouw, Editor in Chief

Media companies like Peruvian publisher El Comercio need to ensure content is formatted correctly and maintains a consistent message across various platforms (websites, social media, mobile apps, and print). Different platforms often require tailored content to suit their specific audiences and formats, adding complexity to the editorial workflow.

With its true multi-channel approach, the implementation of WoodWing Studio at Grupo El Comercio is a lighthouse project in the global newspaper industry.

Jorge Cieza de León, Corporate Manager at Hexas

Challenge 4: compliance and security

Data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA add another layer of complexity to content management and distribution. Any company dealing with content, wants to make sure that this content is absolutely protected from unauthorized access, leaks, and cyber-attacks.

This might be a slightly overlooked advantage of publishing workflow software, but a very valuable one – without a doubt. It will create an automatic and transparent audit trail of content amends and who made them. Additionally, it reduces exposure to risks by eliminating the need for third-party file transfer.

Specialist US communications agency Argyle for example, is focusing on investor and stakeholder communications for companies like Cisco and HP. It helps these businesses communicate their financial, governance, and social performance, while simultaneously complying with very strict regulatory reporting requirements.

With the help of WoodWing Studio, time applying changes to financial reports and sending revised PDFs is cut down. Clients can make their own edits to the report and return them to use within the system. We can make those amends immediately and clients can download a new PDF instantly with no need to use email or FTP to transfer files.

Ronnel San Gabriel, Tech Product Manager at Argyle

Curious to find out what editorial workflow software can do for you?

It doesn’t matter whether your content production team consists of two or 20 people. As soon as there are different locations or time zones involved, multiple products to be worked on, and team members performing a whole range of tasks, such as writing, editing, translating, uploading copy, finding images, designing layouts, publishing to print or digital – publishing workflow software will make a world of difference.

Are you interested to find out how your team can become a lean and effective machine that won’t miss any deadline or content-related demand? Discover the possibilities of WoodWing Studio today.