A newsroom CMS is the content management system (CMS) in which reporters and editors write, edit and lay out stories together, and publish them to the website, the app and social media at once. It is also called a newsroom publishing system, or an editorial CMS. A general CMS, such as the one behind a company website, is built for a few pages that change rarely. A newsroom CMS is built for hundreds of stories a day, many of them changing every minute.
Consider a Hindi news website in Patna on the day that votes are counted in a state election. Reporters at twenty counting centres across Bihar send updates from their phones. They do not email them to the office. Each reporter types directly into the same live blog in the CMS, a single page that shows the newest update at the top. An editor in Patna reads each update before it goes live, and corrects the facts or the spelling. When a party crosses the majority mark, the editor writes a headline, picks a photo and presses Publish once.
That one click does several things. The CMS publishes the story on the website and in the app. It sends a push notification, the alert that appears on readers' phones. It posts the headline and link to the publisher's social media accounts. And it creates a special fast-loading version for search engines.
Several people can work on one story at the same time without overwriting each other's work. The CMS records who changed what, and when. So if a wrong number is published, the editor can see where it came from.
Stories also arrive from outside. A news agency sends its stories straight into the CMS, where an editor can publish one as it is or rewrite it.
The CMS also prepares each page to be found in search. The editor fills in a headline for search engines, a short description and the page's web address. This work is called search engine optimisation (SEO). It matters because most readers arrive from search, although zero-click search is now reducing that.
On election day, lakhs of readers open the same pages at once. So the CMS does not build each page afresh for each reader. Website caching keeps a ready-made copy, and a content delivery network (CDN) stores copies on servers in many cities. The CMS also marks the spaces on each page where ads go, which the publisher's supply-side platform (SSP) then sells. And it marks which stories are for subscribers only, so that the paywall can lock them.