Report: Advice on Choosing a CMS

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The path to choosing a new CMS is littered with roadblocks, conflicts and challenges. That is why we have tried over the past few years to showcase roadmaps that help publishers and newsrooms to better navigate their CMS journeys.

And quite honestly, this “report” fell in our laps. Ariane Bernard was asked to speak at our CMS Day (as part of WAN-IFRA’s Newsroom Summit) in late April, essentially to give her recommendations to publishers which are perhaps in the procurement phase for a CMS. Her comprehensive, concise presentation not only checked all of the boxes of what we are looking for in our reports, but also for newsrooms searching for a CMS. So it was a simple decision to publish this, more or less, as is from her presentation.

So in case you don’t know Ariane, she is a product leader with a specialty in content management and delivery tools – CMS, subscription and eCommerce, analytics, CRM. She was formerly the chief digital officer at Le Parisien. Prior to this, she was the product lead for editorial products at Taboola, and served in a variety of roles during her 14 years at The New York Times, including working on the CMS team.

Today she , as the Founder and CEO of Helio, is building this new publishing platform oriented at independent creators, journalists, video creators, micro-influencers, course creators, etc. And here is her disclaimer for those news media organisations which might think this is some sales pitch for her product:

“We’re in alpha and launching soon (and fundraising soon). Always happy to connect if you want to hear more (but Helio, if it needed to be clarified, is absolutely not the right tool for an established media company).”

In the report, she outlines these key steps:

• Getting ahead of the journey: meaning asking all the right questions about why you are changing your CMS and what is the strategic imperative that will impact your business in 2-5 years.
• Writing the perfect RFP: This starts with your vision of publishing and identifying the problems before the solutions, ultimately creating some concise goals.
• Her framework: Ariane shares her vision on how goals turn to features and turn to categories to score your project.
• Platform vision: A newsroom’s needs are 95% the same as other publishers your size but how you want to solve for the 5% will orient the platform you want.
• The key items and scores: Key items are the smaller subset of features that truly underpin your business. In terms of vendor selection, these are your king makers.
• Lastly, takeaways.