Changing AOL’s Publishing System
In September of 2003 AOL News became the first area at AOL to switch from our proprietary publishing system to HTML. I was the editorial director on the team that redesigned our pages and created a new publishing system. This was a significant change for AOL News in two ways:
1) It required the creation and teaching of an entirely different work process with newly created publishing tools, and
2) It opened the at-work audience to AOL News. Until this switch, AOL members could not access AOL News at work because it would have required loading the proprietary AOL software, which is not allowed by most places of employment.
The Washington Post praised the changes, saying, “The at-work boost could be significant. … Finally – and this may be the biggest impact – the open Web programming language is making it easier for AOL to redistribute content outside the company’s so-called walled garden. (Leslie Walker, April 15, 2004)
I explained the reasons and benefits of this change in two articles published by the American Press Institute:
1) Case Study: Enabling Change at AOL
Excerpt:
Telling your editors they will have to trash everything they’ve been doing to publish articles - and every trick they’ve learned to speed the process - isn’t usually what earns an ovation. But that’s what happened 10 months later when AOL News editors saw the first demonstration of their new publishing system.
Even if your publishing system is the clunkiest thing in the world, editors and their habits are difficult to separate. With a new publishing tool, editors can’t work on autopilot. That sort of change is naturally unsettling.
How do you move your newsroom from grumbling about change to embracing it?
Involvement, transparency and over-communication.
Absolutely crucial to the success of creating a new publishing system for AOL News was the involvement of the editors who really liked their current publishing system. They were the ones who helped guide the process of abandoning it for a new system. That meant they made sure that all the qualities they loved about the previous system were in the new publishing tool, too. They didn’t feel as if they had to give up advantages by switching. Instead, they switched the advantages to a more powerful and flexible publishing system.
2) Behind The Scenes: AOL in HTML
(And Why Other Web News Publishers Should Care)
Excerpt:
The sleeping giant woke up in September. That’s when AOL News started publishing in HTML.
Are you smiling because you now have proof of what a backward competitor AOL News is?
Hold that thought.
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