BERLIN - April 25th 2012 - Sourcefabric today announced the launch of Newscoop 4, an open source content management system for news, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. Developed and used by news organisations like Switzerland’s TagesWoche, ElPeriódico de Guatemala and Yemen Times, Newscoop 4 aims to help independent news organisations manage online publications, enrich content and find new audiences.
Newscoop 4 now features an overhauled media archive, drag-and-drop front page management and a range of citizen journalist tools. “Newscoop 4 is built by journalists, for journalists,” said Sava Tatic Managing Director at Sourcefabric. “Everything is centred around a news workflow - the new image handling, dynamic mapping tools and powerful themes are built to get stories online quickly in a way that’s engaging and shareable.”
With breaking news in mind, Newscoop’s front page management is a drag-and-drop interface designed to make the process of designing a front page on-the-fly easy. Journalists and editors have the option of adding any article to the front page, and then moving that article around to determine where on the page it appears.
Developed alongside TagesWoche, Newscoop 4’s community tools allow citizens to become an integral part of news gathering and sharing. Newscoop allows visitors to sign up for a profile, submit images and video to reporters, comment on articles and follow topics and stories as they evolve.
“We believe the times where journalists alone decide what's news are over,” said TagesWoche co-executive editor Remo Leupin. “Today's media landscape is diverse. TagesWoche is open to the community to bring in news, discuss issues and set trends for the publication.”
Newscoop 4’s adaptive CSS themes means stories change in size and format to suit any browser or device. Two new themes, the New Custodian and Rockstar, offer starting points from which news sites can completely customise the form and function of their sites. Both are written in $gimme, Sourcefabric’s news-centric templating language that extends the popular PHP Smarty framework.
More information: http://newscoop.sourcefabric.org Try the demo: http://newscoop-demo.sourcefabric.org/Newscoop Pro hosting: http://newscoop.pro
About Sourcefabric
Sourcefabric is a non-profit organisation that builds open source tools for journalists, newsrooms and radio stations. It has its headquarters in Prague, branches in Berlin and Toronto, and representatives in Minsk, Guatemala, Warsaw, Belgrade and Cluj. In 2010 Sourcefabric launched as a wholly autonomous organisation securing private funding that propelled it into the ranks of one of the largest European open source projects for news and media. Sourcefabric won a Knight Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism 2011 and a Guardian Digital Innovation Award for Best Technology for Social Change in 2012.