The engine that keeps things chugging along behind the scenes at any media company is their Content Engagement System (CMS). It's the software that puts editorial content on a website, or in the queue for print or broadcast.
It's incredibly unsexy, and absolutely indispensable. It handles everything, and if the CMS goes down, the whole website, publication or broadcast goes down. If you're ever wondering why there has been an old breaking news banner across a website for more than three hours, or why absolutely none of the top stories in an online queue has changed in the past hour, it's probably because the CMS has shat itself, and there are a bunch of people at the other end wondering if a computer can be made to scream. (They can.)
Every media company has at least one, and they've all got deceptively charming names like Voodoo or Zen, and they do crap themselves more often than anybody would like. Many of them have been cobbled together over years, or even decades, with additions and patches stapled onto the framework of the software, built on spit and good intentions.
It's usually not even the IT dudes' fault when it all goes tits-up, even though they take the brunt of the shit for it. Considering how they are built, the fact that they don't always work is inevitable. Technology is a fucking beast like that.
And it's also because these things are expensive as fuck to build, and require significant long-term investment. For the boys in the boardroom, it's just not as exciting as grabbing the latest radio host for some dipshit column, but it's way more essential. The big media companies have invested significant cash into their CMS, but these 10-year-long projects can barely keep up with technological advances like more video and ultra-fast broadband, and the need to future-proof is an exercise in futility, because who knows where the hell we're going to be in a decade.
But a slow CMS is a slow website, and breaking news can be fucking shattered by a 20-year-old server busting a gut. A couple of years ago, Stuff did an ad campaign that suggested that if its staff didn't get breaking news up first, before all the other media organisations, they'd be chucked out the window ('Ha ha! Just joking about fucking killing you, people in our own company! But seriously...'). It was cheaper for Fairfax to put up four-storey tall banners in central Auckland proclaiming this threat, than it was to have a CMS that actually worked properly, which could have helped.
Sometimes, there can still be a delay of up to 15 minutes between something being entered into a CMS, as the system receives the information, processes it, goes away and has a cup of tea, a sneaky cigarette and a wank, has another cup of tea, gossips about the latest redundancies, has another wank, has another cup of tea, buggers about for a bit longer, and then finally puts it up on the website. This can be a very, very long 15 minutes to wait when all the shit is going down.
Companies are aware of these issues, and most of the major media companies have some sort of plans for a new CMS system, somewhere down the line. But most of us are still chugging along with these antiquated, wheezing and barely competent systems. They'll do for now, until suddenly they won't.
This might drive the end consumer crazy, but that's nothing compared to the journos at the other end, who just want to update the fucking story, and get a bloody new picture up there. Fuckin' zen, indeed.
- Katherine Grant
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