FUTURE-PROOFyour newsroom

Being side by side with

journalists as they work

is the best way to build tools

s Europe’s largest developer of open source tools for news media, we are proud to bring you Superdesk, an end-to-end news creation, production, curation, distribu-tion and publishing platform. We have specifically conceived it to be scalable to suit news operations of any size.

Aside from its potential to serve as an all-in-one newsroom system, Super-desk’s modular approach effectively provides a continuous innovation framework for your organisation. New features, products or entire apps can be easily added, without major rewrites

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Sava Tatić

Co-founder and Managing Director

GREAT NEWS FOR NEWSMaking the best possible software for quality journalism is our calling

of the system’s core. As of October 2014, Sourcefabric staff have been embedded in the newsroom of Austra-lian Associated Press (AAP), working with their development team and learning the agency’s strict require- ments for accurate news delivery at speed. We believe that being side by side with the journalists as they work is the best way to build tools that enable rather than frustrate users.

We are open to development partnerships similar to our work with AAP. We are also ready to develop new custom applica-tions for your existing system -- or assist

you in developing your own system on top of the Superdesk framework. And we most certainly will not shy away from playing the role of the custodian of this resulting new code base, in effect built by journalists, for journalists.

"Superdesk is now ready for every-one. This brochure will tell you all about it."

Superdesk

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CONTENTS

Be everywhere without leaving your desk

The better you look, the more you see

Unlock your content, release the API

The Superdesk tech stack

Create once publish everywhere

Business-friendly code

Let’s work together

“Make journalism the focus”

Meet Sourcefabric

Image credits:

Desks, tasks and teams

User-experience and design

The API-first approach

Output channels

Open source license

Developing in partnership

Who’s using Superdesk

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Cover, Janis Milzarajs, Mareks Gaidamovicsp. 3, Getty Imagesp. 11, Adrian Magdasp. 12-13, Remix of Paper city by Philippe Put (CC BY 2.0)

www.sourcefabric.orgcontact@sourcefabric.org

“Web APIs were the

answer to all of this.”

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Sourcefabric z.ú.Salvátorská 10110 00 Praha 1Czech Republic Canada

+420 222 362 540

Sourcefabric GmbHPrinzessinnenstr. 2010969 BerlinGermany

+49 30 6162 9281

Sourcefabric North America720 Bathurst St.M5S 2R4 Toronto, Ontario

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o desks, no newsroom. Desks are essential to any news business. It comes as no surprise that desks are the basic organisational units in Superdesk.

Superdesk’s primary aim is to give newsroom staff the best possible experience to excel in their jobs. To achieve this goal, we have sought to

Superdesk

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Desks, tasks and teams

BE EVERYWHERE WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR DESK

The complexity of workflows and team structures are neatly stacked away beneath the desktop, so to speak.

create an environment that does away with tedious chores and encourages interaction and creativity. Desks are a good illustration of this approach. The complexity of workflows and team structures are neatly stacked away beneath the desktop, so to speak, and can be customised in the desk settings. Desks in Superdesk provide the structure to create teams and

workflows. It is through desks that you assign and manage tasks. Think of them as groups. Desks organise teams by type of work (proofing, image editor) or by location (Berlin bureau, Prague) or subject (politics, sports, origami) or anything else that represents your production.

Each desk has a workflow. All users of a desk share the same process of working.

The desk’s workflow is customisable in the desk configuration.

User experience and design

THE BETTER YOU LOOK, THE MORE YOU SEE

Customisable DashboardGet your coffee, sit down, log in and at a glance know where you are, what there is to do, who else is around and what happened while you were away. This is the way the Superdesk dashboard works (minus the coffee). Each editor can customise their own dashboard to reflect their personal tasks. Adding new widgets is an efficient way to extend Superdesk.

Superdesk comes with a number of universal widgets for the dashboard. More widgets can be added to fit the needs of the newsroom.

Superdesk

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New Tab 02Superdesk

The editor’s dashboard shows everything that matters: activity stream, task management, incoming news. The navigation in the left column accesses other Superdesk areas.

Selecting an item brings up the preview on the right. Metadata and related items can be displayed alongside the image or text itself.

Support to different delivery mechanisms and data formats let you define and browse content from a broad variety of content feeds.

Superdesk’s Ingest component includes support for NewsML-G2, NewsML 1.2, NITF, IPTC, RSS, ANPA, Teletype and other formats.

Vladimir Stefanović / Head of Design

Searches can be saved. This way, the most faceted search results are always only one click away.

The search can access one or more repositories. In this case the search has been narrowed down to “Reuters, pictures, soccer”.

Powerful Content Search

Superdesk features a robust and easy-to-use content searching component built on top of the powerful capabilities of Elasticsearch. You can define a search query by simply setting up filters using multiple parameters and facets. Within the results you can save the filter settings so they can be reused further via the search compo-nent or even within individual widgets on your user dashboard.

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New Tab 02Superdesk

“Interface design means hiding the complexity of technology.”

Content PackagesThe ability to package together news items is important to news organisations and their customers. Creating content packages in Superdesk allows you to better define the different facets of the coverage of a news story or to aggregate content for news products. Packages are versioned, have their own metadata and reference individual pieces of content.

Packaging content including pictures and text occurs on the righthand side of the screen. The monitoring on the left allows you to keep an eye on the news for time-sensitive changes.

Image cropping is intuitive and fast, preset options are available.

Superdesk

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New Tab 02Superdesk

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Monitoring and ProductionSuperdesk allows you to be fully immersed in the news that matters to you as it pours in. The monitoring view is the system’s default working environment. The left part of the screen allows you to keep an eye on the items coming in and out of your news organisation at all times. You can reference background materials and incoming feeds without ever losing focus on your work. The monitored content can be set up for each desk or individually by the journalists. Getting away from all the buzz is simple as well. A click on the monitoring icon hides the monitoring lists. If you need them back, just click on the same icon again.

Monitoring can be adjusted individually. You can follow desks, people and saved searches. You can also change the order of the monitoring results.

Master Desk ViewKeep an eye on your entire news-room. The Master Desk View offers three different modes for you to view how stories and tasks are progressing and who is working on what. Editors can also see user distribution per Desk with their corresponding roles and who is available online or who is not.

New Tab 02SuperDesk

New Tab 02Superdesk

Powerful Content Search

Content Packages

Search queries containing filters, multiple parameters and facets can be saved for reuse in the future.

Packages are versioned, have their own metadata and reference individual pieces of content.

Master Desk View

Customisable Dashboard

Keep an eye on your entire news-room. The Master Desk View offers three different modes: stories, tasks and people.

Each editor can customise their own dashboard to reflect their personal tasks.

hen we started concept- ualising Superdesk as a product, we knew we were going to create a complex and large system. Thus, we had to think of a design where system extensibility, content portability and integration with third-party applications were at the top of the requirements. Web APIs were the answer to all of this.

This API-first approach bring a lot to the table. Superdesk is designed from the ground up as a platform, featuring a set of RESTful APIs which serve different purposes. This approach allows us to define a core system that provides all the underlying services and the minimum set of features for having a functional and useful end-to-end news system.

The System API is part of the platform, giving developers a well-defined

The API-first approach

UNLOCK YOUR CONTENT, RELEASE THE API

Holman Romero

“Web APIs were the answer to all of this.”

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API-first

System API

Content API

Why APIs

Superdesk

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blueprint to extend different parts of the system. This API ensures the standardised functionality and modu-lar structure of the Superdesk core.

The Content API allows us to do a better job with content distribution and publishing. It makes news content available in a presentation-free JSON format and follows the IPTC's ninjs (News in JSON) specification. The Content API represents an important asset to newsrooms, it makes it possi-ble to build specialised apps, whenever needed, to present the content graceful-ly tailored for any given environment.

The Management API is a third interface to Superdesk which is still in the making. It will enable develop-ers to write external applications to create and update content and other Superdesk resources from external applications.

Superdesk APIs encourage and promote innovation and cooperation. This is very important to us, especially considering the fact that Superdesk is an open source project. New products developed based on the APIs will be available as a set of tools for journal-ism to any newsroom worldwide.

With the explosion of new digital platforms, services and devices in the past few years, having a modern technological infrastructure to support content publishing to reach readers wherever they are has become essen-tial to news organisations of any kind. This is exactly what Superdesk addresses.Management API

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Sometimes an image needs

a thousand words:

Superdesk server architecture and

technological stack

Output channels

ontent produced in Superdesk is ready to go on any platform or device, anywhere. You can devise new news products practically as quickly as you can conceive them.

As with everything else in the system, publishing in Superdesk is modular. From wire feeds to web publishing, print and broadcast, each output can be governed by a specialised output manager that allows whatever degree of control you may need. Alternatively, it can also be channeled to existing distribution or production software. And there is more to be gained using output channels.

Typical web CMSs are specialised tools to render content on the web. Those systems can be hooked up to Superdesk as output channels. The newsroom then works within Superdesk in a standardised workflow of content creation and production. The presenta-tion is delegated to the web application. A good example of this approach is the WordPress plug-in we are currently developing to ingest Superdesk content.

In the near future, publishing to the web will be possible from Superdesk. The Superdesk Web Publisher will provide the most powerful way of managing multiple websites driven by Superdesk content. We are working on a modern editor with preview functions for user-defined devices from desktop to mobile, which will help you deliver compelling stories to whatever online publishing platform you may have.

We are working on tools for develop-ers to create new solutions reaching readers on any platform. To better integrate with Superdesk APIs, Sourcefabric is developing a set of SDKs for all major programming languages. We have started with PHP, allowing applications to interact smoothly with the Super-desk Content API.

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CREATE ONCE PUBLISH EVERYWHERE Mischa

Gorinskat / Developer

Integration with Content Management Systems

Developer-friendly

Superdesk Web Publisher

https://github.com/superdesk/web-renderer

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Adaptability matters. The Superdesk content API PHP SDK opens up Superdesk to the world of PHP.

Adaptability matters. The superdesk content API PHP SDK opens up Superdesk to the world of PHP.

uperdesk is licensed to guarantee clients full access to the source code. Our licence eliminates any risk of vendor lock-in and related software-escrow costs. The licence also gives clients the freedom to modify all aspects of the software, because we believe this is how software transcends from being very useful to being truly productive.

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OPEN SOURCE LICENSEBusiness-friendly code

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Adaptability matters. The Superdesk content API PHP SDK opens up Superdesk to the world of PHP.

Adaptability matters. The superdesk content API PHP SDK opens up Superdesk to the world of PHP.

ruthful to our motto “made by journalists, for journalists”, we regularly place our team in our clients’ newsrooms. Working side by side, they effectively translate this experience into Superdesk’s product design. The best innovators know their environment by heart before designing features. This is how we like to work, and this is how we shape Superdesk.

Working together so closely, we prefer to refer to clients as partners, simply

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“We know code, journalism and forward-thinking business models.”

Superdesk

Developing in partnership

LET’S WORK TOGETHER

Arne Müller / Head of Business Development

because it better describes the way we work together. Our recent endeavour with Australian Associated Press (AAP) illustrates the benefits of such a partnership well. Preceding the contract signing, Sourcefabric project managers spent a few months in Sydney to get a better understanding of the technical requirements for the project and to get a feel for the agency’s strict requirements for accurate and speedy news delivery.

This partnership is a perfect opportuni-ty for Sourcefabric to showcase the power and flexibility of open source software to news and media organisa-tions worldwide.

We grow relationships, not just technology.

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“Sourcefabric spoke the same language

when it came to newsroom needs.”

“Sourcefabric spoke the same language

when it came to newsroom needs.”

In October 2014, AAP partnered with Sourcefabric to work side by side in developing Superdesk. Together, AAP and Sourcefabric have more than 30 people involved in the project. In the past, ‘non-journalistic’ tasks, such as tagging keywords to news packages took up to one fifth of the reporters’ time. With Superdesk we are on a quest to (re)make journalism the focus. We asked Brook Thomas, AAP’s chief technology officer, to tell us a bit more about their experience working with Sourcefabric.

With Superdesk, you have the flexibility to build on new features as you go. What are the advantages of having an ever-changing system in your newsroom?

With the digital arm of news media continually creating new challenges, managing a platform that allows you to enhance, add and remove functionality without a fuss is essential. You simply have to answer user and business needs if you want to keep moving forward – if you can’t answer them, you’re in trouble.

How did the open source nature of Superdesk impact the decision-making process?

Obviously open source is a major strate-gic choice and it was a central talking point especially given that our technology stack was so conservative. But in the end we simply went for it.

Brook Thomas/ Chief

TechnologyOfficer,

AustralianAssociated

Press

MAKE JOURNALISM THE FOCUSWho’s using Superdesk

AAP’s developers worked in tandem with Sourcefabric’s developers. How did that go?

I think a general atmosphere of excitement has been generated through our collaboration – that and the usual mix of fear, anxiety and relief that developers tend to feel when tackling complexity.

Did you gain new insights into newsroom management during the project?

To me, workflow is an incredibly intricate thing and this project made me really wonder how some workflows ever came to be. It seems to be the case that they’re often a consequence of estranged needs and misheld beliefs that customers still require content a certain way. Through a technical analysis of workflows we were able to expose some curious aspects of business logic.

Within newsroom management, you can neglect legacy editorial systems and processes at your peril. All news-rooms should work hard to ‘keep their house in order’ – technology can’t do all the work, you have to keep on top of the complexity.

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“Sourcefabric spoke the same language

when it came to newsroom needs.”

“Sourcefabric spoke the same language

when it came to newsroom needs.”

MEET SOURCEFABRIC

“Our diverse portfolio of clients and partners

benefit each other.”

ourcefabric is based in Prague, Czech Republic, and was founded in 2010 with the purpose of developing state-of-the-art tools for journalism. For more than a decade, the founders of Sourcefabric have worked with media organisations worldwide, empowering journalism through software development and services. Our history of producing open source software for news media dates back to 1999.

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Fabienne Riener

28languages wespeak

23nationalities

14countries we are spread acrosswe have

Our team consist of over sixty people, with offices in Prague, Berlin, Toronto, Belgrade and Cluj-Napoca. Among the list of Sourcefabric clients you will find international multi-channel news organisations, radio stations, self-pub-lishing and print-on-demand service providers as well as NGOs and news agencies. We deploy forward-thinking news technologies with business leaders in newsrooms across the globe. Much of our work is also focused on

projects in some of the most remote and challenging political and econom-ic environments in the world.

Our formula is simple: we want the best, not only for individual clients, but for the industry as a whole; from Basel to Bamako, to Sydney and São Paulo.

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Europe’s largest developer of open source tools for news media

Superdesk

CONTACT US

contact@sourcefabric.org

www.sourcefabric.org

@sourcefabric

www.facebook.com/Sourcefabric

https://www.linkedin.com/company/sourcefabric

Sourcefabric z.ú.Salvátorská 10110 00 Praha 1Czech Republic

phone: +420 222 362 540

Sourcefabric GmbHPrinzessinnenstr. 20

10969 BerlinGermany

phone: +49 30 6162 9281

Sourcefabric North AmericaCentre for Social Innovation720 Bathurst St.Toronto, OntarioM5S 2R4Canada

Berlin

PragueToronto