Content management and publishing system for a media fund

Context

The state media support fund finances hundreds of projects every year: regional newspapers, podcasts, cultural magazines, investigative journalism and programmes in national minority languages. Under the fund's rules, the content of these projects must be freely available for at least two years, not only on the publisher's website but also with the fund itself.

This is how the content bank came about: one place to find everything created with the fund's money. It publishes articles, video programmes and audio recordings from several dozen newsrooms.

What needed solving

The hardest part was adapting the system to the people who fill it. Content is uploaded by the newsrooms themselves, and each works differently: some have text with photos, others only a YouTube link, others an audio file. If uploading were difficult, the bank would stay half empty and the fund would have to collect the material itself.

Visitors need to find what they are looking for quickly. With thousands of entries, a list sorted by date is not enough.

Accessibility mattered too. The fund's mission is information for everyone, so it had to be possible to listen to text as well.

How the system is structured

Each newsroom has its own account. After logging in, it uploads content, selects the funding programme it received support under and adds a link to the original source. Larger newsrooms do not have to move everything by hand: articles can be imported from their own systems. If some entries fail to transfer, this is visible straight away and the import can be repeated.

For visitors, content is organised by the fund's programmes, and within each programme they can filter to video, audio or text entries only. Each entry shows which newsroom uploaded it, and related entries from the same programme are suggested alongside.

For text articles, the system creates an audio version automatically. Readers can listen to it while driving, for example, or simply when their eyes are tired. The audio is generated by an external service. If it occasionally does not respond, the system retries later so the article is not left without audio.

Photos and files are kept in a shared library, so the same image does not have to be uploaded several times. The website has light and dark themes, search and accessibility settings.

What to know before a similar project

The success of a project like this depends on the convenience of the person uploading content, not the visitor. If uploading an entry takes a newsroom ten minutes, some newsrooms simply will not do it. That is why we spent most of the time on the upload process, and the look of the home page came second.