One of the greatest performance upgrades that newsrooms will start to widely adopt is the content management technology that powers their programming and publishing workflows. In 2023 and beyond, we’ll see a greater emphasis on bringing product and engineering talent in to optimize the legacy systems that many newsrooms have been constrained by for years, if not, decades.

Far too often, newsrooms have to adapt to their content management tools, platforms, and systems because the technology, workflows, and features are set in stone. This poses great limitations and restrictions on journalists and editors, as they are forced to find workarounds to meet their needs.

The optimal content management platform will provide four key benefits: speed, flexibility, monetization, and empowerment.

Speed: In order to remain competitive in the modern news landscape, content management technology must enable rapid development and integration of new features. It allows for speed of development and the ability to quickly test hypotheses while reducing risk.

Flexibility: Content management systems will become more modular, making it easier to create, upgrade, and replace individual components, from the front end to the back. They should allow editors to mix and match components to create new templates on the fly, while engineers can swap and upgrade everything down to the database.

Monetization: In a high-performance content management platform, we’ll see the integration of diverse revenue-driving experiences consolidated into a single workflow. This will support meeting the design and content needs of advertisers while supporting direct consumer revenue models (such as paywalls and memberships).

Empowerment: Most importantly, the content platform allows journalists complete control of their workflows through an efficient editorial experience. It puts the content strategy completely in editorial hands, so that product and engineering teams can focus on building high-value, innovative features.

In 2023 and beyond, the news and journalism industry will reclaim control of their content publishing platforms, while empowering journalists to work with product and engineering teams to develop innovative products that are not constrained by legacy platforms.