Press Release: ANSA Launches Full Editorial Operations on Superdesk
Italian news agency ANSA has completed the rollout of Superdesk across its full editorial operations.
The implementation of our headless CMS for news organisations began with the Culture Desk some months ago and was completed when the agency’s central desk went live this week.
While every Superdesk implementation is a shared effort between Sourcefabric and our development partners, the newsroom team at ANSA deserves special kudos for accelerating their work in the spring of 2020, as the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was at its height in Italy. Thanks to their efforts, the team was able to rapidly shift the entire newsroom to remote working.
New features added to journalism’s open-source code base
Through our work with ANSA, several new options and improvements have come to Superdesk.
The first is a configurable change in workflow. In the past, the Personal space in Superdesk was reserved as a place for journalists to take an article out of the newsroom stages and work on it privately. Once done, the article would still have to be submitted to an editor or someone else with publishing privileges. But now, with this option turned on, a journalist can publish directly from their workspace without any further approvals required. They can also duplicate articles to their personal space.
Another small but useful improvement in the Superdesk content editor is to make the counter in articles more prominent, whether that’s the number of lines, words or characters, and highlight the text when those limits are reached.
In the same vein, we’ve added a Print button to the Superdesk editor, so that newsroom managers can print out items from the monitoring view, complete with metadata.
Supporting new newsroom products and future growth
The Superdesk deployment at ANSA, Italy’s leading wire service, involves over 500 journalists and 40 desks, including Politics, Economics, and Abroad.
On average, the agency produces 8 000 text and image-based content items per day, reaching millions of readers around the world.
Superdesk is not only key to supporting the current level of news production but will also be instrumental in the agency’s plans for the future. “With the Superdesk Newshub and Planning components, we will be able to offer more products and services around real-time events and breaking news,” said Angelo Marrara, ANSA’s Chief Technology Officer.
ANSA already has a robust digital portfolio that includes the ANSA Web News service for customer news organisations, along with sector-specific feeds on topics ranging from art to agriculture, as well as digital products for general audiences such as the ANSA mobile app and SMS updates.
Its website, ANSA.IT, gets about 242 million page views per month and 25 million unique visitors per month.
“As the largest Superdesk deployment to date, our work with ANSA represents a milestone for us and the news industry as a whole,” said Sourcefabric Managing Director Sava Tatic.
Media Contact
Anna Rohleder
Head of Communications
press@sourcefabric.org
+420 222 362 540
