Selecting a content management system is always a huge issue for a publisher, and the choice gets even harder as the pace of change accelerates. In Web 1.0, we took the output of the newspaper's CMS and pushed it through a Web CMS. Now a lot of publishers are at Web 1.5, realizing that most of the flow is actually the other way, with a lot of content published web-only and then the best bubbling up to the paper. In South Africa, Media 24's Die Burger has implemented a web-to-print CMS and the huge Johnnic Communications group plans to roll out another one for its publications. (One CMS is Italian and one is Scandinavian, but you'll need to ask the companies for details.)
Web 1.5 wasn't enough for the young crew that started Lawrence.com and LJWorld. They also wanted community members to participate through their own blogs, and to be sure that databased content could be reused easily and creatively, e.g. weather appearing on local sports schedule pages; crime stories accompanied by dynamically generated trend info. That was the birth of Django, the Python framework created to be a CMS, and now released open source. For newspapers without the tech skills to customize Django, there's Ellington, a commercial version supported by the newspaper group that created it.
CMS's run the spectrum from open-source Drupal, which has swept the non-profit advocacy world because it's free and contains both publishing and advocacy features, to the industrial-grade Ektron, based on Microsoft's dot-net framework. If you're serious about making a selection, a good place to start is CMS Watch.
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