Users, Authors, Staff
Whereas many smaller blogging or web publishing tools do not differentiate between users and authors, Newscoop provides a professional framework necessary for consistent and future proof author and user management.
Top 5 reasons why you shouldn't mix authors and users
- Your media production is growing. People start working production shifts. As users, your staff can log in, with the administration rights assigned to them, they can add images, add text, edit, proofread and assign any author in the system to an article. They can add new authors, photographers, anything and assign them to articles. No need for authors to add their own material, to register and log in. Your staff can work efficiently as an autonomous editorial team.
- Imagine a free lancer who delivered a lot of mediocre articles that didn't get published. As revenge he wrote something nasty in his user bio and changed the picture showing his middle finger. As a publisher, you are glad that this image and the text do not automatically show up alongside every article - because authors and users are separate entities.
- The author system in Superdesk allows to create job titles on the fly. Especially for longer, investigative articles, the contributors will be listed for their work (writer, photography, research, interview, ...) and not just come up as "written by" with a list of names.
- Paying invoices is easy now. Your staff prints out automatically generated lists of articles each day (week, month) and can structure the pay stubs even along the article IDs given out by Superdesk. No writer, photographer, researcher will be paid late, because once their article is published, the accountant has all the relevant information on the table.
- Like any professional publisher, you are in a position to commission, acquire, translate articles and add them to your publication. No need to create new accounts for new writers in the system. Your staff can do everything from A to Z.
We distinguish between:
- Author - the author of content in your publication, may that be text, images or something else
- User - a community member, somebody who has registered, can comment and perform other tasks
- Staff - somebody who can login to backend, edit your publication and contribute content
The basic assumptions:
- an author has contributed content to your publication (image, text, etc.)
- an author is not necessarily a staff member - and therefore might not have or require a login
- a user is somebody who registered him/herself on the site or has been registered through the admin interface - and therefore has a login
- some users have access to the admin interface - we consider them "staff"
- users with access to the admin interface (staff) differ in the rights they have (e.g. create, publish, delete, etc.)
Following these assumptions you can map most use scenarios, like commissioned or translated articles (author only) as well as community contributions (registered users writing comments) or contributing editors (users with admin access).
There is an additional feature in Newscoop 4 that allows to link authors with the community, following these assumptions:
- some authors are staff members - they have two profiles: author and user
- staff members are (by definition) community users / members
- in the admin interface I can link between users and authors
- if such links exist, the template can display a link from the author information to the matching user page
It is important to stress that all content on the author profile is editorial content. The portrait image follows the design of the publication. The biography information is written and edited by staff members, not the user him/herself. The user profile can be edited by the user him/herself.
Who owns what?
- Author picture and bio are editorial content and are owned by the publication. They are part of the corporate identity and the brand of the publication.
- User picture and bio / info are owned by the users and can be changed by them any time. There is no editorial control over the content. And user can delete everything, also cancel their account.