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Right, and it's still sad to say that they capitalized on that fact so incredibly poorly that the following came to pass:

https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/1012781017940316161

> The Lawrence Journal-World, where Django was created, is now a Wordpress site. http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2018/jun/26/redesign-ljworld/

discuss

always_good|7 years ago

Or they realized that there isn't much value in building their own CMS.

ubernostrum|7 years ago

I worked at the Journal-World for around five years, starting in 2006.

Upper management at the time was interesting. A lot of people who didn't necessarily understand the internet or technology in general, but knew they didn't, and were willing to hire and trust people who did. That was the magic sauce that led to Django, and a lot of the other innovative stuff. The owner of the paper, for example, had his secretary print out his emails and bring them into his office; then he'd write his replies on a manual typewriter, and hand them back to be typed into a computer. But he'd also managed to ride the wave of first the cable TV/internet boom (by setting up a cable division) and then the web boom (by hiring a team of people to build a first-class news site and giving them more or less free reign to do it right).

And that was how you got the heyday of the Journal-World. All sorts of interesting experiments in using the web to enhance journalism, close collaboration between the newsroom and the tech team, and a ton of cool things accomplished and a bunch of industry awards, etc. I actually had a byline at one point, on a feature that's now gone because Django got retired (a data-journalism project tracking the impact of flu during the H1N1 scare).

And other news organizations were happy to pay for the software to do their own version of that. We had both hosted and on-prem versions of it, and recommendations for hiring developers and training them to work on it, and as far as I could tell they seemed pretty happy to have something that had been designed at and by a newspaper (as opposed to other news CMS products, which often have their first encounter with a journalist at the time of production deployment).

But all good things come to an end. There were some management shakeups, and a lot of the tech team (myself included) left for greener pastures. A little while after that, I heard the CMS division was being shut down and everyone in it laid off; then I heard another company had made an offer to acquire it. As far as I know, Ellington (the Django-based news CMS) is still available today as a supported commercial product. But the Journal-World no longer uses it or, to my knowledge, maintains an in-house technology team like it used to.