Among the innovators, four news organizations in this survey have added software development and sales to their business portfolios. Not finding what they envisioned on the shelf, and unsatisfied with the idea of building a site that would be difficult or impossible to extend once consultants left, they designed content management systems from the ground up that were built around core community concepts.

• Ellington: Ellington is the system that’s behind the Lawrence Journal-World’s Lawrence.com. A CMS built using the Django open-source framework ¹⁶, Ellington is now resold to other news organizations with an entry price of $15k. For now, Ellington is used mostly at organizations that have a direct or indirect connection to the Lawrence Journal-World’s parent company; in addition to World Company sites such as LJWorld, Lawrence.com, KUSports, it’s in use at the Naples Daily News of Naples, FL, and its sister paper the Bonita Daily News, where a number of former LJWorld/Lawrence.com staff migrated to. Outside of the World Company family, Ellington is in use at Steamboat Pilot , a community site for Steamboat Springs, Colorado sponsored by The Steamboat Pilot Newspaper, and at TexasGigs.com, a music community site founded by Mike Orren, whose other notable online journalism site is PegasusNews.com.
• Morris Digital Works Suite: Many of MDW’s new signature sites, such as Bluffton Today, are built on the open-source CMS Drupal. But MDW has, in addition, a product line of its own. Some of the products are integrated with their Drupal sites, and others, like Siteweaver, are complete online publishing management systems in their own right. Particularly notable is MDSpotted, a photo gallery package that enables readers to upload photos. MDSpotted is in use at a number of sites owned by Morris Communications, MDW’s parent, but its gained traction well beyond that at sites like WickedLocal.com.
• Bakomatic: Bakomatic was developed as a social networking platform for Bakotopia, a youth-oriented site founded and operated by the Bakersfield Californian. The Californian also runs the Northwest Voice and the Southwest Voice. Participata, the software spinoff of the Californian, markets Bakomatic on a per site basis with pricing linked to the circulation size of the newspaper who’s building a new social networking site for their audience. Pricing starts at $30k for 1-3 sites for newspapers with a circulation of less than 50,000. Customers include the Arizona Republic.
• YourHub: The YourHub platform, designed in partnership with web development firm Indigio for the Denver News Agency, creates a turnkey system for a blog community to wrap around an existing media site – and it also provides a platform for self-service classified advertising. It’s sold on what Yourhub.com describes as a “syndicated” model – that is, there’s an initial fee coupled with monthly fees based on circulation; in addition, YourHub’s customers can join an online ad network that shares revenue based on per-click advertising placed on the YourHub sites. In addition to the Denver News Agency flagships of the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, customers include: The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Ventura County-Star, Scripps Treasure Coast Newspaper Group, Los Angeles News Group, The Anderson Independent-Mail, The Wichita Falls Times Record News, and The Colorado Springs Gazette.