Last year I became Director of Internet Technology at Philadelphia Newspapers, and one of the first things I wanted to fix was the publishing workflow. The process of getting newspaper content onto the web was taking about eight hours. Over the years I had built individual tools to automate pieces of the workflow — from reading image dimensions to serving ads — but the overall process was still largely manual. Editors and producers were spending their day on mechanical tasks: reformatting stories, uploading files, checking links, fixing layouts. These are smart, capable people doing work that software should handle.

The idea behind Cofax is simple. The content management system should do the mechanical work so that journalists can focus on journalism. A story moves through the editorial process, and Cofax handles the rest: formatting, placement, indexing, publishing. What used to take eight hours now takes about 45 minutes. That is not an incremental improvement. That is a fundamental change in how a newsroom’s web operation works.

I could not have built this alone. The team that made Cofax real is a group of people I respect and enjoy working with.

Karl Martino is one of the strongest developers I have worked with. He writes clean, thoughtful code and thinks carefully about architecture before writing a line. Sam Cohen handles the integration with our editorial systems, which is the kind of unglamorous work that makes everything else possible. Toan Dang is another senior engineer whose contributions to the core system are essential. Derek Dinh handles our systems administration and database administration, and is fast and resourceful in keeping everything running. Charles Harvey manages our site operations and makes sure Cofax runs at production scale. Hung Dao contributes solid development work across multiple components of the system. Don Henry, our senior producer and project manager for Cofax, serves as the bridge between the development team and the newsroom. He understands both sides and keeps us building the right thing.

Outside of Knight Ridder, Lee Bolding of Unix Consulting contributes to the open source side of Cofax with software development and database work. His contributions are separate from the newspaper production work but valuable to the project.

We launched Cofax on Philly.com, serving the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. The newsroom staff adapted quickly because the system was designed around their workflow, not the other way around.

I spent a good part of last year talking to editors and managers at other Knight Ridder newspapers, explaining what Cofax does and why it matters. Convincing a newsroom to change its publishing workflow requires trust. You have to show them that the system will not break on deadline, that it will handle their edge cases, that it will make their lives easier, not harder. Some of those conversations took multiple visits.

It worked. Cofax is now being adopted by other Knight Ridder newspapers. The Miami Herald is using it. The San Jose Mercury News is on it. More are scheduled to come online in the coming months. Each newspaper has its own quirks, its own workflows, its own technical environment. We are learning from every deployment and making Cofax better as a result.

The plan is to make Cofax available to newspapers outside Knight Ridder as well. Good software should not stay locked inside one company. If Cofax can help a mid-sized newspaper publish to the web without hiring a dedicated web production staff, that is a better outcome for the industry. Newspapers are all facing the same challenge: how to publish to the web efficiently without pulling resources away from journalism. We want to share it widely.