23 Jun The Superdesk Wire Club: Turning newsroom software into a shared resource
But as the industry has fallen on tough economic times, new forms of collaborative journalism have emerged to help media organisations share costs and improve the quality of the news they produce.
Readers can easily see the results with projects like the Panama Papers and Documenting Hate. Harder to spot, but no less important, are the partnerships in the digital trenches – the alliances forged to improve the tools and software that deliver journalists' work.
Facilitating technological collaborations has always been a Sourcefabric priority, and now we're solidifying this goal with the launch of the Superdesk Wire Club. This forum will give news organisations powered by Superdesk a conduit to engage in the planning, development, and maintenance of the software they use every day. Founding members of the Wire Club include Norwegian news agency NTB, Belgian news agency Belga, and the Australian Associated Press (AAP). Additional agencies are expected to join soon.
Since Superdesk's public release in early 2016, nearly a dozen publishers have adopted the CMS or are transitioning to the software, including some of 
Europe's leading news agencies. Every month, the platform delivers more than 300,000 news items to over 80 million readers on four continents. As a "headless CMS," in which the front end has been decoupled from the content processing interface on the back end, Superdesk is a more flexible digital publishing system. Superdesk is also built on open-source code base, which allows partner media organisations to collectively make improvements and share costs.
The Wire Club will facilitate these development efforts and give Superdesk's clients a forum dedicated to ensuring that the system continues to meet the particular needs of major news agencies.
Tom Wuytack, Belga's CIO, says that is precisely why his news agency is participating. "The Wire Club will allow us to sit in the driver's seat to ensure that further evolution of the Superdesk software remains relevant for Belga.