How Contexte built a custom collaborative editorial tool

Editor’s note: this article is part of Toolbox, The Fix’s series on digital tools used by news publishers. The goal is to help managers pick the most appropriate tools for themselves by speaking with media practitioners. In the previous editions we looked at Dennik SME, elDiario.es and Zetland.

Contexte strives to provide clarity to the lawmaking process. Founded in 2013, this subscription-based publisher provides analysis and reportage about public policy with a focus on France. Their readership includes professionals and the general public alike.  

Contexte sends a daily newsletter which collects information from its nine editions. Since 2013, their team has grown and is currently more than 50 journalists spread across their offices in Paris and Brussels. “With the team growing in the last decade, we needed a strong collaboration system between different stakeholders like journalists and editors in our two offices,” says Cédric Raud, a developer at Contexte. 

Making their newsletter was an orchestra which started in the afternoon with the journalists writing their news briefs. By evening, the proofreaders would start their work. At dawn, the editors would make the final touches. The entire process is time-sensitive as they need to send the newsletter to their subscribers by 8:00 AM sharp. 

This orchestra was earlier played out on Google Docs which was pre-formatted with ArchieM, a markup language. The final result would then be exported to Django. This process did not allow for multiple people to work simultaneously on Docs. Having this process split into two separate software services made it difficult for the team to make any last-minute changes and deterred them from experimenting. 

This pushed Raud into building a custom collaborative editor, one that allowed multiple people to edit simultaneously in a briefing format. The end product, Echo, took three months to build. 

Raud and his colleague spent the first two months in the discovery phase. Raud recalls 10-12 products that he found useful. The two that caught his eye were Prosemirror and Tiptap. 

“I didn't look at the whole package solutions because they were expensive. For a small journal like us, we didn't want to buy something off the shelf,” says Raud. In the end, they decided to use Tiptap and Yjs as building blocks for their proof of concept. They then used API to bind the process together. 

The team of two had split their responsibilities, recalls Raud. “I was responsible for the core editing feature and my colleague was responsible for the collaborative discussions and the history of modification.” 

Before Echo, the team of production editors used different tools than the journalists. “By integrating comments inside the tool, journalists, reviewers and production editors can all work in the same document at once, discuss in threads and suggest modifications, without switching tools.” 

They then took one month to check the validity of their software. “We ran a lot of demos and user tests to ensure that our tool was the right fit between the needs and the intended solution.” Echo was finally made available to the whole editorial team in January 2024.

With Echo, the Contexte editorial team now enjoys a better editorial experience. “The entire process is more fluid and pleasant,” says Raud. Echo has also helped them gain roughly 20% on their productivity.

It has also helped them reduce their chance of errors in formatting.

Raud attributes this lessening of errors to Echo's design. “It is a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get), so the document looks closely to the published version on the website, which simplifies the detection of layout issues or formatting mistakes.”

Echo has not only brought the tech and redaction team on one page, but has done so while reducing errors and improving the productivity and editing experience of the Contexte team.