Looking for a customisable online magazine generator that gets its content from multiple Twitter users - any ideas?

September 1, 2012 2:53 AM

I'm looking for an online tool to create a daily web-based magazine for a citizen journalism collective. Ideally, it would gather articles, links and photos from designated multiple users on Twitter, and allow an editor to lay them out and edit them to create nice, readable pages.

I'm part of citizen journalist collective. Currently we're doing this: our volunteers post relevant links and photos on Twitter with a specific hashtag. Using Scribblelive we then make a selection of the most important tweets and post this online in a Scribblelive feed on a page on our site. This is updated on an ongoing basis.

What I'm exploring is whether it's possible to have an online 'magazine' using the same content from multiple Twitter users, that is published on a daily basis. It would need to be customisable in terms of typography, layout etc. and as automated as possible to minimise the workload. We could then also create a PDF of and this send it to our mailing list, print it, etc.

I see that Paper.li goes in this direction but it doesn't seem to be customisable in the way that I'm looking for. Also we need to have content input by hashtag rather than have the tool following all the tweets of specific users, since these users don't exclusively tweet content that should end up in the magazine.

Any ideas? Does anyone have any experience with these tools and can advise?

Thanks!

posted by scrm to Technology (4 answers total)

I am not an expert but you could do all the above in wordpress custom installation. You can have individual contributors all have limited accounts which allows them to put draft articles which the editor can edit and post or schedule to post.

You could use one of the many (often free) 'magazine' themes to start with and get things going and later get someone to do it for your properly.

It is also be possible for people to contribute via email so even literally anyone anywhere can push something on to the blog. This means you can have truly distributed team of non- journalists or non- web savvy contributors.

If I ran a magazine op I would integrate my wordpress with google doc (warning: this needs a professional hand i think)

There are extensions like the ones here which let you convert articles to pdf.



Just a note: Wordpress takes a bit of time (weeks to months depending on your attitude and aptitude) but once you are on top of it nothing matches its power and flexibility.
posted by london302 at 3:55 AM on September 1, 2012

And to you specific point. Scribblelive integrates with wordpress.
posted by london302 at 4:26 AM on September 1, 2012

Try Scoop.it. Not sure it wil integrate with the hashtag, but worth investigating.
posted by Ms. Toad at 6:24 AM on September 1, 2012

paper.li might do.
posted by zadcat at 8:01 AM on September 1, 2012