What is Scoop?

Scoop (not to be confused with our mobile listings app, The Scoop) is The New York Times’s homegrown digital and (soon-to-be) print CMS. (We also use WordPress for many of our blogs.) Scoop was initially designed and developed in 2008 in close partnership with the newsroom. Unlike many commercial systems, Scoop does not render our website or provide community tools to our readers. Rather, it is a system for managing content and publishing data so that other applications can render the content across our platforms. This separation of functions gives development teams at The Times the freedom to build solutions on top of that data independently, allowing us to move faster than if Scoop were one monolithic system. For example, our commenting platform and recommendations engine integrate with Scoop but remain separate applications.

This post was written and edited in Scoop.

The vision for Scoop has evolved over the years. The beauty of a homegrown CMS is that we can shape its features and technology over time. Since its inception, the Scoop platform has been extended to include many new features such as sophisticated authoring and editing tools and workflows, budgeting, photo manipulation, video management and more robust content APIs. Its user base has swelled from a few dozen web producers to more than 1,000 users, including reporters, copy editors, photo editors and video producers.