Snell-o-vision

We track a lot of stories at Macworld in a given day. Some we decide aren’t worth covering. Some we toss into a heap for our Remainders column. Some get written up if there’s time, or tossed on the heap. Some are must-writes.

We also get a lot of press releases and news tips every day. And we have a stable of writers, on staff and off.

What we are lacking right now is a good way to track all this stuff.

I am trying to harness the power of the LazyTwitter to see if someone can point us in the right direction, ideally at something that is currently available as a product that could be used for our purposes without much, if any modification. We aren’t interested in building this ourselves or having you build it for us. Note: We use a home-built CMS, and we aren’t going to change that anytime soon. Suggestions for using another CMS to do this will not be helpful. It also needs to be a web-based interface, because we have a lot of different contributors interacting with the same data and a desktop app just isn’t gonna work.

Anyway, here’s what we’re looking for.

• Each story idea/possibility would be a discrete item, with several metadata fields.

• Metadata fields we know we need: Priority [Ignore, TBD, Remainders, Could Write, Must Write], Author [nobody, name of person who says they are writing it], staging URL

• Ability to forward e-mails to an account somewhere and have them automatically sucked into the system and added as a new, TBD-priority item, so that we can stop using e-mail forwards as a way of throwing articles into the pool

• Ability to display active stories/issues based on various search criteria, for example, what am I writing, what needs to be assigned, what needs to be triaged, what needs to be edited and posted.

Basically, stories would come in - via e-mail or entered by a human - and then triaged. Writers would be able to “dibs” a story by entering their name in the writer field. They’d write it up in our CMS and then mark the story as written and ready for editing, possibly just by pasting in a staging link. Then an editor would read it over, push it live and mark it complete.

To me this sounds sort of like a modified version of a bug tracker, but most bug trackers strike me as being overkill for a small editorial management task like ours.

In any event, if you have any suggestions for services/tools I should look at, I would love to hear them. jsnell at macworld.com or @jsnell me on Twitter.