​​​​​​​In this episode of The Editorial Edge, we examine the technical and operational transformation of Erdee Media Groep, a Dutch cross-media publisher producing approximately 100 stories a day across a six-day-a-week newspaper, a family magazine, websites, apps, and a digital archive.

Before this transformation, individual editorial teams at Erdee Media Groep managed planning independently in Excel and Word documents, with no shared view of what was being produced across the organization. Kordiam entered the picture in 2017 as the planning system for the company's main publication, giving editorial boards their first real visibility into upcoming content. But planning and production remained separate systems, and every story still required someone to manually copy information from one to the other.

The discussion focuses on how Erdee Media Groep closed that gap in 2023 by integrating Kordiam with WoodWing Studio, building a unified workflow where Kordiam serves as the single source of truth for their 200-person editorial team. We explore the "planning is production" principle that governs the integration: if a story does not exist in Kordiam, it does not exist at all. Editors are never permitted to start a story directly in WoodWing.

We break down how the event-driven integration works in practice. A story idea sits in Kordiam with an "idea" status, and no production work begins. Only when the editorial team decides to move forward and changes the status to "production" does the integration activate, automatically creating an article in WoodWing Studio and linking it directly from the Kordiam Story Card.

This factual overview highlights how the integration synchronizes metadata and article templates between the two systems, including platform, scheduled date, assigned author, and article type, to eliminate manual data entry and accelerate the publishing cycle. Any later changes made in Kordiam, such as a shifted date or reassigned author, flow through to WoodWing automatically, keeping both systems in sync without manual upkeep.

We also discuss what this separation means operationally: writers can focus on content while a dedicated output team manages publication timing and channels, with the Kordiam-to-WoodWing handoff removing the risk of dropped information between the two roles.

This podcast was produced with the support of AI