Around 100 stories per day. A six-day-a-week newspaper, a family magazine, websites, apps and a digital archive. One editorial planning system as the starting point for all of it.

When Erdee Media Groep rolled out integrated planning and production with Kordiam and WoodWing, two things stood out. The whole editorial team was working confidently in the new workflow within about two months, with no phased rollout. And no in-house developers were needed for the integration itself.

Annerie Mauritz shared the workflow and the lessons learned in our recent webinar with WoodWing.

For a newsroom producing around 100 stories a day across print and digital channels, the gap between planning and production is where deadlines slip, information gets duplicated, and editorial teams lose time they cannot afford to lose. Erdee Media Groep, a Christian cross-media publishing company based in Apeldoorn in the Netherlands, knew this problem well and decided to tackle this challenge head on.  

Recently Kordiam and WoodWing hosted a joint webinar in which Annerie Mauritz, Editorial Business Analyst at Erdee Media Groep, walked attendees through the company's journey: from fragmented, team-level planning in Excel sheets, to a fully integrated workflow where a story planned in Kordiam flows directly into WoodWing Studio, with metadata, article templates, and status updates moving between the two systems. 

The Problem: Two Worlds That Did Not Talk 

Erdee Media Groep publishes across multiple brands, anchored by Reformatorisch Dagblad, a daily newspaper published six days a week, alongside a weekly supplement, a bi-weekly family magazine, and digital channels including websites and apps. Coordinating content across all of these was, for a long time, amanual effort. 

Before 2017, individual editorial teams — politics, economics, and others — each maintained their own planning, primarily in Excel and Word documents. There was no overarching view of what was being planned across the organization, which made it difficult for editorial boards and team leads to coordinate coverage or manage priorities. 

Kordiam came on board in 2017 as the planning system for the main publication. It brought immediate improvements in coordination. Teams could finally see what others were planning, and the editorial board gained genuine visibility into upcoming content. But planning and production still lived in separate systems. Every time a story moved from idea to active production, someone had to manually copy information across. 

The Solution: One Trigger, One Flow 

In 2023, Erdee Media Groep introduced WoodWing Studio as its editorial production system and integrated it with Kordiam from day one. The integration was built on a clear principle: Kordiam is the starting point for everything. If a story does not exist in Kordiam, it does not exist. 

The mechanics of the integration are grounded in workflow status. When an editor creates a story idea in Kordiam, it sits in the system with an "idea" status. No production work is triggered yet. Only when the editorial team makes the decision to actually produce the story, and the status changes to "production", does the integration activate. 

At that point, a WoodWing Studio article is automatically created, pre-populated with the metadata already entered in Kordiam: the platform, the scheduled date, the assigned author, and the article type. A link to the WoodWing article appears directly in the Kordiam Story Card. The editor clicks once and arrives in Studio, ready to write. 

Any subsequent changes made in Kordiam such as a date shift, a reassigned author, or a change in article type, continue to flow through to WoodWing automatically. The two systems stay in sync without anyone having to maintain that sync manually. 

"Nowadays, for us, it's nearly impossible to work without Kordiam as a start of our publishing cycle. So all publications start in the Kordiam planning, and they end up in WoodWing." 

— Annerie Mauritz, Editorial Business Analyst, Erdee Media Groep 

What Changed in Practice 

Annerie highlighted several concrete improvements that the integrated workflow delivered for Erdee Media Groep. 

A faster publishing cycle. Because the WoodWing article is created automatically the moment a production decision is made, writers can move directly into content creation.  

Metadata that travels with the story. Information entered during planning such as platform, deadline, author, or article type, is automatically transferred to  WoodWing. The writer has all the data they need and no longer need to start from a blank slate.  

Article templates selected at the planning stage. WoodWing's article templates define which components a piece needs. Erdee's editors can now select a template directly in Kordiam when planning a story, and that structure is pre-applied in WoodWing when the article is created. For content that follows a regular format, this removes a significant amount of repetitive setup work. 

Cleaner separation between input and output

When input and output responsibilities sit with different teams. For example, writers focused on content creation, a dedicated output team managing when, where, and how stories are published. So the handoff between planning and production has to be airtight. The integration handles that automatically.  This separation only works if the handoff between planning and production is reliable. The integration makes that handoff automatic.

"We really teach by the model: if it's not in Kordiam, it doesn't exist. So we also require the editors and the teams to start a story in Kordiam, and they never start it in WoodWing — so it's always in the planning." 

— Annerie Mauritz, Editorial Business Analyst, Erdee Media Groep 

Why This Matters Beyond Erdee 

The Erdee Media Groep story is not unique in its challenges. Fragmented planning, duplicated data entry, and the disconnect between editorial strategy and daily production are problems that publishing teams across the industry navigate every day. What makes this case instructive is how they resolved it by making Kordiam the single source of truth, with their CMS following its lead 

For Erdee Media Groep, the result is a publishing operation where a newsroom of around 200 people, producing content across multiple brands and channels, works from one coherent workflow — from the first story idea to the final published article. 

Want to see how Kordiam connects with your production tools? Explore our integrations or get in touch to discuss your workflow.