Neon Tommy Drupal Site

The pilot news site for the Annenberg Social News Platform (ASNP) is Neon Tommy. Neon Tommy is a web-only, Los Angeles-based news source sponsored by the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism via the school-wide student-supported incubator program known as Annenberg Digital News. Neon Tommy offers compelling, crucial and timely news coverage about issues of concern to Southern California residents, and is read broadly by readers across the country and the world.

Built entirely in Drupal, the site is powered by a custom developed module called the Editorial Control Panel, which allows site editors to customize the news layout on a variety of page templates to serve as the home page and section pages.

Published as a case study on Drupal.org, the Annenberg School has immediate plans to roll this Drupal installation out for two additional journalism projects.

Successfully launched in June, 2010. (Client testimonials.)

My role:

Project Manager
Client Manager
Technical architect

Core features:

An Editorial Control Panel that provides a graphical tool to layout stories on the sites home page and every major news section home page. The system allows users to instantly swap in a layout template and fill each region with specific articles, pod casts, videos and slide shows.
Extensive rich media support, including embedded video, hosted video, podcasts, custom slide shows (with audio!) and custom Google Maps
The Zeitgeist dashboard, showing a snapshot of custom system activity.
Precise media positioning, allowing you to insert a simple text placeholder to position embedded video, slideshows and pod casts anywhere in the body field
Automatic HTML5 detection for audio pod casts

Read more about the feature set in the Drupal.org case study.

Core technologies: