CMS Vendors
WhiteBeard News Suite
News Suite
Lebanese company produces a very feature-complete, if somewhat clunky, content management system (CMS), offering a 'one-stop shop' for publishers primarily in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
- Breadth of platform features as well as vendor professional services makes this a very white-glove -— if not fully mature -— solution, with the added twist of excellent Arabic support
- The platform best fits mid-sized independent news organisations, especially those with only minimal technical resources
- Customers include L'Orient-Le Jour (Lebanon), Al Nahar (Lebanon), Raseef22 and Fatafeat (Dubai)
Likely fit
WhiteBeard is a good fit for publishers in the MENA region, especially those that have a single publication, are digital-first or moving away from print and don't have a large in-house team of tech resources.
At a glance
Primary customer fit
Mid-sized independent news organisations
Secondary fit
Small independent news organisation
Most active geographies
EMEA
Official support hours
24/7/365
Officially supported languages for user interface
AR (LB, SA, EG, JO, AE, OM, BH, SY, QA), US, FR, NL
Third-party language support available?
No
Licence model
SaaS, median licensing reported to be 1000 USD/month
Scope summary
Emphasis on broad (though not necessarily deep) functionality in digital experience and revenue generation but with comparatively thinner editorial UX
Tech base
PHP
Cloud model
SaaS (hosted on Liquidweb)
Headquarters
Beirut, Lebanon
Head count
33
What customers report
- Customers appreciate the WhiteBeard team and report that the vendor understands the publishing business, making the translation to technology for them
- Platform offers a very complete solution, to the point that some customers self-report only having scratched the surface in terms of possibilities
- Vendor understands the nuances of publishing in Arabic
- Can deal with a relatively large number (hundreds) of editors
- Breadth of functionality built out over time clutters the interface and can prove overwhelming to workaday journalists
- Platform is ill-suited to print workflows
- You become closely tied to WhiteBeard as both vendor and implementation partner, and therefore remain dependent on the company's resource availability
Background
- WhiteBeard was founded in Beirut (Lebanon) in 2011 as a spin-off from newspaper L'Orient-Le Jour, where the CMS had been in development since 2008. Since then, it has attracted more than a dozen other publications, mostly in Lebanon. While the CTO is based in Amsterdam, the company effectively still operates from Beirut.
- WhiteBeard's 'News Suite' is a very broad solution, with modules for subscription management, analytics, e-commerce, commenting, planning and video, all of which can be accessed from the same interface. However, WhiteBeard acknowledges the resulting clutter can be confusing (and they're working on redesigning it to make it cleaner and easier to use).
- The content model is fixed and relatively straightforward with the main body content as well as embedded content (such as social quotes) in one rich text field. (WhiteBeard says it can adapt the content types to the wishes of their customers if needed.) While this is convenient for authors, the resulting content 'blobs' can be difficult to reuse between channels and digital presentations.
- News Suite is a headless CMS and there is no out-of-the-box front end; WhiteBeard can develop one for you or you can do this yourself. Given that the front end will be closely tied to the back-end CMS (for analytics, commenting, subscriptions and so on), you'll probably have to involve WhiteBeard in front-end development in one capacity or another. For print, the company says it has an integration with InDesign, though most customers seem to be either digital-only or have separate automation for print.
- In terms of fit, then, the platform potentially suits digital-first, small to mid-sized independent news organisations in the MENA region. It presently has less to suit the multititle needs of chains and would prove overkill for micropublishers.
- News Suite is offered as SaaS, with WhiteBeard managing hosting on LiquidWeb in the US. According to the company, the median license cost is $1000/month.
- Apart from the CMS and related implementation and support, the company also offers more general-purpose (web) development services. These seem to account for a large percentage of the revenue. WhiteBeard has no partner network for implementations; as such, in most projects, the company would likely be responsible for the CMS, the website and app development. The advantage here is that, effectively, WhiteBeard is a one-stop shop — though the potential drawback, of course, is getting tied in exclusively with the company if you choose their CMS.
Package scope (as reported by vendor)
| Core platform - i.e., bundled in product (yes/no/beta) | Add-On (yes/custom/3rd party) | |
|---|---|---|
|
Content lifecycle: author / classify / edit / approve / publish / re-purpose / archive / dispose
|
Yes
|
|
|
Basic digital / voice / media asset management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Support print publishing
|
Yes
|
|
|
Simple social media re-publishing
|
Yes
|
|
|
Optional modules: forms / polls / social widgets / etc
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Connector library (OOTB connectors, APIs, etc.)
|
Yes
|
|
|
Bundled CDN (with DDOS protection)
|
Yes
|
|
|
User registration
|
Yes
|
|
|
Subscription management and fulfillment - digital
|
Yes
|
|
|
Subscription or membership
|
Yes
|
|
|
Personalisation
|
Yes
|
|
|
Ad management - digital
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Ad management - print
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Content management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Research
|
Yes
|
|
|
Content management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Video management / OVP
|
Yes
|
|
|
Audio management / podcasting
|
Yes
|
|
|
Data journalism and visualisation
|
Yes
|
|
|
Classifieds
|
Yes
|
|
|
Commenting / community features/
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Newsletter production and management
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Notifications and alerts
|
Yes
|
|
|
A/B testing
|
No
|
Yes
|
|
SEO
|
Yes
|
|
|
Multi-title management with variable inheritance
|
Yes
|
|
|
Complex layout and subsite / subsection cloning
|
No
|
|
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AR- / VR- enhanced services
|
No
|
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Audience segmentation
|
Yes
|
|
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Online user / partner forums
|
Yes
|
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Regular user group meetings
|
No
|
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