Abstract

The Journalism Department of the University of the Basque Country, with financial support from the Basque Government, is developing a prototype website (www.meneXtra.com) which aims to become the principle means by which press offices and PR professionals publish their scheduled press events. If this system becomes standard, media outlets and journalists will also have a streamlined means of managing their own weekly schedules. The platform is the result of a year-long analysis on the specific needs of both types of professional by a team of seven researchers, each of them journalists and lecturers on the subject. In this paper, we describe the platform’s development, from its conception to its implementation. The paper also touches on ways in which plans for the platform has had to be adapted along the way; both in terms of what is technically possible from a coding point of view, and the difficulties of creating an interface to meet the specific needs of both kinds of user.