A Study on the Resilience and Flexibility of Technical Systems in News Production

Hainan Nanhai Net Media Co., Ltd., Haikou, Hainan 570100

Abstract

This study examines the resilience and flexibility of technical systems in news production, aiming to build more agile systems and solutions that enhance media production efficiency and creative capacity. Using templating, modularity, microservices architecture, and agile development, we achieve rapid technical responsiveness. These methods resolve production bottlenecks and challenges, boosting operational efficiency and innovation. The approach effectively unleashes technical productivity and strengthens media dissemination power, offering a valuable reference for media system technical responsiveness.

Keywords: Thematic Activities; Templating and Modularity; Resilience and Scalability; Flexibility and Extensibility; Media Convergence
CLC Number: G223
Document Code: A
Article ID: 1671-0134(2025)02-32-05
DOI: 10.19483/j.cnki.11-4653/n.2025.02.004

Citation Format: Ling Yunyi. A Study on the Resilience and Flexibility of Technical Systems in News Production [J]. China Media Technology, 2025, 32(2): 32-36.

The advent of the Internet accelerated information sharing, giving rise to web-based media platforms. With the emergence of rudimentary BBS forums, online information dissemination became possible. Rich text and related technologies further propelled Internet growth, creating space for sophisticated web applications. Commercial media outlets such as Sina and Tencent News experienced rapid expansion in the 1990s, prompting domestic institutional media to deploy Internet media platforms on a large scale through electronic newspapers and online television stations. After years of development, this has evolved into a highly sophisticated and complex media network.

The release of the "Guidelines on Promoting the Integrated Development of Traditional and Emerging Media" and the "Opinions on Accelerating In-depth Media Integration" signals a new era for the media industry. Reflecting on history and looking toward the future, information technology and Internet media have developed in tandem—technological advancement drives further media development, which in turn generates new technical requirements. This dialectical and mutually supportive relationship forms the foundation of progress. This paper focuses on how technical system resilience impacts news production in media development, using news special topic implementation as an entry point to explore superior technical solutions for addressing insufficient technical elasticity that constrains news production.

1. Manifestations of Technical Constraints

Hainan Nanhai Net Media Co., Ltd. is an online media subsidiary of Hainan Daily Newspaper Group, evolving from the Hainan Daily electronic edition into a leading online media platform in Hainan's "one newspaper, one network, one television station" media landscape. Its brand "Nanhai Net" represents Hainan's official online media platform. Throughout its development, the organization's technical requirements have taken various forms.

During its growth phase, technical progress rarely kept pace with or exceeded business needs. To address technical system requirements, the early approach primarily involved purchasing commercial CMS systems, supplemented by independent R&D and secondary development of open-source CMS platforms such as PHPCMS and DedeCMS.[1] Most commercial CMS systems were primarily designed for backend support. In the PC era, where SEO served as the main traffic source for news sites, frontend support relied mainly on generating static HTML. Due to insufficient in-house R&D capacity, this technical architecture gradually became inadequate for supporting more functions, particularly dynamic, interaction-heavy features. A disconnect frequently emerged between news planning and technical requirements. Custom development through vendors incurred economic and time costs that often exceeded the temporal demands of news. The timeliness of news events required rapid technical response, creating a conflict with development speed that ultimately resulted in downgraded implementation based on existing system capabilities, compromising news expressiveness and dissemination effectiveness.

To address this issue, templating solutions gradually emerged—preconfiguring commonly used templates in the CMS backend, primarily for news special topics and page styling. Template implementation relied mainly on tag systems[2] that associated tags with data, using regular expression matching and replacement[3] during page generation to render data into HTML pages. While templating aimed to reduce development costs and enable rapid response, its relatively fixed styling resulted in static, building-block-like news presentations, typically limited to header image changes. This rigid page styling constrained news expressiveness, leading to low template adoption rates and persistent dissatisfaction among editors and news producers regarding technical response speed. Moreover, templates primarily displayed static information with minimal dynamic functionality and poor interactivity, weakening the dissemination power and influence of special topics and news content. For instance, covering events like space launches or sports games requires interactive elements that create audience engagement—something templating cannot adequately address, necessitating custom development and thus reverting to the original problem. Naturally, topics with sufficient planning time could be resolved through customization, synchronizing development processes with news planning to some extent.

2. Evolution of Technical Solutions

2.1 Commercial CMS and Templating

As previously mentioned, after purchasing a commercial CMS, Nanhai Net accumulated numerous templates through customized development services, selecting different templates based on news themes. Template implementation primarily relied on tag systems that still required varying degrees of technical involvement during page production. This consumed the technical team's energy in creating numerous special topics and event pages. To resolve this conflict, Nanhai Net established news production workflows mandating that non-priority special topics and events use preconfigured templates with minimal design customization. This approach largely alleviated the conflict between technical constraints and news production, enhancing news timeliness, dissemination power, and influence to some extent. However, underlying system constraints remained unresolved, limiting other functional implementations and leaving insufficient elasticity—particularly without templating adoption.

2.2 Self-developed CMS and Templating

To further address the flexibility limitations of commercial CMS platforms, independent development gradually became an inevitable technical path for Nanhai Net. To enable rapid response to technical requirements, the company adopted the popular PHP language to build its proprietary CMS. Based on its technical capabilities and actual needs, the system prioritized the most frequently used functions in news production, maintaining lightweight architecture to prevent iteration speed degradation caused by excessive functionality and system bloat.

The system design emphasized lightweight architecture from the outset. First, it implemented only essential functions including permission management, user management, channel management, news management, comment management, and statistics management—essentially a semi-finished system that facilitated easier functional expansion. Second, the code was uniformly encapsulated by functional modules with clear distinctions to maximize modularity. Public calling modules were kept as lightweight as possible with minimal functionality to enable convenient extension. Finally, the system incorporated commonly used code snippets in news production, storing them in databases for easy modification and reuse, effectively supporting rapid extended development.

The database design did not strictly adhere to normalization principles. To facilitate extension and functional implementation, the system retained some redundancy in tables and fields, sacrificing partial database performance and storage space to better balance code expansion speed.

To better facilitate rapid templated development, we fully absorbed templating and tagging design concepts in our proprietary CMS, customizing a set of template tags (see Figure 1 [FIGURE:1]). Simultaneously, using Dreamweaver extensions, these template tags were loaded into Dreamweaver software via XML tags, enabling rapid functionality implementation through simple button clicks—an approach inspired by industry solutions.[4]

The self-developed 1.0 system solution compensated for the constraints of purchased CMS platforms, alleviating the crisis for a period. However, cybersecurity issues became increasingly prominent—the loosely designed system contained numerous vulnerabilities that were easily exploited by hackers, with prohibitively high repair costs. Simultaneously, the technical architecture became outdated, causing technical constraints to reemerge.

2.3 Open-source CMS

To supplement insufficient in-house R&D capacity, Nanhai Net has historically utilized open-source CMS platforms such as PHPCMS and DedeCMS for numerous sub-sites and client-facing websites. These CMS systems also employed tag-based templating solutions, using regular expression replacement to render static HTML. Secondary development on these platforms faced similar challenges as commercial CMS systems—finished products offered limited flexibility, and secondary development proved difficult. Additionally, performance degraded rapidly with large data volumes, making optimization challenging. Regarding news production flexibility, extending beyond the original system model was difficult. While leveraging system strengths to support partial news operations, overall system resilience and extensibility remained inadequate. Such systems also presented significant cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

2.4 Mobile Internet Era Solutions

The rapid development of mobile Internet swept through the entire media industry, transforming media ecosystems and user behaviors. The "fast-eats-slow" characteristic exhibited by online media placed unprecedented pressure on traditional media outlets like Nanhai Net. Technical constraints became increasingly evident as business needs demanded rapid transformation while technical system elasticity and R&D capacity proved insufficient. Simultaneously, new technologies from the mobile Internet era, particularly APP and H5 technologies, drove the evolution of technical ecosystems and reshaped the media industry. Issues that remained unresolved during the PC era gradually found relative solutions in the mobile Internet era.

In the mobile Internet era, templating approaches and methodologies transformed with the introduction of rich text visualization supported by H5, significantly reducing template usage difficulty. Ordinary editors could quickly assemble special topics and templates through building-block approaches without technical staff involvement. As the focus shifted to mobile-first strategies, functional requirements for PC terminals decreased. Meanwhile, mobile device performance and screen size limitations led to more quantified page designs emphasizing video refinement rather than visual impact, alleviating pressures from the traditional PC era and enabling more sophisticated user experiences.

To address news business elasticity, Nanhai Net also implemented flexible UI modular configuration solutions on its APP terminal to enable rapid response to news production demands.

To strengthen technical support, Nanhai Net assembled an R&D team to embark on an extensive self-development process, adopting a microservices architecture[5] and implementing two separate systems using PHP and Java programming languages. The PHP-based system primarily addresses rapidly changing requirements, supporting websites, mini-programs, and lightweight APPs by leveraging PHP's lightweight and fast characteristics. In actual news production, the technical team frequently receives extremely urgent requests, particularly for highly time-sensitive news, requiring technical response times at the hourly level. The Java-based solution mainly supports core business components, particularly systems demanding high performance, stability, and security, with long-term iteration needs and acceptable iteration cycles from a technical perspective. Simultaneously, the technical development process was designed for agility, with strict control over system scale to prevent excessive bloat that would reduce elasticity. Since traffic is diverted to third-party platforms, self-operated platforms do not require particularly large or complex systems for load bearing.

3. Technical Implementation

3.1 PHP-based High-Elasticity Technical System Implementation

From a software engineering perspective, development efficiency improvement focuses on project management processes and specific technical solutions. Agile development is employed for processes, while the technical architecture adopts minimal constraints. To more rapidly resolve technical elasticity issues, Nanhai Net's technical team began independently developing a CMS system, designing and building a new platform based on lessons learned from previous generations of technical staff. Considering the low efficiency and cybersecurity risks of designing the entire foundation from scratch, after thorough research, the team adopted ThinkPHP as the foundational framework without fully utilizing its MVC design, instead implementing a frontend-backend separation approach. The backend provides only APIs and corresponding capabilities, with the frontend retrieving data via AJAX requests. In practical application, using ThinkPHP as the foundation while adhering to cybersecurity design principles mitigates security risks. The underlying framework support improves development efficiency, while code standardization following foundational design principles prevents architectural chaos and retains extensibility to support elasticity and code reuse. The following example of Nanhai Net's "Government Inquiry Hainan" system illustrates this lightweight and elastic design.

3.1.1 Permission Management System

To ensure simplicity, the permission management system implements only fundamental functions including three-tier review processes, role management, permission management, and administrator management, designed to be as simple and loosely coupled as possible to facilitate future extension.

3.1.2 Member System

The member system implements only essential user management functions, including minimal fields such as ID, mobile phone number, and login time. In accordance with national laws and regulations, user information collection is minimized to ensure security while preserving adequate system extension space.

3.1.3 Content Management System

Content management implements only core content element functions including column management, content management, and material management, with data field designs kept as streamlined as possible to guarantee extensibility.

3.1.4 Statistics System

Data statistics also focus only on essential core metrics such as content volume, user count, and click-through rates.

3.1.5 Summary

This lightweight CMS has supported and extended numerous business systems for Nanhai Net since the mobile Internet era. Particularly in past development, the company undertook highly customized businesses that existing systems could not elastically support. The basic functions of this lightweight CMS are the most frequently used, providing relatively good guarantees for business extensibility, reusability, and security.

To address infrastructure elasticity issues, Nanhai Net adopted public cloud solutions. Unstructured data storage such as video, images, and audio utilizes OSS object storage[10], while load balancing[11] and databases leverage PaaS-layer cloud capabilities as much as possible, simplifying operations and maintenance while ensuring reliability. For third-party APIs, Nanhai Net requires vendors to cloudify their capabilities with minimal granularity, as smaller granularity facilitates easier extension and reduces coupling constraints.

3.2 Java-based High-Elasticity Technical System Implementation

Java-based technical systems, evolving from J2EE through MVC architectures centered on the SSH framework and SOA architectures to today's microservices architecture, have significantly accelerated software system iteration rates when combined with frontend-backend separation. Through reasonable module and service decomposition coupled with well-designed APIs, system elasticity can be maximized to facilitate iterative development and optimize business responsiveness. Based on the Java microservices architecture, Nanhai Net designed and developed its core support system, the "Haichao Smart Media Cloud" system.

3.2.1 Architecture System

The current microservices framework represented by Spring Boot has matured considerably. After thorough research, Nanhai Net's technical team selected Spring Boot as the foundational microservices architecture. Building upon agile development principles and following microservices design principles, the entire system was decomposed into 31 subsystems (services) that communicate via APIs, using OpenJDK as the Java runtime environment. With cloud computing development, microservices and containers have become ideal partners, but based on practical considerations, we did not adopt containerization solutions outright. Instead, we utilized cloud hosts as microservices runtime environments, keeping them as clean as possible.[6]

At the database level, to reduce program complexity, MySQL's master-slave mode was adopted, with write operations handled by the master instance and read operations by slave instances. To address performance issues, the K-V in-memory database Redis was used to cache high-frequency data in memory, reducing MySQL pressure and accelerating data loading. Since news data consists primarily of text, ElasticSearch[7] was introduced to solve full-text indexing and large-scale data storage, improving search performance and full-text indexing capabilities while alleviating MySQL pressure from data volume growth. Additionally, a frontend-backend separation architecture[8] was implemented, with the frontend adopting the Vue framework[9] to call backend APIs and incorporating Vue-based page rendering mechanisms to enhance frontend performance and SEO capabilities.

3.2.2 Layout Management System

The layout management system is a module system designed by Nanhai Net for APP applications based on its technical elasticity requirements. It enables sequential adjustment, visibility toggling, and styling modifications of blocks on APP pages according to news reporting needs, effectively adapting to scenario-based demands in news production. Multiple styling options were specifically designed to prevent monotonous APP interface layouts and avoid aesthetic fatigue. Additionally, visual drag-and-drop technology for sorting enhances the user experience for system operators (see Figure 4 [FIGURE:4]).

3.2.3 Site Management System

To better accommodate sub-site expansion, Nanhai Net designed a site cluster management system that facilitates sub-site construction and extension. Site setup can be completed simply by adding domain names through backend configuration, with APIs reading data based on different parameters.

3.2.4 Style Theme Management System

To meet extensibility requirements for special occasions in news production, Nanhai Net designed multiple themes within the system, applying templating concepts for scenarios such as festivals and events, allowing theme switching as needed.

3.2.5 Other Elastic Design Features

For highly flexible functions such as points, comments, and likes, Nanhai Net designed rule-based configurations in the backend that can be completed through parameter settings, better adapting to changing demands in current news production.

4. Key Technical Points

Through years of exploration in addressing news production system elasticity, Nanhai Net has gradually accumulated valuable experience. The use and exploration of templating have partially bridged the gap between technical response and business requirements. Combined with independent development efforts, Dreamweaver plugins simplified templating technical work. The application of visual drag-and-drop and visual design not only improved work efficiency but also enhanced user experience for editors and other system users while reducing human error rates in code or content modifications.

The ThinkPHP framework provides foundational MVC capabilities with high-quality foundational code, commercial support, and a robust domestic ecosystem, enabling high development efficiency and avoiding excessive foundational implementation. To ensure system extensibility, Nanhai Net designed its upper-layer systems as semi-finished products. This design philosophy better mitigates the high costs associated with modifying finished systems, as loosely coupled designs are significantly easier to iterate.

The Spring Boot microservices architecture decomposes the system while using API calls for data sharing and inter-service communication, reducing subsystem or module size and accelerating iteration speed. With a mature technical ecosystem, it provides strong security and performance guarantees. Even after splitting the system into over 30 services, it maintains excellent extensibility and reusability. The stability and performance of the Java environment have gradually manifested in the project, with service unavailability rarely occurring after system launch.

As the world evolves, so does the technical ecosystem. Problems previously unsolvable due to lack of conditions have been resolved through new technologies and tools. Simultaneously, changes in the business ecosystem have created favorable opportunities for problem-solving. For instance, issues with templating application levels and extensibility have been alleviated in the mobile Internet era through application lightweighting and shifting experience evaluation standards. Combined with smaller screen sizes and reduced emphasis on visual impact, many previous burdens have been lightened and gradually resolved, allowing focus on new problems in new scenarios. This paper presents a vertical, micro-level perspective that recreates the technical challenges faced by Nanhai Net as a representative traditional media outlet, reflecting the technical development path of traditional media and serving as a microcosm of technical transformation in the media convergence process.

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About the Author: Ling Yunyi (born 1986), male, from Tianshui, Gansu, is a senior engineer whose research focuses on media convergence, technical management, project management, software engineering, cybersecurity, etc.

(Editor: Li Jing)