The New Times

Built an automated publishing system that transforms community-submitted articles into a production-ready magazine draft with minimal manual effort.

The team wanted to regularly publish community writing in a magazine format, but manually collecting articles, organizing content, and assembling layouts created too much operational overhead.

A creative community regularly publishes writing from its members. Many contributors maintain personal publications on platforms like Substack, and the team wanted to showcase that work through a recurring magazine-style publication that could be shared with the broader community.

The challenge was that producing a publication required significant manual coordination. Someone needed to collect submissions, extract article content, gather author information, organize media assets, create a table of contents, and assemble everything into a printable format. For a recurring publication, this quickly became unsustainable.

To solve this, I built an automated publication pipeline that converted article submissions into a structured editorial workflow.

Contributors simply submit a link to their article through a Tally form. Behind the scenes, the submission triggers a webhook that processes the article automatically. A Python service retrieves the article content, extracts metadata such as author information and publication date, captures relevant media assets, and stores the structured content inside Airtable.

Once submissions have been collected, a second workflow assembles the publication automatically. The system retrieves all approved submissions, generates a table of contents, formats articles into a consistent layout, and produces a complete PDF draft of the magazine.

Rather than starting from a blank page each month, the editorial team receives a production-ready draft that already contains the publication structure, article content, contributor information, and supporting assets. The team can then focus on higher-value creative work such as cover design, layout refinement, and final editorial review.

The result is a scalable content production system that dramatically reduces the effort required to publish community writing while making recurring publications feasible with a small team.