Digital Collections USA News

2011

Gannett installs DC-X for ContentOne

Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI) has installed a DC-X content marketing system from Digital Collections GmbH, Hamburg, Germany, as the cornerstone for its ContentOne initiative to establish an enterprise-wide content sharing solution. The system is used by editors and web producers throughout the company for marketing, sharing and distributing content via multiple channels, to multiple outlets and audiences—for web, mobile, and print publication.

The DC-X system originates from Gannett Co. business partner, Digital Collections GmbH, Hamburg, Germany. Digital Collections is a software developer and service provider, serving the news media industry worldwide. Gannett Media Technologies International (GMTI), Cincinnati, OH, is a reseller and distributor of Digital Collections software. GMTI is a full service contractor and provided project implementation services for the DC-X project at Gannett Co., Inc.

DC-X project profile

Cellesche Zeitung (CZ) is a daily newspaper located in Celle, Germany—about 75 miles due south of Hamburg. Its publisher, Schweiger & Pick Verlag, produces a print edition Monday through Saturday that is distributed to more than 30,000 subscribers. CZ also produces a free ePaper (PDF) edition that is available on its web site: www.cellesche-zeitung.de. A fifty percent ownership position in CZ is held by Madsack GmbH & Co. KG, a German media company founded in 1892—with its center of operations in Hanover, Germany.

The CZ print edition consists of 24-to-36 broadsheet-size pages on weekdays, and 60 pages on Saturdays. For the last 13 years, CZ used software components from QuarkXPress and P-Ink (now defunct) to produce its print editions. For the last four years, CZ has produced its web site using “NoozMaker”, a lightweight CMS software product developed by Desatec Systems UG, Gottingen, Germany.

New content marketing requirements and competitive pressures drove CZ to seek new tools of the trade for meeting the demands of the audiences they serve. Although its business partner, Madsack, offered CZ the use of a shared DTI Editorial system—planned for use by most Madsack-owned media properties, Cellesche Zeitung decided to purchase software from Digital Collections GmbH and ppi Media GmbH. Combined software products from those two companies, custom-fitted for CZ’s market-specific needs, they believed, would be much less expensive and a better fit for meeting their needs. Additionally, CZ wanted to separate the editorial processes from the layout processes. They felt this would facilitate greater information liquidity for multi-channel publishing. The architecture of the Digital Collections/ppi Media solution made this achievable.

After a three-month project involving work by Digital Collections and ppi Media engineers—on-site and off-site, CZ now produces all editorial content for their print and web products using the DC-X System from Digital Collections, and the Content-X InDesign plug-in framework from ppi Media. All this was accomplished for a small fraction of the cost of the DTI solution.

The DC-X System exists as a (LAMP) cloud data platform—running as virtual machines (one for the application and one for the database), and hosted in Madsack’s data center. ppi Media’s Content-X software also runs in Madsack’s private cloud computing environment.

At peak load times, 30-plus concurrent users are busy producing pages for the print editions, importing content from internal and external sources, and exporting content from DC-X to the NoozMaker CMS for placement in web page templates and online publication. Since DC-X aggregates and manages all editorial content, news stories, photos and web videos are constantly created within, or sourced from DC-X, and exported for online publication via the NoozMaker CMS. The powerful DC-X workflow engine makes broad use of The AtomPub (Atom Publishing Protocol) API for integrating internal and external data feeds, and streamlines dataflow traffic management.

Through innovative use of the Digital Collections Semantic Engine (DCSE), DC-X allows users to “find rather than search” for content.

First, content of various media types from all sources, including items in the DC-X system and those externally linked, are automatically tagged by DCSE based on one or more subject, geographic or topic lists. When an item is selected in the DC-X user interface or in another application through the DC-X API, the system uses the tags to create dynamic links between the selected item and other content in the local database or remote systems. Related content is available for display to users within seconds after selecting an item.

As a DC-X user edits or creates a content item, the DCSE constantly analyzes the user activity and updates the related content links in real time. So as users produce, manage and publish content in DC-X, the DCSE makes certain they have the latest related, competitive and supporting articles, images, videos and other content at their fingertips—only one click away.

The Content-X software from ppi Media enables drag-and-drop of content from DC-X directly to the InDesign page. Changes made by an InDesign user are automatically written back to the DC-X database. So, the published page is an exact replica of what is stored in the DC-X database. The InDesign plug-in is able to accommodate both layout and content-driven approaches for print production. All print edition pages are now produced using the new system.

Digital Collections GmbH (www.digicol.com) and ppi Media GmbH (www.ppimedia.com) are both headquartered in Hamburg, Germany.

Gannett Media Technologies International (GMTI), Cincinnati, OH, is a distributor of Digital Collections software for the western hemisphere. GMTI is a full service contractor providing project implementation services and 24x7 customer support.