USA

ImpreMedia Taps Tera to Manage Content and Archives for Growing Cadre of Spanish-Language Pubs

The Challenge
ImpreMedia’s rapidly expanding news organization required combining the assets and coordinating the efforts of a dozen regional and national print and online publications. The publisher needed a comprehensive content management platform to strengthen collaboration, improve production efficiency, create robust archiving and ease editorial and advertising content sharing.
The goal: to increase operational flexibility and add new revenue opportunities while managing technology strategy.

The Context
Established in 2004 through the merger of New York’s El Diario/La Prensa and La Opinión, in Los Angeles, ImpreMedia is now the top Spanish-language newspaper and online news publisher in the United States with a combined total weekly distribution of 1.9 million copies. In total the company produces six dailies, one weekly and a dual language magazine.
The burgeoning empire is supported by 150 writers, editors, paginators and advertising-services personnel nationwide. But as the company has expanded through mergers and acquisitions, integration among its proprietary local systems was non-existent. With no audit trails, no systems for approval, and no rights management, ImpreMedia lacked the ability to communicate, plan and share content.
Headquartered in New York with a data center in Los Angeles and properties around the US, ImpreMedia officials knew that their vision hinged on effectively integrating and streamlining editorial operations through scalable, centrally managed technology.

The Analysis
In crafting a technical strategy for the company at large, ImpreMedia officials focused on creating a company-wide virtual newsroom with a core database that could be centrally managed and would foster communication and cooperation among all the publisher’s assets.
Speed and flexibility were important factors.
“Time to deploy is critical,” says Bob Mason, ImpreMedia’s Chief Technical Officer. “When it comes down to it, I don’t have a year and a half to get a new property up and running. I have about 30 days to bring them online and make them a part of our system.”
ImpreMedia was already seeing the benefits of Tera Digital Publishing’s platform at its El Diario product in New York. Also, because the ImpreMedia deployment would be the first GN3/Tark installation to use virtual servers in an integrated newsroom management system, Tera’s commitment to joint development and continued technical support was vital to making the project work.

The Solution
To handle content management, page flow and production, ImpreMedia chose GN3 and Tark from Tera. According to Mason, they, “give us all the feature sets of any of the top brands in a suite that is quick to deploy and easily fits any size operation from a 600-seat large metro to a small, 10-person shop.”
ImpreMedia is looking beyond media-specific technology in an effort to move seamlessly between print, web, mobile and PDA delivery. Mason said the company chose Tera’s tools because they eschew a pagination-centric design in favor of robust management of media neutral formats. At ImpreMedia, all sites feed a shared archive, and XML document files are being used to plan, produce and archive content across a variety of media.
ImpreMedia runs the highly scalable Tera systems from a half-rack of blade servers with virtualization software to segregate operations. On the user side, ImpreMedia leverages the GN3 text editor, pagination and page-tracking tools, and database search engine to allow its local editors to layout, edit and share content. For archiving, the tightly integrated Tark tool provides access to all published data—from stories and pictures to complete pages and multimedia. Individual desktops access the centralized systems via Citrix from newsrooms around the country.
Tera’s GN3 is flexible and quick to deploy because of its core database design. Documents are XML-based groups of elements that reside within the central database. The structure simplifies group work and content flow, and ensures adherence to workflow rules with minimal file transfer and network overhead.
Now ImpreMedia is beginning to deploy Tera’s News Room Manager for central management of assignments and newsroom assets, and to speed the coordination of nationally sourced and locally sourced stories.

The Implementation
Mason praises the ease with which Tera is deployed across ImpreMedia’s 10 properties in six metropolitan markets. Continuing acquisitions make implementation issues a key concern, he says.
“From that perspective, [the Tera suite] is really perfect for our needs,” says Mason. “We don’t need a large pipe for communicating. There are essentially no local support costs, because we centrally manage everything. And, each time we add a new property, we just drop in the Citrix client and bring them onto the system.”
Since the Tera rollout began, ImpreMedia officials have worked closely with Tera support engineers to ease deployment, coordinate training and customize applications. The cooperation with Tera R&D led to a number of system improvements and made it possible for ImpreMedia to pioneer a GN3/Tark installation in a virtual server environment. Continued on-site support is also vital as ImpreMedia works to roll out News Room Manager and continues its virtual and mobile newsroom initiatives.

The Result
Transitioning 150 content management seats to GN3 has enabled ImpreMedia to centralize production and consolidate IT resources and administration. The simplified infrastructure and the ease of server optimization in the virtualized environment significantly reduced the cost of ownership for ImpreMedia.
The editorial process, too, is now simpler. The Tera system “literally takes dozens of steps out of the process,” according to Mason. “We want the local editors to be free to shape the content as they see fit, but without having to repeat the work of their colleagues elsewhere.” Shared articles retain their structure, and automatically inherit the default styling of each site, boosting productivity and efficiency, Mason says, adding that editors in New York or Orlando now drag and drop content from other ImpreMedia properties.
The Tera’s suite has expanded zoning and multiple editions. Nearly all of ImpreMedia’s major metro properties geographically zone both editorial and ad pages and the built-in regioning and layering technologies in GN3 let the publications share common editorial content and local sections such as classifieds, obituaries and display ads.
The ultimate goal for ImpreMedia is to leverage GN3 to publish content across different media without having to re-edit and reformat articles and pages. For example, ImpreMedia is centralizing Web production, taking advantage of the GN3 ability to handle Web-ready text, photos, video, audio, and interactive graphics. GN3 includes tools that allow users to dictate specific properties for each publishing destination, such as print or Web, preview each element and deliver it to production seamlessly.