The San Antonio Express-News last month became the first newspaper worldwide to go live with the CCI MediaStore archiving solution from CCI Europe.

The San Antonio Express-News is now using the 
CCI MediaStore archiving solution to track and 
archive photos. In the future, the system will 
also be used to archive text and full pages.
Photo courtesy of CCI Europe

CCI MediaStore is based on the Networked Interactive Access Content archiving solution from IBM Italy. The Express-News (Monday – Thursday, 228,733; Friday, 269,139; Saturday, 263,712; Sunday, 362,352), which completed the implementation of a CCI NewsDesk editorial solution in the fall of 1999, worked in conjunction with IBM and CCI Europe to develop the system and tailor it to meet the newspaper’s requirements.

Through this process, the NICA engine was combined with CCI Europe’s interface and the Express-News’ production workflow and evolved into CCI MediaStore. As a stand-alone application, NICA is installed at eight newspapers outside the United States.

“Most newspapers our size don’t get to partner as much as the larger papers like USA Today or The Washington Post, so it was a good opportunity,” said Nina Brooks, chief information officer at the San Antonio Express-News. “Both CCI and IBM had good ideas, they just had no one to actually work with them to put it into a live system. They needed a newspaper to get the nitty-gritty of the newspaper (workflow) — how photographers work, how the scanning people scan — and what happens on a daily basis.”

MediaStore is a complete multimedia archive that stores, tracks and manages content of all types for all media — from text, photos, graphics and pages to multimedia content, such as audio and video.

The Express-News, which had been live with the system for two days at the time Newspapers & Technology spoke with Brooks, is using the MediaStore as a photo archive and production workflow solution. The newspaper started with the photo archive because that was its most critical need, although it has definite plans to use the system to store text, graphics and pages as well.

“[The photo archive] was the biggest pressing need we had,” Brooks said. “We had fragmented systems ... but this brought it all together and gave us a really good workflow.”

Why did the Express-News choose to partner with IBM and CCI Europe vs. buying a system that was already on the market? First was the newspaper’s existing relationship with CCI, and second, the newspaper was also looking for an archiving solution that has a scalable architecture to meet its future needs.

“I really like the NICA engine, because NICA is very robust,” Brooks stated. “We looked at some of the other systems that were already on the market, but they just didn’t have that ability to grow and be as robust.”

The photo workflow

More than just a post-production photo archive, the CCI MediaStore system tracks photos from pre-production, including their assignment and selection, through the production process and final post-production archiving. The Associated Press wire photos are also processed through the system, replacing the Express-News’ AP Leaf Desk system.

“We were going to be adding this to a live production system. Most [archiving systems] are built as a post-production system. [We wanted] to know where a photo is during all different stages of its life — from the assignment and wanting a photo, to publishing a photo, and then repurposing it if we had to,” Brooks said. “Nobody actually had a solution like that. There was really none out there. I looked a lot.”

Since the switch to digital cameras a year ago, the San Antonio Express-News photographers will shoot from 50 to 200 pictures per assignment, since there are no film or film processing costs involved. All the photos go into the system for selection.

“A particular photo goes into a queue, and photo editors will then select from there whether they need to go in for publishing. If it does, it’s passed through the CCI production system. The metadata stays intact, and then after publishing, the publishing data is sent back to the photo archive system so we can marry them together,” said Brooks. “What is really thrilling is that an editor can pull up all the photos that they have to make a choice from right at deadline, and two seconds later they can make a selection and pass it to the production system, at which point the paginator can get the photo. It really widens the ability in production and under deadline to be able to be a part of that selection process.”

Every photo taken by the photographers, whether published or not, is stored on a DVD-ROM jukebox. A photo that is selected for publication is stored in MediaStore, and is called a master. After the photo has gone through the production process, the crop of the photo that was published, called a usage, is sent back to the archiving system and paired with the master. This prevents several copies of one image from bogging down the database, as the Express-News publishes some 35,000 photos a year.

The archive database runs in a Sun HA (high-availability) environment. Before the installation, IBM had to port NICA from AIX to Sun Solaris. The clients are loaded on 270 user workstations, although there are only about 30 to 40 concurrent users. The number of simultaneous users is also scalable, so that if the Express-News wanted to have 50 or 60 users, they could simply boost the memory.

Regarding the system development, installation and implementation, Brooks said: “It all just worked great together, and we’re very thrilled.”