The second largest newspaper chain in the United States is well on its way to create an editorial standard for each newspaper’s newsroom.

Knight Ridder signed an umbrella agreement with CCI Europe in June to install the NewsDesk editorial system at each of its newspapers.

The San Jose, Calif.-based media company publishes 32 daily newspapers in 28 U.S. markets, with a readership of 8.5 million daily and 12.1 million on Sunday. It also publishes 26 non-daily newspapers in California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Texas.

“We sought a common state-of-the-art editorial platform for all of our publications to ensure that we could maximize our journalistic resources, both staff and content, as well as system administration,” said Steve Hannah, vice president of technology at Knight Ridder. “For Knight Ridder, it offers the right blend of sophisticated functionality and systems maturity to facilitate the efficiencies we are seeking.”

Sixteen people, representing nine Knight Ridder newspapers, Knight Ridder Digital and the corporate information technology department, comprised the group to find the editorial standard for the organization. Rob Perschau, newsroom systems manager at The Kansas City (Mo.) Star was part of the group evaluating editorial systems.

“Two of us — Bruce Page, our director of information technology — and I were invited to sit on a corporate committee charged with finding a system that could meet the needs of all Knight Ridder papers,” Perschau said. “We spent four months doing research, making site visits and discussing and debating our findings in committee meetings.”

The corporate committee gathered information about different editorial systems in a number of ways. Several vendors made presentations to the group; vendors went to several Knight Ridder newspapers, including The Star. Knight Ridder also sent people to newspaper sites using CCI NewsDesk.

“During one site visit — by The Star staff — to another CCI paper our news editor, with no training, put together four news pages in 15 minutes by himself,” Perschau said. “The committee was looking for innovation and long-term, continuous development of an editorial system that should keep all our papers up to date and prepared for future circumstances when they arise.”

Knight Ridder expects to develop a standard “best practices” CCI system that all of its papers will install when it is time to upgrade their editorial systems. The committee decided that such a system would promote content sharing, technical harmony across sites, and make internal transfers easy for Knight Ridder employees who may move from site to site.

The automation that NewsDesk provides will help when staff levels are lean.

The Kansas City Star (daily, 266,264; Saturday, 295,053; Sunday, 379,664) is one of the first newspapers in the Knight Ridder group to begin installing the NewsDesk system.

CCI NewsDesk will combine all of The Star’s front end, pagination, photo, graphics and output systems under one database and mostly on one platform. The Star’s photo and text archives will be closely integrated. The system provides complete access from remote locations, which will help correspondents in outlying bureaus and people on the road.

The Star is in the very early stages of its installation.

“We’ve just finished the data collection phase and CCI engineers are currently building our system in their labs in Denmark,” Perschau said. “While the schedule is a little bit of a moving target, we currently expect to start rolling out live pages in May 2003.”

He expects the complete rollout at the newspaper could take up to one year or slightly longer.

“Our rollout will go from department to department, in most cases, departments will come up in stages.”

Once NewsDesk is running, training for the reporters and editors will take three or four days, while page designers will need a week or more to familiarize themselves with the system.