Now that The Dallas Morning News has fortified its content management infrastructure, the daily plans to exploit its digital assets.

“Instead of vertical repositories of data, we now have them all crosslinked” and available for possible repackaging, said Jeremy Van Zee, lead applications analyst.

Jeremy Van Zee, Dallas Morning News’ lead application analyst, with an ultra-density disk used to store the paper’s images.
Photo: Walter Cruz, Dallas Morning News

That flexibility is giving the paper the chance to resell legacy content and to repurpose it for distribution on other media, a trend newspapers are eying with interest.  

The Morning News (daily, 465,469; Sunday 640,742) is basing its versatility on a $150,000 digital archive project rolled out in 2004. The custom system, comprised of software from Software Construction Co. and QStar Technologies Inc. and an optical storage library from Plasmon Inc., lets editors, reporters and designers quickly access the millions of documents and images the paper generates each year.

Deploying a more robust content management foundation was a must, said ImpreMedia Chief Technical Officer Bob Mason, who oversaw The Morning News’ implementation of the technology while serving as the paper’s director of publishing systems. Mason left The Morning News to take the ImpreMedia job last summer.

(Mason now plans to roll out the same digital archiving system at ImpreMedia’s Spanish-language newspapers in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and central Florida.)

Drowning in images

The Morning News was literally drowning in images, generating some 2 million a year.

“We realized we had to store everything” on a centralized basis, Mason said, adding that before the system was rolled out, The Morning News was still maintaining envelopes filled with physical film strips containing historical images. As the paper migrated to digital imaging, photographers burned photos to CD for storage, but more frequently than not, Mason said, the CDs were “thrown in a desk.”

“We spent a lot of time looking at different solutions,” he said. “We didn’t want to have this amount of data and find out it would be unusable.”

Conventional storage technologies such as tape libraries were ruled out because of their slow retrieval speeds. High-speed RAID systems, meantime, were too expensive, as was magnetic optical disc.

But Mason was intrigued with ultra-density optical storage, a technology that uses a narrowly focused blue laser rather than magnetic fields to write data on platters.

More capacity

UDO, co-developed by Hewlett-Packard, Sony and Denver-based Plasmon, provided the fast retrieval times needed and also offered The Morning News the benefit of 30GB capacity, far higher than the 4.7GB capacity of a DVD.

The Morning News installed a 7.1TB Plasmon G-Series optical jukebox, upgrading to a 19.1TB device shortly thereafter.

QStar Technologies’ Data Director app was used to manage the data stored on the discs. The Morning News then tapped SCC for its Media Server database software, which tracks all of the files’ names and descriptions. Media Server is also used to automatically move stored images from near-term, high-speed RAID storage to the Plasmon devices.

Today, The Morning News uses the system to manage not only images but also text and other graphics, said Van Zee.

Quick retrieval

The paper has more than 2.6 million images archived online, spanning pictures Morning News’ photographers have taken since 1998.

“The advantage here is that SCC can work with anything and has the ability to classify the data,” he said, enabling Morning News staffers to retrieve items as needed.

The system will also let the paper expand its NewsML initiative in conjunction with its CCI Europe editorial and advertising software.

“We have invested in NewsML and we now have a project under way to enable our classified system to export NewsML,” Van Zee said.

Van Zee said the system should be able to support The Morning News’ projected 10 percent annual growth in archival needs for the foreseeable future. Next-generation UDO discs are expected to hold 60GB of data, and ultimately 120GB, enabling the paper to store more data on fewer platters.