ORLANDO, Fla.— Journal Register Co. said it will install alfa Media Solutions Inc.’s OpenMedia editorial apps throughout its newspapers, comprising more than 800 seats.

The Daily Local News of West Chester, Pa., last year was the first site to install the alfa NewsSuite Enterprise Editorial piece of the software.

Key to JRC was the software’s Web capability, allowing the group to publish to its numerous Web sites.

Photo: Journal Register Co.
Left to right, Dick Conrad, IT publishing systems specialist for Journal Register Co.; Mike Walsh, IT publishing analyst for JRC; and Rainer Wilbert, alfaMedia consultant based in Germany, with JRC’s central Sun Fire V890 server, housed in Yardley, Pa.
 

“Journal Register is moving from print-centric to media-centric,” Allen Mailman, JRC’s senior vice president of technology, told Newspapers & Technology last month. “We see the value of shared services in editorial.”

To that end, JRC will house the OpenMedia apps on a single backed-up Sun Fire V890 server site in Yardley, Pa., meshing them with an Oracle database and Citrix thin-client connections to various newsrooms.

The Reporter in Lansdale, Pa., and The Morning Sun in Mount Pleasant, Mich., began installing the editorial apps in January, Mailman said. Installations are currently under way at The Trentonian in Trenton, N.J., and The Mercury in Pottstown, Pa.

Breaking the rules

Mailman admits that in selecting alfa, he broke his No.1 rule: Never buy from offshore companies.

“Alfa is not based in the U.S., but I went and looked at their editorial product at Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung in Augsburg (Germany) and I liked what I saw,” he said.

Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung has NewSuite installed at 25 newspapers.

“It’s like a Swiss watch with German precision,” Mailman said. “The scalability was better with alfa than with the other products I looked at.”

Editor’s note: alfa Media Solutions and alfaQuest Technologies are divisions of alfa Media Partners GmbH.

Mailman said his relationship with alfa’s American alfaQuest division was key.

“I don’t say this as a negative because it is positive, but in my 32 years in the industry I’ve never met a vendor as good as alfa — they walk the walk,” he said.

18 papers slated

All told, there will be 18 papers — throughout Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut — running the alfa editorial apps with 17 of those installs taking place between January 2007 and February 2008, Mailman said. JRC’s remaining five dailies and three of its major weeklies will use Atex’s Prestige editorial software.

The aggressive rollout schedule of two papers per month is staying on course, according to Mailman.

OpenMedia consists of NewsSuite and ProductionSuite modules. NewsSuite manages cross-channel news with links to associated multimedia data. ProductionSuite supports edition planning and tracking capabilities. XML feeds are delivered to online portals at the end of the production cycle, or can be delivered on demand, according to a newspaper’s preference.

At any time, data can be directed to Web services for posting RSS feeds or other Web output. Print data can be linked to audio or video to provide multichannel, cross-media support.

NewsSuite can also integrate Web input to the multichannel operation, alfa said.

Proprietary works

Mailman said alfa’s proprietary approach appealed to him.

 “We’ve seen all of these open systems from [vendors] and they don’t work.”

JRC is also in the midst of installing Data Sciences Inc.’s DSI/Circulation software at various sites.

Next up for the publisher will be implementing advertising software, something which Mailman was examining at last month’s Nexpo.

“We’ll make a final decision by the end of May,” he said. “We hope to have two clusters installed by the end of the year.”