Jo Ann Froelich, newly named president of Milan-based EidosMedia Inc.’s U.S. division, discusses the direction the vendor will take in the United States and her plans for the company.

Why did EidosMedia decide it was time to step into the United States and what do you view as some of the biggest challenges in this market? How might your products help newspapers and media companies address these challenges?

Industry statistics and our experience present a clear view of today’s newspaper market; young people are no longer tied to traditional news outlets. They prefer a variety of Internet portals as their main source of content they choose to consume. The baby boomer audience, which I am proud to be a member of, is also getting involved in the new media world and makes up a large percentage of the marketplace.

 

In most Western countries the challenge is the same: publishers must update their business approach in order to capture their share of these new potential revenue sources.

We believe that newsroom convergence is the most effective response in terms of addressing the decreasing revenue stream from the traditional print business. EidosMedia’s approach to cross-media publishing has been unique and non-traditional: We actually implemented the cross-media process by embracing standard Web technologies — such as XML and CSS — and bringing them to the core of the print process. The ability to distribute content through any existing and future channel, whether paper-based or electronic is one of the core features of Methode’s design.

You recently had your first major U.S. sale of Methode to the Seattle Times. Key in the publisher’s decision to implement Methode was the channel feature of the application, which allows users to view how the content will look when it is delivered through various outputs. How do you think newspapers can best use this feature to their advantage?

Convergent cross-media publishing is a double challenge. On one side it requires the desire to change the newsroom organization; on the other side it requires the acquisition of a technological platform that enables this change in a quick, efficient and smooth way. The two aspects are tightly intertwined: one cannot succeed without the other.

As well as allowing new services and products to be developed, a publishing platform must also be a tool for change in the organizational sense.

By adopting a platform that was born for convergence and that uses open standard technologies (XML, CSS, SVG) throughout the whole process such as Methode, media companies are finally free to take a big step towards the convergence of multimedia.

Methode supports an advanced news-management paradigm — known as concurrent publishing — that provides capabilities beyond the simple idea of repurposing. 

In concurrent publishing, a single news item is tailored for publication in a variety of channels and editions at the same time:  from print to Web, syndication and even wireless. This is different from serial processes such as repurposing in which a story is prepared for one channel — usually print — and then adapted for Web and other channels.

You have commented that Methode it is not “yet another editorial system,” but goes beyond by offering newspapers a true framework for content management. Explain.

When we started designing the system, we had a very clear vision. We were already convinced that the concept itself of an editorial system was about to become obsolete. We had to think in terms of enterprise publishing platforms, addressing the global needs of modern publishing organizations.

News and media companies are, in fact, knowledge management organizations. Their need for new knowledge management solutions has been made particularly acute by the massive throughput of information resources, the multiplication of new distribution channels and technology and rapid shifts in market conditions.

To satisfy this requirement, Methode has been designed to be a horizontal cross-enterprise knowledge management platform — a single repository where assets can be viewed, managed, searched, accessed, correlated, enriched and so on.

With your experiences in the European newspaper marketplace, what are the chief disparities you’ve observed between the European and U.S. newspapers in terms of workflow?

Europe shows an extensive variety in terms of workflows and union constraints. If you visit a newsroom in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, or the United Kingdom, you would be surprised by the difference in the working practices between each country.

As a technology supplier, you must be able to provide a system which is flexible enough to support whatever the local workflow model is, whether it is layout-driven, text-driven, content-driven or a mixture of all these and by adapting to business constraints but at the same time supporting the need for new business models.

In very general terms, our international experience has prepared us for all the diversity the North American media market has to offer.

We strongly believe that the system must not impose any organizational constraints but must adapt to customers’ specific workflows. Methode is an open and flexible system that can be tailored to the working practices of any media organization, any media mix — now and in the future.