The Seattle Times last month said it plans to adopt EidosMedia’s Methode editorial and publishing software to support the production of its print, online and multimedia content.

The daily — the first U.S. publisher to implement Methode — hopes to begin the rollout later this year with completion slated for first quarter 2009, according to newsroom IT manager Greg Anderson.

Serving 250 users, the project is no small feat.

“We’re the first in the U.S. to announce our intention to use it, although I don’t know in the end if we’ll be the first to go live,” said Heidi De Laubenfels, assistant managing editor, visuals and technology.

The application’s ability to let users view content in its different outlet formats, what EidosMedia calls “channels,” was attractive to The Times (daily, 215,311; Sunday, 420,587).

“It allows you to view content in different channels,” Anderson said. “I can take a 20-inch story, for example, and view what it would look like in print and then switch my filter (or channel) to view what it would look like if I sent it out as an SMS text message, from 20 inches down to a paragraph, or I can view what it would look like on the Web.”

Streamline operations

Because Methode is open and standards-based, the app will allow The Times to better streamline its operations, a key goal for the paper.

“Fundamentally, what we want to do is move away from being a print-oriented organization that repurposes its content and move towards being a news organization that publishes in a variety of ways,” De Laubenfels said.

Methode is based on standard XML and CSS, and is based on an object-oriented database rather than a relational database.

 

“With a lot of systems you have to import photos and graphics through spoolers” — putting jobs on a queue and taking them off one at a time — “but with Methode you just drag the object right onto the application and it imports it into the database,” Anderson said.

Users can also add metadata, which can be helpful for internal searching and tasks such as getting information and keywords posted online without forcing users to create new columns or tags in a database.

That functionality will allow The Times to consolidate its current process that requires different codes depending on whether the content is slated for print or online distribution “We can create a metadata field for coding all of our photos and I can right click and create the field and then it’s there for all objects of that type from then on,” Anderson said.

No modifications

The app’s content management capability, meantime, will enable The Times to repurpose copy without making modifications.

“Because we are built to produce newspapers we have to retouch content when we are repurposing it. For example, we have to take coding off that’s irrelevant for online,” De Laubenfels said. “We wanted to move toward a system that didn’t require that and the vision for this technology is that we can write a headline, for example, and it‘s tagged as a headline no matter where it’s running.”

Having watched Eidos for some time, The Times was able to forgo the vendor selection process common among many newspapers choosing products and applications.

“We were monitoring what was happening in the industry and this (company) emerged as something interesting for us to pursue,” De Laubenfels said.

The new platform will replace the daily’s CCI Newsdesk front-end app which requires users to input copy and then export it to a homegrown system for posting on The Times’ Web site. The homegrown app served the daily well, and both Anderson and De Laubenfels admit they are not necessarily ready to part with it.

“We don’t know at this point whether or not we’ll keep using it,” De Laubenfels said. “It’s a pretty good system.”

Developing a new workflow

The paper is at the very beginning of its Methode deployment and is still working out exactly how the workflow will operate, but The Times is optimistic about the possibilities.

“We see the potential of this technology and what we’ll do next is work on designing a workflow and the tools to support that,” De Laubenfels said.

The Times’ workflow will also include all of the checks and balances necessary when so many users are involved, De Laubenfels said.

The Times also welcomes the benefits a single system will provide to editors, reporters and other users.

“As you meld newsrooms these days and think about all of the different products, it’s important as you try to train people that you have fewer applications to train them in,” Anderson said. “They can be more productive — so it’s our hope to use this to a greater extent across the newsroom and across the products.”

The Times sale is a coup for Milan, Italy-based EidosMedia, which recently opened a U.S. marketing and sales office in New York.

Prior to picking Methode, Anderson visited the Financial Times, which deployed Methode in 2002, and saw the success that its much larger counterpart had with the app.

“They are a much bigger organization than us and they are using it worldwide very successfully.”

FT adopted Methode in 2002, after Atex abandoned the Omnex app it was developing with FT in favor of developing its Prestige app.