The Nezavisni Dnevnik Vijesti daily newspaper in Podgorica, Montenegro, will deploy software from Tera Digital Publishing in a bid to keep pace in a lively media battle going on in the newly independent southeastern European country.

NetCom, Tera’s exclusive reseller for the region, made the sale.

Vijesti, a full-color mid-market tabloid with an average 64 pages a day, previously relied on a mixture of Microsoft Word and QuarkXpress to produce its issues. But local owners who last year took command of the paper from a previous partnership with the German Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ) group wanted to implement a suite of editorial products to extend the daily’s local, regional and national coverage and hold and improve their market position.

Six new apps

The paper is currently installing six different Tera products, including the GN3 editorial app for writing and editing, Tark electronic archive software, along with Open Pre-Press Interface (OPI), Wire Text wire service, Picture Manager and XML Site Manager modules.

The combination will allow Vijesti to produce its daily title and a series of other weekly and monthly publications — some of which are inserted into the daily. Tera’s XML Site Manager module will also allow Vijesti to automatically feed XML output to its existing Web site app.

Tera software will be rolled out to 20 editors and layout designers in the newspaper’s main office as well as correspondents throughout Montenegro.

“Currently the correspondents send all copy to Podgorica, but when Tera is installed the idea is that they will be able to use new, higher-speed communication lines to actually be a part of the central editorial operation, using GN3,” said Zdenka Starcevic of Zagreb, Croatia-based NetCom.