Hearst Newspapers last month became the latest publisher to invest in editorial front-end software when it said it would deploy apps from Digital Technology International at the Houston Chronicle and Times Union in Albany, N.Y.

The editorial project is a first step in Hearst’s plan to consolidate IT operations across its newspapers, according to Hearst Vice President of Technology Development Mike Fogel. 

“We’re going to start with Albany and Houston on the editorial side and move forward with similar projects in circulation and advertising over the next three to five years,” he said.

 

Hearst will spend more than $2 million on the DTI apps, and a total of $5.6 million on the entire project, including all hardware, software and content repositories.

The Chronicle and Times Union will work from a shared editorial server housed in Houston, with a disaster recovery server located at a “bunker” site roughly 70 miles away.

“One of the goals of Hearst was to facilitate the sharing of content across a number of platforms and properties and we think (DTI) will allow us to do that,” said Bill Prewitt, systems editor for the Chronicle. “That was one of the reasons we decided to implement this in Albany and Houston at the same time.”

DTI touts its Liquid Media platform for its ability to integrate with other software and facilitate the use of content in many places. Fogel said DTI’s integration with other vendors’ apps will allow the publisher to upgrade the San Francisco Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, all Hearst properties that run on front-end systems from CCI Europe.

“In addition to the editorial install we are working with DTI to integrate our CCI and DTI properties into one content repository,” Fogel said. “We want to share content, but also news budgets, so as ideas are coming to each of the Features or Sports departments we can follow those stories. If the Times Union wants to pick up a Seattle P-I story they can do that once it’s published.”

Replacing legacy editorial apps

Fogel said “archaic” editorial apps at both the Chronicle and Times Union also fueled the move, adding that the DTI front end will allow the dailies to integrate more efficiently with the Web.

“Our Web sites are growing year over year at rates of 25 to 45 percent, depending on which property you look at,” he said. “We need to facilitate that growth and not only spend time integrating these things, but spend time enriching the content.”

DTI’s integration with online content management apps is a step in that direction, according to Fogel.

Both the Chronicle and Times Union will maintain their existing online content management apps for now (the Chronicle uses a homegrown app) although all of the pieces are in place to bring DTI up in the future.

“DTI offers the ability to have larger story budgets for Web headlines and stories,” Fogel said. “So the writer can determine that so many inches of copy are for print publication and the rest are for the Web, and copy will be routed accordingly to the Web or print management system.”

‘Sophisticated look’

Another key factor in selecting DTI, particularly for the Chronicle, was the app’s tight integration with Adobe InCopy and InDesign.

“We completed a redesign years ago and we’ve adopted a fairly sophisticated look on all of our pages,” Prewitt said. “This allows the freedom we need in graphic design, coupled with a state-of-the-art editorial system.”

Hearst’s News Service in Washington, D.C., already acts as a clearinghouse and story-generation facility for the publisher, and Prewitt said this consolidation will create a repository for both editorial and graphic content.

“We share some of the bigger projects that our graphic artists do throughout the larger properties, and we also have a number of smaller properties where we’d like to beef up content with some of these larger projects that we have the resources to do,” he said. “Those smaller properties do a lot of good work that we could use, too.”

Hearst plans to be live with the new editorial front end late this year, first in Albany and then in Houston.

“We’d like to have everything wrapped up by the first of August because of the Olympics and political conventions and everything that’s coming up,” Prewitt said. “That’s a fairly ambitious schedule but they tell us it’s usually about an eight-month process from contract signing to placing the final section into production — we’re hoping to pull that off.”