Press
Monday, October 08, 2007
TERA Announces It is First Vendor to Support AP Web Feeds, New Wire Feed Delivery Method
Tera Digital Publishing today announced that it is the first news system vendor to integrate into its software the new AP Web Feeds from The Associated Press.
AP is now offering customers delivery of the AP report over the web in addition to satellite. The new AP Web Feeds represent a significant advance in data quality over satellite wires. AP's new Web Feeds are now fully integrated into Tera Digital Publishing systems now running at the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Tera intends to convert all of its 18 US newspaper customers to the new AP Web Feeds this year.
AP's new Web Feeds offer newspapers a more modern and complete content feed. This richer feed delivers text, photos, graphics and video and can help editors find news with greater accuracy in less time. This is made possible by AP's new metadata classification which is applied to every item in the feed. AP produces thousands of news stories everyday. The new classification contained in the Web Feeds will help Tera customers to find and organize the content quickly and into more locally relevant categories. "The old, industry standard just doesn't help editors find that needle in the haystack - the stories that editors may skip over because the slug or headline doesn't hit home," says Dwayne Desaulniers, AP's Deputy Director for US newspaper markets. "Combined with good software, AP Web Feeds surface these stories to make sure editors don't miss information that is meaningful to their local audience."
The richer AP feeds can also be extended to readers. Online editors now have many categories of content that can be offered for the website. No longer do editors have to depend on the category 'Sports'. With AP's Web Feeds, sports news can be broken down automatically into scores of categories - by sport, by team, by topic and even by athlete. "These feeds really help online editors build a wide, wide range of pages or sections to suit the very diverse interests of local audiences," says Todd Martin, AP's Vice-President for Development. "Build a page of news about all authors, for example, or all actors or all green-energy news or all stories about news in the K-12 education sector. The feeds help editors reach all of those diverse interests and of course advertisers who want to reach those niche audiences."
To implement the AP's Web Feeds interface, a feed definition was created in the IFSReader of Tera's GN3 newspaper system. ISFReader is a standard feature of GN3. The implementation can be accomplished at any GN3 site running current software.
"The AP is a leader in news gathering and new distribution technology. As a leader in newspaper systems we, at Tera, realize the importance of having software that can accept new content formats, such as Web Feeds as they are defined," said Michele Mottini, Tera Head of Engineering.
Tera GN3 customers are easily able to accept data AP's Web Feed and automatically distribute the stories into the categories the paper has defined. Configuration flexibility is a hallmark of a Tera system
Tera, a worldwide provider of newspaper content management systems, is a recognized leader in newspaper systems engineering.