Tera Digital Publishing S.r.l

Press

Monday, January 21, 2008

Top daily in Montenegro chooses complete Tera system in lively circulation war

Podgorica, Montenegro - The leading daily newspaper in Montenegro, Nezavisni Dnevnik Vijesti, has chosen a complete suite of products from Tera Digital Publishing to allow it to keep pace in a lively media battle going on in this newly-independent south-eastern European country. NetCom, Tera's exclusive reseller for the region, made the sale.

Montenegro, with a population of only about 700,000, won independence from neighboring Serbia in a referendum only two years ago, but four major newspapers and five TV channels, all based in the capital, Podgorica, are fighting for market share from an audience hungry for information in the newly-liberated state.

Vijesti, a feisty full-color mid-market tabloid with an average 64 pages a day, previously relied on a simple 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, decided they needed a world-beating suite of editorial products in a plan to extend their local, regional and national coverage and hold and improve their market position.

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

The combination will allow Vijesti to produce not only its daily title, but a series of other weekly and monthly publications - some of which are inserted into the daily - taking the publications from first keystroke to page output at its own printing plant. The Tera XML Site Manager module will also allow Vijesti to automatically feed XML output to its existing web site system.

One attraction for Vijesti in choosing Tera was the typical fast and easily implementation of the new publishing system. Workflow study and installation began in early January and the system is expected to be complete in mid-February, less than seven weeks after work began. 

After the daily newspaper staff train on GN3, Vijesti's own "super users" will train staff at other publications.

The new Tera system will not only allow the 20 editors and layout designers in the newspaper's main office to improve efficiency and develop new products but will also allow its correspondents throughout Montenegro to extend its regional and national coverage. "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.

The newspaper will also take advantage of the installation to change over all its editorial hardware from Apple Macintosh (save picture desk machines) to PCs, reducing operating costs, and will concentrate on building up its new electronic archive, using Tera's TARK. Currently back files are held on a simple but unwieldy file system as Portable Document Format (PDF) files. ''In the future, they hope to use TARK to make content automatically available to its web site producers,'' said Starcevic.

Vijesti has also moved to become the first newspaper in the country to publish books, including a collection of 20th century authors, an anthology of Montenegrin authors and a survey of great painters. The company hopes to be able to integrate its newspaper and publishing arms to use its Tera publishing system to produce further book titles, in an impressive salute to Tera's publishing flexibility.

Zdenka Starcevic of NetCom said, ''We are pleased that Vijesti chose Tera's GN3 for its editorial and publishing system and it is an important sale for NetCom being our first in the east of the former Yugoslavia. For us it is very important that Montenegro newspapers recognize GN3 as a powerful, fast and flexible technological solution that can produce great quality. With the GN3 system the editorial content of the newspaper will be able to become more focused on local and national news.''

About Nezavisni Dnevnik Vijesti: 
Founded September 1, 1997. Rapidly became the leading printed newspaper in Montenegro. The German media group Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ) acquired 50 per cent of the newspaper company in March 2003. Commended by the Organization For Security and Cooperation In Europe (OCSE) for observing professional standards during the Montenegrin independence campaign. WAZ sold its stake in Vijesti to the other parties in October, 2007.

About NetCom:
Based in Rijeka, Croatia, NetCom is the Exclusive Tera dealer for Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina & Montenegro.
In Croatia, a Tera system is synonymous for a newspaper editorial content system. In addition to the national news agency Hina, Tera publishing solutions are used at the Vjesnik, the national title based in Zagreb, at the very innovative Novi List, Glas Istre, Glas Slavonije and Zadarski List.

About Tera:
Tera is a leading provider of integrated multi-media editorial solutions for the newspaper publishing. Dominant in many world markets, we are best known for the quality of our engineering, the ease-of-use of our products and their very low cost of ownership.
Tera's product line includes multi-media editorial, archiving, advertising and prepress solutions. All our products deliver the highest performance, maximum reliability and low operating costs. Our solutions are installed quickly, and easily, with the smallest impact on the organization.
In terms of titles, we are the dominant vendor in the UK. In the US, we publish over 100 titles and are the dominant vendor for Spanish-language newspapers. We are also the dominant vendor in Brazil, Italy and Croatia

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