Tera Digital Publishing S.r.l

Press

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Victoria Texas Buys Tera's GN3 as Best Entry Point for Reverse Publishing

Victoria, Texas - March 17, 2008 - A forward-thinking daily newspaper in Texas has bought a Tera Digital Publishing GN3 editorial system because they see it as the best entry point available for joining the growing movement among newspaper publishers that is being dubbed "reverse publishing."

Chris Cobler, Editor of the Victoria Advocate in Victoria, TX, a city south of San Antonio, wants his organization to be thought of in the future as not  only a newspaper but also as the region's best content provider across all kinds of media. The Advocate's web site is a Newspaper Association of America Digital Edge award finalist ready to leap forward with Tera providing cutting-edge support.
The broadsheet Advocate, with a circulation of about 35,000 in a region of 221,000 people based in Victoria County, and owned by the Roberts and McHaney families, is one of the oldest newspapers in the state, founded in 1846.
But the paper feels it will stay at the forefront of cross-media production through its purchase of GN3, including 17 seats of the system's Ted text editing application, 17 of the Fred pagination tool and, importantly, its TARK cross-media archive.
The Advocate is only one of a number of recent GN3 customers who have been telling Tera that they reached out for GN3 because its totally XML-based storage, together with its article-based organization, made it better than the competition when it came to repurposing content.
Phil Ashley, who leads the Advocate's IT team, said the paper was moving from a previous TeamBase system from Agile Software. He said: "The main drawback of the old system was that we badly wanted to move to a reverse publishing paradigm in which the paper's web site would become as important a publishing medium as the newspaper itself, especially for immediate events like breaking news.
"We also believed Tera was the most cost-effective solution for the needs that we had. Some of the other vendors offered third-party software solutions and because of our experience with TeamBase of having several vendors in the mix with the resulting difficulties for upgrades and maintenance, we felt that Tera with its complete interoperability was the best choice."
The over all attractions of the Tera system were low cost and the ability to install quickly. GN3 is being installed now at the Advocate and is expected to be up and running within a month.
But Ashley said one feature immediately drew the Advocate to the system: the ability to have an integrated photo and news graphics workflow for both print and web. "[This] was having to be handled outside the system and was leading to production difficulties. We were working with a hybrid QuarkXpress plug-in that led to some inherent instability."
The Advocate is currently setting up the picture workflow within GN3 and is about to begin staff training. "Once we do this we will be better able to take advantage of immediate publishing to the web, and the strong desire is to begin reverse publishing as soon as possible," said Ashley.
The newspaper already has a lively web site (VictoriaAdvocate.com) that not only reflects major sections of the print product such as news, sports, entertainment, business and classifieds, but also includes immediate breaking news headlines and makes a major attempt to dialogue with readers by allowing them to file their own news stories and comments and take part in reader polls.
The print side of the group will not be neglected. The new Tera system will also be used to provide content for the group's weekly Matagorda Advocate in nearby Bay City. And the daily newspaper has already made what Ashley calls some "evolutionary" changes in advance of the system roll out "to make things work more smoothly," including a redesign of the paper and a planned installation of computer-to-plate output.
But the Advocate is not alone among those newspaper publishers in noticing that 2007 was a record for people visiting newspaper web sites, particularly by the young who are not necessarily newspaper readers, as the public looks for trusted "branded gateways" in a confusing world of mass information. 
Monthly unique visitors to newspaper sites in fourth quarter 2007 hit 62.8 million, according to a survey of 88 newspapers in the top 50 local markets carried out by Scarborough Research.
And Randy Bennett, vice president of audience and new business development at the Newspaper Association of America, recently told the Wall Street Journal "Growth for newspaper web sites continues to outpace growth in Internet use generally."
John Juliano, Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Reseller Relations with Tera DP said: "Newspapers are dropping the term newspaper and viewing themselves as content providers across media. There is a history and tradition behind newspapers, which a newspaper brings to newsgathering. Its attributes are journalistic expertise and integrity. A system like Tera's provides the tools to produce content to that standard. This requires the system manufacturer to understand the unique requirements of a good journalistic endeavor: workflow which supports the immediacy required and the coordination of, sometimes, hundreds of people producing a daily product, security - not only passwords and the like, but audit trails - and now, the ability to publish the news across different presentation technologies. And that brings us full circle back to the use of XML as the underlying standard in GN3."

About Tera:
Tera is a leading provider of integrated multi-media editorial solutions for the newspaper publishing. Dominant in many world markets, Tera is 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 Tera products deliver the highest performance, maximum reliability and low operating costs. Tera solutions are installed quickly, and easily, with the smallest impact on the organization.
In terms of titles, Tera is the dominant vendor in the UK. In the US, Tera systems are used to publish over 100 titles and are the dominant vendor for Spanish-language newspapers. Tera is also the dominant vendor in Brazil, Italy and Croatia.
More information is available by visiting this website, and through Tera offices and resellers worldwide.

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