Press
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
La Estrella de Pamana and El Siglio Relaunched by New Owners with Tera's GN3
Panama City, Panama – Panama’s oldest daily newspaper, La Estrella de Panama (The Panama Star), is being re-launched under new ownership using a new editorial system from Tera Digital Publishing.
La Estrella, previously known for closely backing the country’s government, is publishing with a new stance as a politically independent title dedicated to press freedom after having been bought by Grupo Wisa, a local upscale import-export company that already owns Panama’s popular daily El Siglo (The Century).
Juan Luis Correa, CEO of Grupo Editorial El Siglo-La Estrella, the newspaper’s holding company, said: “La Estrella and El Siglo will both remain independent of the government and the opposition. The idea is to maximize the values of a free press, giving access to the community to express their viewpoint on the different topics that are relevant to our society”.
Grupo Wisa is pitching the 40-page broadsheet La Estrella, which first began life in1853 and is believed to be the second oldest newspaper in South America, as an up-market buy for a better-educated audience than its tabloid sister title. But the 56-page El Siglo will be also re-launched with a new format in July.
La Estrella, which is being redesigned as part of its re-launch, competes with half a dozen other daily and weekly titles publishing in Panama City, the 1,000,00-population capital of the Central American country best known for its eponymous ship canal.
The rebirth of the newspaper is seen locally as reflecting Panama’s growing regional importance as a waypoint between the U.S. and South America. Panama City is an important hub for banking and commerce and the capital has been for seven years in the top five places for retirement in the world, according to International Living Magazine.
Grupo Wisa is an important player in the fashion industry in Panama and the canal Free Zone, importing reputable brands of perfumes, jewelry and bags from France and Italy. It has duty free shops across Central America, Colombia and in the Caribbean Islands.
The introduction of the TeraDP system at La Estrella coincides with the current installation by the new owners of a new Goss printing press with seven full-color towers and two folders, a heatset oven for commercial printing, and computer to plate (CTP) output. The new press will enable the group to increase its full-color pagination to 72 pages per day at La Estrella and 96 pages at El Siglo.
La Estrella’s re-launch also represents a continuing success story for TeraDP in Panama.
It is the second daily newspaper in Panama City to choose a Tera system for its publishing needs. TeraDP software is already in use at the well-established La Prensa (The Press), and Tera was backed by Juan Luis Correa, who transferred to La Estrella from a 17-year career at La Prensa, because of his previous good experience with Tera products.
La Estrella has purchased the latest version of TeraDP’s GN3 editorial system, including 57 seats of its Ted text editing application and 10 seats of its Fred page layout application, wire servers and imposition software. The newspaper has also installed Tera’s TARK cross-media database. Tera reseller GSI of Miami, FL, now adding a separate Pongrass display and classified advertising system to give the newspaper a complete production system, carried out the installation.
Juan Luis Correa said: “We are very proud to work with GSI, a company I have known for many years. We believe GN3 is an excellent system and a flexible tool for newspaper operations. There is no doubt that it will contribute to our newspaper in their new designs, new presses, new CTP systems, and everything else we are doing to foster the development of this media group”.
About Tera:
Tera DP is a worldwide manufacturer of editorial, web, content management, pre-press and archiving solutions for newspaper and magazine publishing. With more than 300 installations worldwide, Tera is a recognized world leader in newspaper publishing technology.
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 http://TeraDP.com, and through Tera offices and resellers worldwide.
Tark, Fred, GN3, GNPortal and the Tera-ribbon logo are trademarks of Tera Digital Publishing.
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