Press
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Caxton, S. Africa’s Largest Publisher, Adds Tera’s Tark Archiving to Tera GN3 Editorial Content Management System
MILAN, Italy — Caxton CTP, the largest publisher of newspapers by number of titles, magazines, books and commercial print in South Africa, has bought Tera Digital Publishing’s Tark archiving system for is flagship daily newspaper, The Citizen, in Johannesburg, to help it expand in the online publishing world.The purchase is significant in terms of Tera’s world presence on the editorial content management systems stage.Caxton’s newspaper division, with 88 free and paid for titles, already uses Tera’s GN3 editorial content management system across its publications. The purchase of 90 seats of Tark represents a further solid endorsement of Tera as a supplier by one of the world’s leading publishing companies. Last year Caxton CTP group sales topped $3 billion.Caxton’s continued confidence in Tera only reinforces Tera’s well-known reputation for having the highest customer retention rate of any system vendor in the newspaper-publishing field. John V. Juliano,Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Reseller Relations for TeraDP, said: “ Caxton’s loyalty and satisfaction demonstrate why 99.4% of Tera customers, worldwide, across our 18-year history, are still Tera customers.”Caxton’s newspaper division employs over 1,200 people and runs off two million copies of its titles per week at nine company-owned print plants across South Africa. It uses Tera’s Ted editing program, Fred page layout application and Topic OPI (Open Pre-press Interface) at a swathe of mainly community newspapers.But the Citizen is the jewel of the Caxton empire. The newspaper is a leading title in Johannesburg, the mining, industrial and financial powerhouse of South Africa, in the heart of Gauteng province (“place of gold”).At the 70,000 circulation, 570,000-reader daily, a 90-seat GN3 system is being used not only for daily production but, with the help of Tera’s Site Manager web content management workflow system, to feed content to a lively and increasingly popular web site (http://www.citizen.co.za). Readership of the paper’s “fiber edition” has increased by 15 per cent in the last 12 months.Now the group wants to take its cross-media publishing success much further by adding several new web sites, based on the exciting results of their experience at The Citizen.A database behind the existing Citizen web site already contains over 60,000 pages and articles, and the newspaper has just ended a six-month trial of daily news podcasting through the GN3 system, which, an executive says, handled everything “beautifully.”The acquisition of the 90 seats of Tark, with its seamless integration with GN3, means all the data published in an edition — stories, pictures and complete pages — can be archived in a single step without requiring manual intervention. Stories are translated into XML, color pictures are retrieved from the OPI and converted into JPEG format, whilst grayscale and line arts are converted into GIF.Caxton will be able to run Tark in conjunction with its existing Tera Site Manager software, which organizes and manages content for digital publication such as web sites and other presentation technologies using XML-based output channels.Tark will also give The Citizen a modern, automated archive for its print pages. At the same time as XML is being generated, a PDF of each page is made. All the links between the various elements, which are established when placing them in the page, are automatically re-created in the library, so that it is possible to search for a story and then jump to the page where it was published and from there to list all the pictures used on that particular page.Caxton says Tark was chosen for its configurability, its media independent XML-based standards approach, and its tight integration to their existing systems. The buying decision followed a trial run of several months, during which time Caxton executives were able to take a close look at Tark.Executives say that another attraction of Tark was that it can be easily configured to suit the group’s needs, something which they say they believe is the hallmark of GN3 systems overall.About Caxton CTP: Caxton & CTP Publishers and Printers stables 88 free and sold Caxton owned or co-owned titles. These newspapers are focused in the metropoles and key jewels in the mini metropoles with a combined circulation or print order of over 2 million copies per week. The flagship newspaper of Caxton and CTP Publishers and Printers is The Citizen. This daily newspaper based in Gauteng, is one of the largest daily newspapers published in this area. The Caxton newspapers operate in 8 of the 9 provinces in South Africa, targeting all demographics within the country. They have 50 offices around the country and employ approximately 1,200 staff. The Caxton newspapers are printed at wholly owned printing plants within the group to date having 9 dedicated press sites. Caxton CTP, as a group, employs a total of 5,959 people in total and had 2007 sales of R4,006,400,000 ($3,051,332,825). About Tera Digital Publishing: 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 of our 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.More information is available by visiting http://TeraDP.com, and through Tera offices and resellers worldwide.Tark, Fred, GN3, GNPortal, GNWeb and the Tera-ribbon logo are trademarks of Tera Digital Publishing.Tera Digital Publishing Srl
Viale CERTOSA 148
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ItalyTel: +39 02 38.09.87.1
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John V. Juliano
+1 404.327.6010Mel Ellis
South Africa (Pty) Ltd?
Tel +27 11 688 6000?
Fax +27 11 688 6392?
Cell +27 83 440 7780?
E-mail: MEllis@antalis.co.za?
Website: http://www.antalis.co.za