Tera Digital Publishing S.r.l

Press

Monday, November 03, 2008

IHT buys Tera TARK Digital Archive

Monday, October 27, Amsterdam, Netherlands —The International Herald Tribune, perhaps the world's most widely read English-language international newspaper — on sale in 180 countries — has confirmed its faith in the Tera Digital Publishing GN3 editorial system it installed in 2000 by ordering Tera's Tark archiving software. The sale was announced by TeraDP at IFRA 2009 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on Monday, October 27.

Because of its XML-based operation, the acquisition of Tark will be a key piece in the reorganization of the IHT, announced by its owners, the New York Times, in June in which executive editor Bill Keller foresaw "a new newsroom management structure, along with plans for a redesign of the IHT and a proposal to combine the IHT and NYT Web sites."

The goal of the reorganization is to continue "harmonizing both the business and news sides" of the two papers. The NYT took over full ownership of the IHT, which is based in Paris, France, in 2003 from a previous partnership with the Washington Post.

The IHT is a longstanding Tera customer and was the first to go live with GN3 as the beta test site for that release of the publishing system. Tera's Milan, Italy, headquarters worked closely with IHT to provide the newspaper with the flexibility and functionality it needed from the GN3 system.
In the years since GN3 was installed, IHT, with a circulation of around 235,000 copies per day, has been able to increase the number of print sites at which it is published from 18 to 33 around the world.

Thousands of fully paginated IHT pages have been successfully produced using GN3 and sent out to the print plants.

Because of Tark's seamless integration with GN3, all the data published in an edition - stories, pictures and complete pages - can be archived in a single step without requiring manual intervention.

Most importantly, all the links between the various page elements, which are established when placing them in the same page or in the same section, 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.

After an edition has been published and flagged for archiving, an automatic procedure running on the editorial server starts exporting all the elements linked to this edition from the editorial database. Stories are translated into XML, a key point given the NYT's emphasis on a Web presence' colour pictures are retrieved and converted into JPEG format, whilst greyscale and line arts are converted into GIF. At the same time, a PDF of each page is generated.

Because Tark is a complete digital asset management system, IHT will have great freedom on how it is used in the future of the newspaper and in the links between its archive and the NYT.

Although the IHT has only five reporters based in Paris, it has over 40 editors; and because of its close ties with the New York newsroom, IHT already has access to all NYT reporters' unedited copy as soon as it is available, so it can be published in a fast-paced operation in the IHT the same day.

IHT's technical team was extremely impressed with Tera's outstanding support for GN3 during the initial editorial system installation, including the Tera's ability to produce system enhancements in a matter of weeks rather than months. For example, Tera was able to design a picture desk that was built into the GN3 interface. The picture desk allows IHT editors to search wire photos, browse IPTC header information, and to put crop marks on pictures for later editing.

At installation there were 80 GN3 users on the system, of which about 65 were in editorial, in addition to three remote terminals in New York.

About the International Herald Tribune:

The International Herald Tribune creates, collects and distributes world news, information, entertainment and opinion of the highest journalistic integrity. Its balanced perspective addresses all areas of human interest and is trusted and enjoyed by people in all corners of the globe.

Established in Paris in 1887, today the IHT is owned by The New York Times Company and continues to expand the reach of its authoritative journalism through the newspaper, which is sold in 180 countries and via computers and mobile devices at IHT.com.

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