Tera Digital Publishing S.r.l

Press

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Fayetteville Observer goes Live with Tera's GNWeb

Fayetteville, NC, USA June 10, 2009 - One of the most go-ahead daily metro newspapers in the southern United States has gone live with Tera Digital Publishing's GNWeb for FayObserver.com, an exciting multimedia alternative to its print product.

The Fayetteville Observer, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which has been a Tera customer since the late 1990s with a 109-seat GN3 editorial system, already used its GN3 system in a single newsroom operation to produce a lively web site that Infrastructure Manager Jeff Frye says is a true revenue source for the newspaper. "Our bandwidth has doubled in the last 18 months and both traffic and online revenue have increased considerably".

Now, in a bid to build a newspaper that can face the future, the portal (http://fayobserver.com) at the 62,000 circulation Observer is even more fully integrated into the paper's workflow, using GNWeb's superb one-click-to-web publishing feature to allow the paper to move control of the site as completely as possible into the hands of the print news team.

Now with GNWeb, the newsroom has total command of not only the content but the look-and-feel of the portal's web pages, where they can take over creation of web page templates that in GNWeb are a user-configurable resource.

The paper's web site is already a lively amalgam of highly visible multimedia, including sound, photos and video content, even to the extent of broadcasting video news bulletins, in television newsreader style from its newsroom.

Jeff Frye says that the Observer, now in its fourth generation of local ownership under proprietor Charles Broadwell and one of the largest family-owned newspapers in the country, is keen to be seen as "a media company not just a print company. You can get our news in a variety of places." The paper's web site also includes a subscription-only e-edition of the paper's print.

Fayetteville, in the Cape Fear River region, an important military town with Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base nearby, is the fifth largest city in North Carolina and dubs itself "America's home town." The local population is 203,000.

And the Observer, which dates back to 1816 and is the oldest newspaper still being published in the state, has been keen to keep pace with its community's needs. In 1997 it chose Tera's GN3 as a keystone of a $30 million expansion project that also included the installation of state-of-the-art color printing presses. The system included GN3's Ted editing application, Fred pagination tool, The Shell database search tool, and Tark XML-based archive, with the full knowledge that it would allow the paper to move to a single newsroom operation with a web site. Now, the purchase of GNWeb and GNPortal further confirms the company's faith in Tera products.

GNWeb provides complete website management with such features as versioning, content-locking and web analytics. When matched with Tera's GNPortal, content can be acquired, validated, processed, and added to the GN3 workflow stream automatically.

In use, GNWeb together with GN3's article-based content management mean that a website is one more content distribution channel, like the printed edition of the newspaper - only instantly.

GN3's article-based content organization allows the publisher to define the elements that comprise an article as part of system configuration. For example, a publisher may define multiple headlines and assign each headline to a title or website (or multiple titles and websites). Workflows proceed independently of where the content will be published. When it is time to publish, the correct story elements are sent to the channel, whether electronic, such as the web or a mobile device, or a traditional printed channel.

Tera's GN3 workflow is completely media neutral.

About the Fayetteville Publishing Company:
The Fayetteville Observer is North Carolina's oldest newspaper still being published. It traces its roots to the establishment of the Carolina Observer in 1816. Four generations later, the company remains in the same family. The Observer is the largest independent newspaper in North Carolina and one of the largest family-owned papers in the country. The company has continued to diversify with the purchase of The Carolina Trader and Acento Latino publications over the years, among others, and the creation of Next! magazine, The Sandspur weekly newspaper, and others. The company is involved in the advertising sales, printing and distribution of the military newspapers at Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base. With its new presses, Fayetteville Publishing Co. has also established a strong reputation in commercial printing for various publications in the Southeast.
In 2002, The Fayetteville Observer was named one of the 50 best-printed newspapers in the world in an international color-quality competition. Only 11 U.S. newspapers received this recognition.
The newspaper has received a number of other prestigious awards. In 2005, the N.C. Press Association selected The Fayetteville Observer as No. 1 in General Excellence among North Carolina's largest daily papers.

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, our greater than 99% customer retention and our Single Newsroom solutions which include GNPortal content ingestion product.
Tera solutions are installed quickly, and easily, with the smallest impact on the organization.
More information is available by visiting this website, and through Tera offices and resellers worldwide.

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