Tera Digital Publishing S.r.l

Press

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Italy's Il Fatto Quotidiano Chooses Tera SaaS GN3 Editorial System

MILAN, Italy - In a coup that has surprised the European editorial systems industry, Tera Digital Publishing has won the contract to supply the system to be used at Il Fatto Quotidiano, a new left-wing national daily newspaper to be launched in Italy this month.

The political importance of the new paper in Italy, which is setting itself up to overtake the traditional leftist daily L'Unita, means that the future of Il Fatto Quotidiano is being closely followed with keen interest by both politicians and public across the nation.

Initially the new paper will have just 20 seats of Tera's GN3 editorial system, but Il Fatto Quotidiano will also be a thoroughly modern newspaper aimed at keeping its production costs low.
Not only will it be published both in print and online - a job made simple by GN3's media neutrality - but will be set up on an SaaS basis, a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to the customer over a network, typically the internet.
Reports in industry publications had predicted that SaaS systems were on track to make up 30 per cent of the software market by 2007 and be worth $10.7 billion by this year. Undoubtedly the impact of the recent recession will have curbed those projections somewhat but Saas is still expected to become a major system architecture in the future as newspapers race to reduce costs.
Il Fatto Quotidiano will be the first newspaper in Italy using GN3 to be launched using an SaaS model.

GN3 plays perfectly with this model, the advantages of which are easier administration, automatic updates and patch management, compatibility - all users will have the same version of software at all times - easier collaboration and global accessibility.

Il Fatto Quotidiano's service provider will be GMDE of Milan, Tera's reseller for Italy, who concluded the sale and who own a server farm on which the paper is hosted.

The paper will also be funded -- uniquely in Italy -- on the basis of a strong subscription campaign, which by July this year had already signed up 40,000 subscribers, 11,000 of whom have already paid for their first newspaper deliveries.

This is counted an astonishing figure in Italy where, most papers have only three to five per cent paid subscribers as opposed to those who pick up the paper at a news kiosk.

The new owners -- who also include small investors and the staff journalists themselves -- planned to launch the paper only when the number of subscribers covered its financial break-even point, and that point has already been reached.

Il Fatto Quotidiano, which had a planned launch date of the 23rd of September, has been founded by former senior members of the L'Unita staff, including former CEO Giorgio Poidomani, and well-known author and journalist Antonio Padellaro, who will be the new paper's director or editor-in-chief.

Marco Travaglio, a journalist who writes a political blog on Italian politics, says that the name of the new paper is in dedication to the immensely popular Italian journalist and broadcaster Enzo Biagi, who died in 2007 aged 82 and who had a popular 30-minute TV news show on Italy's national RAI network called Il Fatto.
Biagi was notable in his 45-year career for his courageous exposures of political shenanigans and was a constant thorn in the side of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. He was fired from his news show after Berlusconi came to power.

Travaglio believes the new Il Fatto Quotidiano will carry on that stance and says in a recent blog that, under Padellaro's direction, it will be "written by a small but fierce team of young people straight out of journalism school"; plus others, including himself as a contributor.

In fact, the paper, while being left leaning, will likely concentrate on giving its readers simply the facts ('il fatto' in Italian means 'the fact' ) while also being completely independent.

In its 20 GN3 seats, Il Fatto Quotidiano will use 15 seats of GN3's Ted editing application and 5 seats of its Fred page layout program. The newspaper will be layout driven but there will be no graphics department and the five editors will choose pages from a library of predesigned masters and assign them to the 15 writers, a workflow which is common in Italian newspapers. All users will need to be able to search the newspaper's archive and so Il Fatto Quotidiano is including Tera's Tark digital archive in its SaaS architecture.

The newspaper will be 16 full-color pages and will be available as a digital product and six days a week at news kiosks.

Editor's Note: Perfectly on schedule, Il Fatto Quotidiano went live on September 22nd.

About GMDE:
In Italy, Tera produces more than 50 mainly mid-sized titles. With an average circulation of 25 thousand copies a day, the majority of the Italian customers produce a regional paper or a chain of local papers.
Libero and La Padania, two national dailies, are produced using GN3. Libero, which is based in Milan, uses a 100 seat GN3 system to produce an average of 48 pages daily and over 70 thousand copies a day. La Padania, the daily Milan newspaper of the Northern League Party, has 50 seats and a nationwide daily circulation of 50,000 copies. La Padania also publishes on the web.
In the south of Italy, two of the most prestigious papers of the area, La Gazzetta del Sud, based in Messina, and Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, based in Bari, use Tera's GN3. These two titles have a combined circulation of over 100,000 copies a day using more than 250 seats of GN3.
Other Italian papers served by Tera's GN3 are Corriere di Como, Corriere Adriatico, Gazzetta di Parma, and Eco di Biella, a chain owned by media entrepreneur Giuseppe Ciarrapico, Latina Oggi and Ciociaria Oggi; the Italian media group CEGA, with 5 titles that cover the Adriatic Riviera; and the DMedia group with 17 titles published in Lombardy. In addition two prestigious free newspapers in Italy are also produced with Tera's GN3 suite of products: in order of the number of seats used, Epolis with more than 150 seats and 18 editions daily and DNews with more that 30 seats and 4 regional editions daily.

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 hundreds of installations on five continents, 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, GNWeb web cms and Tark4 our SOA multimedia digital archive.
Tera solutions are installed quickly, and easily, with the smallest impact on the organization.
More information is available through Tera offices and resellers worldwide.

GMDE

Tera Digital Publishing