News UK

“We need to drive a greater responsiveness for global news coverage, rapidly publishing articles that provide a consistent, rich multimedia experience for readers across all channels and publication brands,” said Simon Pumphrey, systems manager at News UK. ”Against a backdrop of technical change, we have to ensure we remain at the forefront of how news is delivered, across all channels.”

Selecting a solution to meet clear objectives

News UK had specific criteria for a new Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution to meet their objectives when replacing their legacy systems.

“The new DAM solution had to be faster, easier to use and be more cost-effective than our existing system. It should also help us ensure compliance with usage rights of the assets we use, with comprehensive tracking, audit and reporting. We wanted a browser-based solution, based on open standards, which would be straightforward to integrate to our editorial system. OpenText Content Hub for Publishers meets all of these criteria and more,” said Pumphrey.

Key among the factors that led to the selection of OpenText, was the track record of Content Hub for Publishers (CHP) at other, similar organizations. The integration of CHP with Méthode was straightforward due to its use of open standards, avoiding major re-engineering costs during the deployment.

“Working closely with OpenText, we evaluated not only the current product offering, but also its roadmap, which is substantial. Added to this, the company’s commitment to modern browser-based technology and the adaptability of the solution for multiple asset types helped us in our choice of solution,” said Pumphrey.

Flexibility to meet the needs of users

Not only is CHP capable of handling the myriad of content file formats that News UK receives and generates, but it also provides a flexible user interface (UI) to meet the needs of a range of users. During the scoping phase of the project, various users, including editorial picture desks, subeditors, designers, reporters, digital picture desks, web and tablet content designers, archivists and librarians were consulted on their needs.

“The extensive and flexible UI of CHP helps us meet the specific needs of our varied users. It is scalable and the underlying technology is easily portable, which aids integration. We ran workshops and beta testing programs to ensure the solution is exactly as required,” said Pumphrey.

Once an asset is published, the integration of CHP with the editorial system facilitates comprehensive asset usage tracking and reporting for print and digital channels. Workflows are highly tailorable to assist with content archiving and metadata enhancement. This helps with both search and reporting.

A Business critical deployment

CHP has been introduced as part of a large-scale transformation project to increase collaboration across editorial teams.

“The business critical deployment of OpenText CHP allows News UK to collect as many as 100,000 or more new digital assets and news feeds submitted each day by multiple journalists, photographers and agencies into a single system. The OpenText™ Content Analytics engine automatically tags these assets, ensuring content can be quickly found and retrieved across the various editorial desks,” said Pumphrey.

Not only can the assets be easily repurposed across The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun, the solution ensures the correct rights are associated with each asset, helping to mitigate the risk of digital rights infringement.

“In today’s connected world, customers are choosing to engage with our newspapers across a growing number of devices and, increasingly, we need to manage the growing types of digital content to create a richer digital experience. We chose OpenText CHP as the scalability of the platform has enabled us to move from a print-centric process to one where journalists can associate multimedia content directly into different channels,” said Pumphrey.

Up to 650 users from around the UK connect to CHP concurrently each day. Users based in London and satellite regional offices, working on The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times, The Times Literary Supplement, plus syndication, promotions and other head office functions, are benefiting from the fast access provided by CHP.

Asset use and ease of reporting

Keeping track of and paying for content usage, is a key responsibility for News UK. Asset IDs from CHP are stored throughout the print, web and tablet production processes, in a number of editorial systems. This enables those systems to report details of asset usage post-publication, using a standard XML format. CHP matches these details with the content and creates comprehensive usage records.

“With CHP, we are able to provide editorial and accounting users with the information they need to pay photographers and agencies. The solution also provides a comprehensive audit trail, should queries arise,” said Pumphrey.

In order to address new requirements and channels as they evolve, News UK works closely with OpenText and other CHP customers to ensure the needs of users and the business are represented.

“The OpenText Customer Advisory Board allows users, technologists and subject matter experts from News UK and other OpenText customers to get together with OpenText developers,” said Pumphrey “This allows us to participate in the prioritization of roadmap items, sharing of design details and ideas with other users and to generate new ideas for product features.”