Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases
online video. There was some resistance within the newsroom to the video cameras, but
some journalists and editors are embracing the expanded use of video.
Nstein’s Text Mining Engine is helping to keep users on the Web sites longer. It can
automatically generate lists of related stories based on keyword matches and place links
to those stories on Web pages; these can be on the same Web site, or they can cross-
promote other Quebecor Media Web sites.
Quebecor Media’s online strategy will take the company further than just about any
other major North American newspaper chain in unifying online content management.
After the Toronto Sun, the next Web site to be migrated to Nstein will be Le Journal de
Quebec. By the end of 2008, half of the company’s dozen legacy content management
systems should be gone, followed by all but two of them the following year.
Gilbane Group Conclusions
For over a decade, publishers have been experimenting with digital asset management,
web infrastructure, and ways of integrating the two – with limited success. It has
become clear that “one size fits all” DAM implementations don’t work at businesses that
are by their very nature decentralized. It has also become clear that the deep divisions
between the worlds of layout-driven editorial (think RDA or LPG) and content structure
(think scientific journals or college textbooks) will be slow to erode, yet they must erode
in order to make feeds of publishers’ core content to multiple digital distribution
channels feasible.
XML is in some ways antithetical to layout-driven editorial technology, as enabled by
QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign, yet the two worlds must coexist – not just peacefully
but synergistically. The jury is still out on how best to bridge this gap; some publishers
(like LPG) use outsourced manual labor to do it, while others use automated tools in-
house; and layout technology vendors such as Adobe are working on smoother
integration.
On the other hand, both layout-driven and XML content should – and can – be
accessible in the same repositories, through the same methods. The key to this is not
just putting it all into one database (see “one size fits all” above); it is also metadata.
Publishers now understand the need to support search, discoverability, and
personalization, lest their content get lost in a sea of “free” content online. Metadata
provides the glue that makes this all happen.
Yet metadata creation is the bête noir of many publishers – especially those that don’t
have editorial librarians already on staff (as most news publishers do). The success of
DAM and web content management implementations often hangs on the assumption
that someone is going to create lots of metadata. This is something that most editorial
staffers have neither the time nor the skills to do properly. Hiring incremental staff with
MLS (Master of Library Science) qualifications to maintain taxonomies and oversee
metadata creation helps but is inherently not scalable. Text mining technologies can
help, especially when combined with knowledgeable staff.
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©2008 Gilbane Group, Inc. http://gilbane.com
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