Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases
publishers are adopting them. Nstein is an example of a vendor that offers all of these
technologies in a single product.
Some publishers are starting out by adopting these technologies for internal use, in
anticipation of integrating them with external products and feeds. Of these, some are
using these technologies to integrate existing smaller-scale systems and legacy content
repositories, while others are using them to replace existing systems. Yet other
publishers are adopting these for use in external Web sites immediately. We will look at
examples of each of these usages.
Two major consumer publishers — Reader's Digest Association (RDA) and Large
Publishing Group (LPG) — are currently taking the former course; they are unifying
their myriad asset repositories, streamlining their workflows, and adding text mining
capabilities to dramatically increase the quantity and consistency of their metadata.
Large Publishing Group
1
Large Publishing Group (LPG) publishes a wide range of widely popular consumer
magazines, some of which date back several decades, all of which are known for high
quality in their fields. LPG’s collection of images has been sitting in a number of
repositories, including Canto Cumulus and Wave MediaBank; many are older images
that have yet to be digitized. LPG also runs a legacy text library system and various
other file servers and DAM products.
LPG’s story starts in late 2006, soon after the company promoted Eric Saunders from
one of the magazine groups to the newly created position of VP of Asset Management at
the corporate level. Saunders had some experience with DAM and wanted to implement
a system that could enable a range of use cases. Foremost among these was editorial
research: editors needed to be able to find old photos and article text to help them guide
current content and plan future issues.
LPG had a program in place to digitize photos that were still stored as negatives.
Undigitized photos number in the millions, so Saunders began a plan to prioritize
photos to be digitized for two reasons: editorial demand, and assessments of reusability
by archivists who had been looking at photos and writing abstracts about them. Also, in
some cases reusing an old photo — to which LPG has full rights — represents a financial
savings over the cost of commissioning a new one or licensing one from a stock agency
for one-time use.
Another purpose in adopting the DAM system was to help automate syndication to
aggregators such as Lexis-Nexis. Requirements for automated syndication arose out of
a brainstorming session at the company, where the objective was to find ways of
increasing the amount of content that could be sold or syndicated to third parties. In
addition to reducing costs of building and running syndication feeds to aggregators,
LPG saw incremental revenue opportunities for certain new types of feeds.

1
A pseudonym, as are all names in this report associated with this publisher.
23
©2008 Gilbane Group, Inc. http://gilbane.com