Televisual: CN Group

Newspapers & Magazines

Outsourcing

Corporate Development Tools

Read how Televisual's customers use Asset to lower their cost of content ownership.

CN Group

CN Group, based in Carlisle, England publishes a range of daily and weekly newspapers, as well as magazines, directories and web sites. Its main publications are:

News & Star
Evening Mail
The Cumberland News
Whitehaven News
West Cumbria Times & Star
The Hexham Courant
Eskdale & Liddesdale Advertiser
Cumbrian Gazette
Cumbria Life
Business Gazette

Upgrading to Asset

CN Group were impressed by the reports of reliability and speed attributed to Asset.

Seeing the ease with which Televisual demonstrated the recalling of articles from the majority of Scottish Daily Newspapers that they store (searching 13 million records across the internet) was substantial evidence that the Asset software was powerful enough for CN Group's requirements.

The first task was the acquisition of the existing 130GByte archive of text, pictures and pages from the last five years" says Brian Pennington, IT Manager of CN Group. "Thanks to Televisual's support for a wide range of import formats, including the Phrasea format, this was straightforward.

With the import of legacy material complete, the next task was integrating the Asset Content Server with the existing editorial workflow. Using its Workflow Wizards, the Asset system was
configured to accept text and pictures from the editorial system and picture desk fully automatically.

CN had five years worth of existing pictures and text stored in Phrasea (which were located on 100 CDs in a jukebox) and were quickly taken and loaded into Televisual's archive to allow rapid searching on any words in any field of the JPEG IPTC header (for images) and any field in the Article Text.

Achieving a smooth transition from the legacy archive system was the priority for the installation process. The flexibility of the Asset web browser client meant that it could be simply customised to give a similar look and feel to the archive it was replacing, minimising the training required on the editorial floor. This was done during the systems administration training course.

With the installation complete, CN Group are now benefiting from the advantages that Asset delivers. As well as much enhanced speed and reliability of searching, the low cost of maintenance delivers savings to the IT department. Both content acquisition and index maintenance are fully automatic, and the Content Server alerts the systems administrator by email of any error or warning conditions, eliminating the need for monitoring or regular maintenance tasks.

Current Usage

Powered by two Compaq Proliant ML530 G2 twin Xeon processor servers each with a 560 GByte RAID array for data storage, the Asset system provides 177 editorial staff with access to published text and pages as well as a picture and clippings archive.

Both servers are fully replicated and also “load share” - reporters using one server for text and subs and photographers using the other for pictures. In the event of server failure, any person simply points their browser to the working server and there is no loss of data.

At the time of writing, CNGroup do not employ a librarian. All content from the above publications (with the exception of Cumbria Life) is fed automatically by scheduled events that extracts XML from their TERA editorial system.

The XML contains information such as:

Publication
Date
Article Text
Articles associated Pictures
Headline
Byline

Asset also receives a thumbnail of the pictures associated with the article and a PDF of the page (of which Asset creates a jpeg thumbnail which subs find useful for creating "ragouts".)

Asset can then fully associate all pictures, text and PDFs. An entire edition of PDFs in either High or Low resolution can be obtained and easily downloaded for later repurposing if required.

Asset serves (and is fed from) seven sites across CN Group's WAN:

Barrow
Carlisle
Whitehaven
Workington
Carlisle (HQ)
Carlisle City Office
Penrith

Association of published pictures with non published pictures for photographic re-sales purposes is all automatic - using software developed by Televisual. This has an added benefit of allowing the journalist to see other relevant pictures taken and use a different picture each time for running stories or regular stories about popular local celebrities). This is seen as a great advantage and gives subs an opportunity to "freshen up" the newspaper.

Reporters find it invaluable to be able to quickly look up past stories for reference, and subs have the ability to choose from several relevant pictures stored on the system to send to the page that they are constructing.

Like many Newspapers, CN Group has a "clippings library" where articles have been cut out and filed. A decision was made to OCR a few thousand of the commonly researched articles (such as local government, schools and personalities etc) using Acrobat and store the clippings as PDFs in Asset. Reporters can now search these articles like any "free text" search, see a Jpeg image of the clipping as well as the PDF itself.

Because Televisual's Archive is totally platform independent, as well being used by the PC users in the Editorial Department, the Mac based studio / production departments may look at past pages to find PDFs of Pages containing adverts and re-extract the ad if required.

The Marketing department also bring up examples of front pages for publicity purposes and award entries. A useful "spin off" that is also used heavily by the Editor, is that many hours of searching through past edition's of physical front pages can be saved - at the run up to the Newspaper Industry's many Award functions - by simply calling the pages up on the screen) . All this is done without having to install proprietary software (which incurs time and licensing costs) on everyone's computer - whoever needs to browse the Archive just needs to type in the appropriate address into their browser.

It also forms the basis for future integration into their Group Intranet.

"The transition from an old system to a new one is always full of potential pitfalls ... and we are pleased at how smoothly the Televisual Asset installation has been, and are very happy with the performance of the software and the professionalism of the company."

-Brian Pennington. IT Manager.

Last Updated: Tuesday 16 May 2006 - 15:42

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