Prepress
Wall Street Journal in production with Méthode global newsroom
Wednesday 14. October 2009 - The international financial daily is moving its print and online operations to EidosMedias multiple-media platform.
The Wall Street Journal is transferring production of its global print and Web editions to the EidosMedia editorial and publishing platform Méthode.
The papers complete portfolio of operations – US domestic, Europe and Asia print editions and online editions tailored for the domestic and international markets – is now being managed from a single editorial platform. The transition, which will be completed in November, will allow the Wall Street Journal to realize an important strategic objective: a 24/7 integrated editorial operation, rolling from time zone to time zone as the day progresses.
“The adoption of Méthode was an enabling step in what has been a complete re-engineering of our newsroom processes,” said Jim Pensiero, deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. “It is giving us a degree of visibility and control over our workflow which has significantly increased our agility and flexibility – especially in dealing with breaking news stories.”
The Wall Street Journal implementation makes particular use of a recent addition to the Méthode functional repertoire: the compound story. Like a standard multi-channel story, a compound story accommodates variants in headlines, text and picture content for different channels. In addition, the compound story may follow different workflow paths and be worked on by more than one person at a time. Thus a story may be taken through to publication by the Web editors, while still being prepared for the print edition. The story remains a single object for all editorial and archiving purposes.
“The Wall Street Journal operation has used the compound story feature to the maximum,” commented Julien Febvre, EidosMedia project manager. “There are points in the workflow when as many as four people can be working on a story simultaneously in several different editions. The transparency of the Méthode workspace – plus adherence to a number of ground rules – allows this distributed workflow to proceed in a smooth and productive fashion.”
Gabriella Franzini, EidosMedia CEO , said: “The scale and complexity of the Wall Street Journal operation plus the critical time-to-market factors operating in financial reporting, made this one of the most challenging projects our teams have undertaken. We are very satisfied to have been able to deliver the benefits in productivity and flexibility that the Dow Jones organisation was looking for.”
The Méthode platform serves around 900 users distributed between the Wall Street Journals newsrooms in the US, Europe and Asia.. Other Dow Jones editorial operations scheduled to be transferred to Méthode include the magazine Barrons and its associated portal, the Website MarketWatch.com and the Dow Jones newswire service.