Business News

WAZ Media Group titles go live with Méthode

Tuesday 05. October 2010 - The German publisher has completed the transfer of the print and online editions of five regional dailies to EidosMedia’s multiple-media editorial platform.

Five regional dailies belonging to the WAZ Media Group (the flagship title, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, plus four other titles in the North-Rhine Westfalia region, are now using EidosMedia’s Méthode editorial platform to produce their print and online editions.

The Méthode platform is physically located at WAZ headquarters in Essen and is connected to around 80 local newsrooms by data links. Although the five editorial environments are hosted on a single platform, each publication has its own editorial workflow.

“The use of a common physical platform has allowed us to make significant cost savings in terms of installation and management costs,” said Markus Wendler, Project Manager, “as well as allowing substantial sharing of common editorial content between titles.”

WAZ Media Group has reorganized its news-creation processes to get the maximum benefit from such synergies. A central Content Desk team in Essen produces content (national and international news, economy, sport etc.) for the dailies Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ), Neue Ruhr/ Neue Rhein Zeitung (NRZ), Westfälische Rundschau (WR). This content can be used by each of these dailies via the common physical platform.

This integration is continued in the online editions: the five newspapers have a shared online portal (www.derwesten.de ) drawing on a common store of content, plus local articles from each of the contributing dailies. A system of geo-tagging allows online readers to quickly focus on items from their own geographical area.

The Méthode editorial platform has been interfaced with a large number of existing system components, from advertising management to Web publishing. It also handles extremely large inputs from a variety of agency and multimedia feeds.
“The scale of the information flows involved in this operation is substantial,” said Holger Hofmann, country manager for EidosMedia GmbH. “Over 20,000 new objects enter the content base each day and are continuously updated and made available to editorial staff. On the output side, the editorial platform generates up to 1500 pages a day, distributed among 100 different print editions.”

The next stage in this WAZ Media Group long-term project will be another three dailies from the Thuringia region. The Méthode platform will eventually serve editorial staff of over a thousand.