Prepress

Nordwest Zeitung adds intelligent automation to Méthode platform

Monday 29. October 2012 - The German daily has used EidosMedia's dedicated Web CMS to combine hyperlocal focus with high productivity.

NordWest Zeitung serves a large regional readership in the Lower Saxony region of Germany through nine daily print editions and the portal www.nwzonline.de. Two years ago NWZ used the Méthode platform to bring together its print, online and syndication processes in a single integrated operation.
The paper has now extended its platform using the Méthode Portal Server, a dedicated Web CMS for news organizations. Launched at the beginning of September, the new portal achieves far higher levels of local focus without deploying additional resources.
“The challenge for NWZ was to deliver fast-moving local content while keeping manual processes to a minimum,” said Holger Hofmann, general manager of EidosMedia GmbH. “The Méthode Portal server allows them to do this by using ‘intelligent automation’ to populate the pages by a metadata-driven process that is almost completely automatic.”
The NWZ portal has 12 regional sections, each of which is divided into 10 or more micro-regional sections, carrying news from an individual town or district. News items entering the system are parsed geographically to determine the page or pages where they should appear. At the same time, the importance ranking of the story is gauged by an algorithm based on text length and headline size.
This information is written into the item’s metadata and subsequently determines where it will be published, at what page position and for how long. The item metadata are also enriched through an automatic classification process carried out by Méthode’s powerful embedded search technology. The tagging process significantly improves the efficiency of readers’ searches. This dynamic semantic publishing process is also used to generate thousands of ‘topic pages’ and dossiers linked to keywords in the article content.
If there are pictures associated with the item, photo-galleries are automatically generated and published. Around 900 section pages of local news are published daily using this process. Manual intervention from staff is minimal.
“The new portal makes it easy for our readers to locate the news that interests them,” said Marc Del Din, NWZ’s chief of Online and Mobile Services. “We have achieved a significant enrichment of the site contents with more powerful search facilities, enhanced media content and interactivity.”
The new project has also extended the editorial workflow to the online TV station, NWZ TV. Video staff can access the headlines and copy created by their print and online colleagues to use in the pagination of video content. Conversely, video content is automatically linked to published stories as soon as the video becomes available.
The Méthode installation serves around 180 editorial staff distributed between the NWZ central newsroom in Oldenburg and 18 local offices.