It's the second out of three sports dailies in Italy that are using WoodWing's multi-channel publishing and digital asset management solutions. Six weeks ago, Corriere dello Sport switched its production to WoodWing. Both publications migrated from a legacy system in order to modernize and streamline their workflows to create their print, Web, tablet and mobile editions. The implementation of Enterprise and Elvis DAM is part of an almost complete change process, including hardware, software, layout and workflow design. The technical director responsible for the two titles speaks at the WoodWing Xperience, which will be held in Lisbon on June 17 and 18.
The two titles are historic media brands in Italy – Tuttosport has been published for 70 years; Corriere dello Sport for 90 years. Both titles create multiple local editions – Tuttosport a total of four, Corriere dello Sport no less than 12, reaching, respectively, 894,000 and 1.5 million readers each day. The local editions of Corriere dello Sport are often completely individual issues, aimed at fans of a team in a specific region. This means that 60-80 pages per day must be created or reworked.
“Sports journalists work under very tight deadlines to provide their readers with the latest news about events and results in their favorite sports. The majority of the pages are produced in just three hours,” said Guido Ottaviani, Technical Director at Media Progetti, the IT partner of both titles. “We need a system that automates the production to a large extent, and enables the editors to easily create high-quality pages, not just articles.”
The legacy system used by both titles was out of date and to a large extent proprietary. There was an urgent need for a modern, flexible, agile and open system that enables the titles to keep pace with the rapid developments in media technology and journalism. Based on their positive experiences with WoodWing solutions at Conti Editore, a well-known magazine publisher in Italy, Ottaviani and his team selected WoodWing Enterprise, its editorial management application Content Station and WoodWing Elvis DAM for Tuttosport and Corriere dello sport.
The open architecture and the thorough documentation of WoodWing´s solutions enabled the team at Media Progetti to easily migrate the existing workflow to the WoodWing environment, integrate news agencies’ services and the image processing system Binuscan, export pages for digital editions, as well as set up a collaboration workflow with external reporters, freelancers and printers. The migration to the WoodWing environment was hassle-free for editors and designers, and the deadlines were easily met every time, says WoodWing.
With the new system, editors can create standard pages on their own – without the need for any prepress know-how – directly within a browser-based version of Content Station. “In order to ensure production performance and consistency of the design, while at the same time avoiding using the same layout day after day, we developed an app inside Content Station that guides the editors through the design of dynamic pages,” explained Ottaviani. Despite the high variability of the layouts, the editors never need to make more than 10 easy design decisions. According to Ottaviani, the high flexibility and openness of WoodWing´s solutions were an essential prerequisite for this project.
The finished pages are transferred to the D-Share content management system for publication to iOS and Android apps, as well as to the Web. For Web, tablet and smartphone users, Tuttosport and Corriere dello Sport offer attractive subscriptions, valid from seven days up to one year.
WoodWing Enterprise and Elvis DAM are tightly integrated – editors and designers can access Elvis DAM without leaving Content Station. Images and text from wire agencies including Ansa, AFP, Reuters and AP are fed automatically into Elvis DAM. In addition, many freelancers send their content via FTP directly to the DAM system. Metadata control both production and administrative processes – they indicate, for example, whether an image has already been used in an issue. They also control the archiving of published issues and support the generation of fee reports for photographers. Both publications use Elvis DAM also for the preservation of decades of historical content.
"Newspapers are naturally tempted to look at local players, as Corriere dello Sport and Tuttosport initially did,” said Jeroen Sonnemans, Managing Director WoodWing Europe. “But in the end they chose WoodWing Enterpise and ElvisDAM – the strong integration and customization need as well as the digital asset management and the ambitious efficiency gain requirements were best tackled by our solutions. We are proud to have Corriere dello Sport and Tuttosport as our customers and congratulate them as well as their IT partner Media Progetti and thank our Solution Partners Computime and A&F Computersysteme AG with this success.”
About WoodWing Software
WoodWing says: “WoodWing Software develops and markets a premier, cost-efficient multi-channel publishing system, Enterprise, and the next generation digital asset management system, Elvis DAM. WoodWing’s solutions are aimed at magazine and newspaper publishers, corporate publishers, agencies and marketing departments to reach their goals for quality, economy and time-to-market.”
