One can see a drastic shift in the newspaper industry in developed countries with many moving to online publishing — a revolutionary change in the way news is produced and consumed. It is the online medium where publishers see their future. And if you talk of the Indian newspaper industry, it is not lagging behind either — they are well into the race with handsome investments made in building, developing and putting in place robust newsroom technologies for online publishing. You simply cannot miss out the enthusiasm and interest shown by the Indian newspaper publishers in publishing their news online.
Publishing news online may look very glamorous and interesting, but if a proper online publishing platform is not in place, it can be nothing short of a nightmare. The low entry barrier, outdated tools, declining ad revenue, and continuous change in search engine algorithms combined with the ever-shortening attention span of online audiences has forced many
online publishers to go out of business. “If you are using an old CMS or outdated tools, it can take around eight to nine hours to update your site. On the other hand, someone having modern technologies for the purpose can end up doing the same task three times as fast,” says Amitabha Sinha, IT head at Anandabazar Patrika.
Anandabazar Patrika has been using the Atex Web CMS since July-August 2013. Powered by Polopoly technology,
the Atex Web CMS is a platform that combines robust content management capabilities with audience-first features that help minimize business development lead times, support effortless cross-channel publishing, and enable rapid site creation.
Atex’s web CMS allows editors to edit images directly within the CMS and make real-time changes to the content on the web page. The time consuming task of changing elements,
content on the web page. The time consuming task of changing elements, such as headlines, navigation, images, textual content and more on the web page can be directly manipulated by editors by the drag-and-drop features of the software — something earlier done by the IT team writing code — at the cost of high lead times. Precisely speaking, editors are now their own designers, taking care of the look and feel of their web page to a large extent.
The ABP group is using the Atex Web CMS for their online publications – Anandabazar Patrika, The Telegraph and Eibela. Today, Anandabazar Patrika has a monthly online readership of about 45 lakh, while The Telegraph and Eibela have around 25 and 10 lakhs respectively. Going forward, ABP is planning to use the Atex Web CMS for all its five Bengali magazines – Anandamela, Unish-Kuri, Sananda, Anandalok and Desh.
Text mining and tagging
Sinha speaks of a very specific pain area faced by newspaper and magazine publishers — text mining and tagging. Searching and browsing is a lot like looking for data through a keyhole. Text mining and content enrichment, on the other hand, open the door to this data and allow it to be viewed and discovered in a much wider frame of reference. As a result of text mining, the content enrichment process helps to transform simple search into true knowledge management. This leads to greater time-on-site for website visitors, a more relevant search experience, and new opportunities for media companies to build revenue streams that monetize digital news and advertising content. Sinha says, “Atex’s Web CMS comes with a very advanced tagging functionality and we have been able to deliver relevant content to our target audience with much comfort and ease.
