In the last five years, the working and the outcomes of newsrooms have changed radically. Contentcreated by news gatherers, illustrators, photographers, designers and editors now flows out not only in the print format but through multiple web and mobile devices as well. The newsrooms have quickly adapted to new enabling software that enhances the fire power and tools for the new age journalist. Keeping pace with the needs of multi-format or cross media publishing, newsroom software has become more empowering with a single content management system (CMS) and workflow driving mobile to print operations.
Mobile brings scalability
Over the years we have written about numerous editorial and publishing systems and most recently about CMS and workflow providers such as Atex, CCI Europe and ppi Media. We recently spoke to Summit Information Technologies, a pioneering Indian company whose multilingual editorial systems we have written about several times. Summit’s cross media newsroom solution Liberty 6 has gone live in four national and international media organizations this year.
Unlike India’s giant software companies in the banking and telecom sector like TCS, Infosys, Cognizant and Wipro, the publishing software companies are generally low profile and target a single niche vertical. However all that could change with the advent of mobile technologies and the wide application of content-driven systems in retail, consumer services and several other segments. Thus the scope of high scalability suddenly increases for newsroom software companies venturing into the mobile technology development space.
The decades-old Gurgaon-based Summit Information Technologies recently introduced its Liberty 6 CMS
and workflow management system for integrated newsrooms. The software address print as well as digital media on multiple desktop and mobile devices. Liberty’s external interface accepts multi-platform news gathering as well. Based on a web server, reporters from the field can file stories and pictures using any device with the browser-based CMS.
Advantage language newspapers
Rakesh Kapoor, managing director of Summit and its sister unit Process Nine that specifically handles mobile technologies, says, “The early adopters for our software are usually the international language and Indian language newspapers due to our advanced language adaptation software which sorts out the nitty-gritty of linguistic and non-Roman script diversities and the last mile delivery of our software that builds on the Unicode system.”
The first users of Liberty software have been the second largest Thai language paper the Daily News, the Tamil daily Dinamalar based in South India and the largest circulation Sri Lankan Tamil language daily Virakesari published by Express
Newspapers, Ceylon. Maharashtra Times of the Bennett Coleman group and Associated Newspapers or ANCL of Sri Lanka with half a dozen publications are also early adopters. Published from Bangkok, Daily News uses Liberty 6.0 and publishes to print, web and mobile phones while also using the software to manage
content for its TV Channel. Dinamalar published from many centres in Tamil Nadu has used Summit’s NewsPro editorial workflow solution for over a decade and has also gone live with Summit 6.0 for its print, web and mobile editions.
Mobile first or web first
What sets Liberty apart is its capability to integrate multiple operating systems and professional page making software such as Adobe InDesign and Quark Xpress as well as a variety of languages and scripts. Being modular and friendly to add-ons or plug-ins Summit’s software is flexible to customer needs and implementation strategies. It can be customized either for print and web; or print, web and mobile; or print, web, mobile and TV. The Hindi daily Amar Ujala, which currently uses Summit’s NewsPro for print, is now upgrading to the Liberty platform. Marathi daily Maharashtra Times and ANCL that went live with Liberty 5.0 with Unicode and InDesign are also upgrading to Version 6.
Summit also provides ANCL an internet-based eBooking solution for last minute advertisements for its Daily
News, Sunday Observer, Silumina,
Dinamina, and other publications where customers and agents from remote centres can book classified ads for print, web and mobile. “We are going to see an age of mobile first publishing where the reader would want more pictures and less text,” says Kapoor. “We have created the software to select, edit and customize news to cater to any eventuality with full flexibility either for web first or mobile first — on demand. The Liberty software allows its users to perform all the editorial functions including pagination from any remote location through web browsers in any language.”
Mobile app for reporting
“Ideally, what happened in Varanasi on the days before the Indian election cannot be told with the use of just two pictures,” says Kapoor. “The print edition could go with two pictures and a thousand words, but your photographer would have taken a hundred pictures and several videos. So the web-based edition goes with the full text which could be more than thousand words and say twenty pictures and a few videos but it is the mobile version that goes first on air with short text and maximum pictures that can be uploaded instantly. Liberty permits multiple versions of the story with a single CMS for an integrated newsroom with a seamless workflow.”
The Liberty Reporter App enables the story to be written on any device and in any language irrespective of the capability of the smartphone or tablet and also integrates the phone’s camera to the story so that you can select the photos you want to upload with the story. The entire Liberty workflow, which is web-based and on the Amazon cloud can be accessed through any tablet or through smart phones. Hindi daily Amar Ujala which uses Summit’s editorial and ad software is upgrading to Liberty 6 and it has already bought 60 to 70 copies of the Liberty Reporter App for use from the field.
