The McClatchy Company Shifts Newspaper Websites to Vizrt’s Escenic Content Engine

As part of a corporate strategy to streamline its multichannel publishing workflow, The McClatchy Company, the third-largest newspaper publisher in the United States with leading digital operations in each of its markets, will move the websites of all of its daily newspapers to a common Escenic Content Engine platform. The project, which is being carried out by CCI, will result in one of the largest Escenic Content Engine installations in the world.

Escenic Content Engine is part of the Vizrt Online Suite and will replace a number of homegrown online content management systems and become an integrated part of the CCI NewsGate-based editorial publishing platform at McClatchy.

Christian A. Hendricks, vice president, interactive media for McClatchy, said moving to the Escenic Content Engine will provide faster development cycles and enhanced publishing tools.  Another important factor in the decision to adopt the Escenic Content Engine, Hendricks said, is the seamless integration between Escenic Content Engine and NewsGate.

“The NewsGate-Escenic Content Engine combination will further accelerate our move away from linear-based publishing workflows to continuous and concurrent publishing workflows. This will be beneficial both to our readers and to our advertisers,” Hendricks said. Currently, a number of McClatchy titles, including The Charlotte Observer, The Miami Herald and The Kansas City Star, are using the common NewsGate publishing platform. The implementation of the combined NewsGate- Escenic Content Engine solution will extend NewsGate to McClatchy’s remaining papers and replace a number of different front-end systems and homegrown online systems.

The move to the NewsGate-Escenic Content Engine is expected to improve editorial workflow and enhance McClatchy’s mobile publishing. The objective is to publish McClatchy content to multiple digital channels as a story develops and not as an additional step after the publishing cycle is completed.

Moving to NewsGate-Escenic Content Engine is also part of a long-term strategy to react quickly to new technology and market changes.

“Ultimately, we believe that systems have to be flexible and advanced enough to enable us to meet both today’s requirements and those that are going to come down the road,” Hendricks said. “With the NewsGate-Escenic Content Engine solution, we will be able to more easily integrate any future editorial tools required to publish to new channels.”

In the combined solution, NewsGate is the core editorial system for creating and editing content and metadata, whereas Escenic Content Engine handles the digital publishing component.

Dan Korsgaard, CEO of CCI, said: “It is greatly satisfying that The McClatchy Company has chosen the NewsGate-Escenic platform as a vehicle to pursue important strategic objectives.  The Escenic Content Engine project at McClatchy is proof of the value of the strong partnership between Vizrt and CCI and the tight integration between our respective solutions, Escenic Content Engine and NewsGate, that has resulted from this partnership.”

Martin Burkhalter, CEO of Vizrt, said: “We regard CCI as an important strategic partner in the market for multichannel publishing solutions for the news industry. Our long-standing collaboration has allowed us to develop a flexible and efficient publishing platform that combines two best-of-breed systems, and we are confident that CCI’s implementation of Escenic Content Engine at McClatchy will be successful.”

The first rollout of the combined publishing solution is scheduled for October 2013 at The Kansas City Star.

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