Content Management Trims Online Fat

Reeling from declining ad revenue, news media companies are turning to sophisticated content management systems to cut costs and generate new revenue from their online information.

One news company, Knight Ridder, is even looking to capitalize on the industry's focus on content management by marketing its internally developed system to other large publishers. Knight Ridder, the nation's second largest newspaper publisher, plans to unveil a workflow and content management platform in November after it migrates its Real Cities Web portals and the Web sites for its 32 newspapers to the platform, says Rohn Jay Miller, senior vice president of product and technology at Knight Ridder Digital. He declined to identify the platform.

To consolidate and standardize their online operations, Knight Ridder and other media companies are creating custom applications that their staffs can use to create, manage, store and publish stories. Some large publishers have found the workflow features on off-the-shelf content management software to be too simplistic, since those systems were designed mostly for publishing reports on company Web sites, says Gartner Group research director Mark Gilbert.

The software works just fine for that purpose because it lets users post items on the Web without any HTML programming skills. They simply log onto a portal and post text into standard fields. The application then converts the information into HTML by applying a standardized style sheet, with the added benefit that all content coming out of the system has a uniform look and feel.

But daily news publishing requires that multiple reporters, print editors, online editors, photo editors and even IT staff have the ability to work on projects simultaneously. Customizing off-the-shelf software turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.

“We had one vendor that we brought in to one of our major newspapers, and when they were done, they had built almost 900 templates to publish one of our daily newspapers,” Knight Ridder's Miller says. “It was a good example of how a system that was not developed with an understanding of the very sophisticated requirements of newspaper publishing could be tremendously inefficient.”

Knight Ridder's platform is based on open standards like XML and Java 2 Enterprise Edition, and it uses a three-tier architecture incorporating BEA WebLogic and an Oracle database.

When the migration to the platform is complete, Knight Ridder will be able to share content across its network of newspapers and Real Cities portals. That's no small feat, considering that the current print and classified ad systems at the company's newspapers are based on dozens of proprietary platforms.

Knight Ridder hopes the content management effort will slash production costs and generate more online revenue, though Miller declined to provide specific cost or revenue figures. Centralizing content on one platform helps Knight Ridder generate new streams of ad revenue by packaging news from Knight Ridder's newspapers in speciality channels that appeal to specific groups of readers. For example, Knight Ridder has papers -- and in-depth local sports coverage -- for 28 of the 31 teams in the National Football League.

“We're just starting to look at what we might do to package that coverage into a specific channel for football fans,” Miller says.

Other publishers with smaller online operations have successfully customized off-the-shelf content management systems.

New York Times Digital, the online unit of New York Times Co., installed Open Market Inc.'s Content Centre this year as part of an infrastructure upgrade and site redesign. The effort helped improve site navigation and gave more prominent placement to revenue generators such as classified ads.

The upgrade has helped double traffic in the past year, says Karim Meddahi, vice president of systems and technology at New York Times Digital, which gets most of its content from the print edition of the Times and the Boston Globe. Despite the industrywide ad slump, the increased traffic -- along with sizable layoffs -- has brought a measure of financial stability to Times Digital.

The company's operating costs were down 44 percent in the second quarter of this year compared with 2000. Despite shrinking revenue, the company posted a net loss of $9.5 million in the six months ended July 1, compared with a loss of $17.9 million in the same period a year earlier.

Still, Times Digital, which accounts for only 2 percent of total company revenue, is promising it will post positive earnings for 2001 before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Having already cut about half of its staff -- down to 250 employees today, vs. 430 in November -- it's focusing on boosting revenue.

The unit, with 9 million registered users, already has launched a new real estate section and plans this fall to add one on travel. Each new section supports new forms of classified advertising.

Having retained IBM Global Services to develop common templates, Times Digital will find it much easier to add new content.

“What we tried to do with IBM was envision all the things we would need, so we have a template that takes care of databases and a template that takes care of flat content and so on,” says Times Digital CEO Martin Nisenholtz.

Times Digital won't disclose how much it spent on technology upgrades. Content Centre had to be integrated with inbound feeds from wire services and the print publishing systems used by the Times and Globe.

News stories are converted into XML as they flow into Content Centre. Web editors no longer have to do HTML coding to publish content, which is posted automatically from Content Centre to style sheets in the Web publishing system. Eliminating the HTML coding cut out the most time-consuming part of the process. “We're producing more copy today than we were a year ago when we had almost twice as many people,” Meddahi says.

Many online media operations are overhauling their content management systems to cut costs, says Dan O'Brien, an analyst at Forrester Research. “A piece of online content is only worth so much,” he says, “and every time a person has to touch that content, it loses value” because of the extra labor involved.

The goal, O'Brien says, is to create content once, store it in an XML format and use it in many places to maximize the return on investment.

That's what Weather.com intends to do with its new content management system, TeamSite from Interwoven, which was installed about six months ago. Weather.com feeds data and text from its proprietary forecasting software into TeamSite, which creates XML files that can be translated into other languages and posted on multilingual versions of the site.

Weather.com, the online subsidiary of The Weather Channel, is converting two of its Spanish and Portuguese sites that serve Latin America and Brazil to the new system, says Joe Fiveash, senior vice president of business development.

Each of the sites is based on different applications, so even though all of Weather.com's sites are hosted at a single data center, content had to be coded and posted to each separately. With TeamSite, all content is published automatically to each site.

Weather.com expects to derive new revenue from its growing international business, says CEO Debora Wilson, although she declines to give forecasts.

Another company that's repurposing news content for overseas markets is Reuters Health Information, a subsidiary of Reuters plc. Last month, Reuters Health began enhancing its English-language stories with Japanese annotation. Readers in Japan can get definitions of terms like “cardiology” by rolling a cursor over highlighted words in the text of the article.

Reuters is partnering with Sentius, which enhances the text with its RichLink software at a Globix data center in Santa Clara, Calif. The stories are transferred to Sentius by Reuters and returned within seconds, says Brett Conklin, manager of RichLink professional services at Sentius.

Reuters Health won't say how much it's paying Sentius for the RichLink ASP service, but the company expects to more than double its licenses for content on the corporate portals of Japanese pharmaceutical firms during the next 12 months, says Geoff Worton, vice president of worldwide sales at Reuters Health.

Another way online news outlets are seeking returns from content management is by combining it with personalization technology to deliver targeted content.

MyWashingtonPost, launched in June by Washington Post Newsweek Interactive (WPNI), the online arm of The Washington Post Co., collects data such as birthdates and ZIP codes whenever a user registers for the service. Based on that data, MyWashingtonPost delivers local weather and other information, and lets users customize the layout of their news pages.

The goal is to have users visit the site more often and stay longer. “People who customize the site spend about four times as much time there as people who don't,” says Eric Schvimmer, vice president of technology at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive.

Advertisers are willing to pay more to get their ads in front of viewers who have shown an interest in their products, Schvimmer says. WPNI collects information about what users click on and is determining how it can use this data to deliver targeted ads.

The site plans to take a closer look at the data it's already collecting and might consider using personalization technology, such as collaborative filtering software, if it can develop a business case, Schvimmer says. This kind of software has been used most successfully by Amazon.com, which compares customer buying patterns and offers prospective buyers books, tapes and other products that customers with similar tastes also purchased.

However, analysts say attempts at personalization have failed more often than not, and they don't expect newspapers to dive in until vendors can show they have a proven product that can deliver a return.

More efficient content management, on the other hand, is delivering payback. Like Knight Ridder, newspaper publisher Tribune Co. -- which owns 11 papers, including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun -- is consolidating its online operations around an internally developed content management system.

Tribune Interactive, the company's online unit, began developing the system, called Oxygen, in June 2000 when the Tribune acquired Times-Mirror.

Each of Tribune's 11 newspapers and many of its 22 broadcast properties had separate content management systems for their online news sites. Sharing content across all sites required double work from editors at each, says Mike Plonski, vice president and chief technology officer at Tribune Interactive.

Oxygen is in use at seven of the company's sites, including those for the Tribune, LA Times, Newsday and TV station WGN. Tribune Interactive hopes to migrate all of the company's sites to the platform by year's end.

Consolidating on a single publishing system lets Tribune use the same four-column format at every site. The standard layout lets the company sell to advertisers nationally, giving them the top slot on the sports or business section of each site, for instance. That wasn't feasible before, because it would have required coordination among site managers at each property.

In addition, Oxygen lets Tribune use its reporting staffs more efficiently. “We're also gaining efficiencies in technology because we're able to much more easily add enhancements to all properties at once,” Plonski says.