The Hindu continues upgradation drive
Encouraged with growing online penetration and an emerging mobile market in India, The Hindu adopts an online-first publishing strategy on a CCI NewsGate platform.
By implementing CCI NewsGate, including the digital publishing engine from Escenic, the innovative Chennai-based news publisher Kasturi & Sons Ltd is now set to enlarge the scope of their online offerings.
Having online presence since 1995, The Hindu, a daily newspaper from the stable of Kasturi & Sons Ltd, is a first mover in online publishing in India. With an online market on the rise, particularly in the mobile segment, The Hindu decided that now was the time to replace their legacy online publishing system and implement a modern multi-channel publishing solution. “Until very recently, we had felt that it was not worthwhile investing too much money in the online space, so our offerings have been very much under the print umbrella. With the implementation of NewsGate, we have established an infrastructure allowing us to efficiently meet the demands in the online market,” commented K Balaji, director of The Hindu Group.
When The Hindu launched a redesigned website on the new platform on August 15, 2009, daily page views almost tripled. The Hindu has since maintained these traffic numbers with a dynamic and continuously updated website. The move to NewsGate allows a one-system platform enabling extensive collaboration between editorial staff from print and online. For The Hindu, this means the ability to provide more interactivity and more quality multimedia content on their websites, a key part of the overall business strategy.
“We wanted to set up an infrastructure allowing us to create quality content for online publication as this is a prerequisite if one is considering a business model where one charges for content on the website. In that respect, the implementation of NewsGate is an important strategic decision,” stated Balaji, adding, “The tight integration between print and online and the concept of the Story Folder as a single-place repository for all material relating to a story are some of the key features that made The Hindu choose NewsGate.
To meet the specific requirements in projects, including a complete online system implementation, CCI’s project and support organization, has been expanded with a unit fully focused on online and mobile publishing. In addition, new methods of development and implementation inspired by the agile mindset have been adopted. Dan Korsgaard, CEO of CCI, said, “It gives us great pride to be able to deliver a solution to a news publisher as innovative and enterprising as The Hindu.”
The new The Hindu website was built in close collaboration between CCI consultants and The Hindu web developers, who were trained in using and customizing the Escenic system in parallel with the actual development. With a team of developers, The Hindu is currently expanding the services offered by the new website. Rollout of all digital and print products is expected to be completed before the end of April 2010.
CCI, part of the Stibo Group, is one of the leading providers of editorial and advertising solutions for multimedia news environments including stand-alone online solutions. Their CCI AdDesk, CCI NewsGate and CCI NewsDesk products are among the most robust and powerful systems in the industry, and are implemented in news organizations across five continents. The company provides the platform to support evolving needs of the world´s largest news organizations, and scalable solutions to help growing media brands optimize their business strategies.
