Westfalen-Blatt makes rapid move to Méthode

Based in the city of Bielefeld in north-west Germany, the daily Westfalen-Blatt serves the surrounding Ostwestfalen region with 25 print editions, a Web edition and formats for mobile and tablet. A number of weekly magazine supplements are distributed together with the daily. The paper’s popular Sunday edition has a readership of around 500,000.

Westfalen-Blatt has recently completed the transfer of its operations to Eidosmedia’s digital publishing platform, Méthode. In the print channel, the 25 regional editions produced each day vary in both editorial and advertising content and the management of this complex edition structure has been greatly simplified by Méthode’s powerful multi-edition workspace. For the Web and mobile editions, common editorial content created in Méthode is automatically fed to external systems without the need for repurposing or manual conversion.

As well as handling the editorial workflow, Méthode also provides the paper’s new archive system which stores all assets and production data for the daily’s editions.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the Méthode deployment was the speed with which the new solution has been brought into production: “It was strategically important for us to upgrade our operations as soon as possible,” said Ulrich Windolph and André Best, both managing editors of Westfalen-Blatt. “And in just two months we were able to move all the daily and weekly publications to the new platform and and all our assets to the new archive.”

“I think this is something of a first in terms of speed for deployment of a multi-channel editorial and archive solution, “ said Holger Hofmann, managing director of Eidosmedia GmbH.“ It was possible through the use of best practices and the close involvement of the customer during the design and configuration of the solution.”

Another important feature of the Westfalen-Blatt project is the support for the latest NewsML-GL format - an XML-based protocol for the exchange of all media types from text to video and mixed packages of items. “The adoption of this increasingly popular standard allows Westfalen-Blatt to take in complex media despatches from news agencies in their new native format,” said Holger Hofmann.

The new Méthode platform serves around 130 users in the paper’s Bielefeld newsroom. It replaces the existing Alfa Linopress system.