Tamedia is the largest media group in Switzerland, reaching two thirds of the country’s 8.5 million population through one of its 30+ titles. The organization’s IT team is building a future-proof infrastructure, as part of its strategy to thrive as print continues its slow and steady decline.
In this post, we will share a few insights from their journey in building what they have called the Tamedia Editorial Cloud.
Standardize, optimize, harmonize, and automate
From a technology perspective, the organization has centralized its IT capabilities under a Group CIO. This team is responsible for building solutions that can be scaled across titles and centralize what were previously channel-specific solutions. The goal is to build a system that will provide an easy and interconnected platform for their reporters and content creators to create and distribute great stories. During this process, the IT team has adopted the mantra; “standardize, optimize, harmonize, and automate.”
The biggest challenge is usability
The IT team’s goal is to ensure it is future-proof by building a cloud-based infrastructure. A key challenge is integrating digital and print tools on one platform. The team is investing in combining tools and building an elegant system. But while this is a challenge, the greatest challenge is a far more human issue - usability.
While a core component of Tamedia’s vision is a seamlessly integrated platform, ensuring that users do not need to jump across or log in to different places to work, they found that this alone is not enough. Unless a task is intuitive and fast, human nature will kick in and people will go to Google Docs or another route to do their thing.
Tamedia uses WoodWing Studio (previously known as WoodWing Enterprise Aurora) to ensure its writers can write stories for online and print in the same place, so writers can add the photos, videos, metadata, tagging, and so on that they need. But this is not enough. Considerations such as loading speed, rendering print previews quickly, and optimizing workflows for as few clicks as possible have also been important considerations to ensure the best user experience possible.
