The Economist drives its brand of news, comment and opinion with Picdar's Media Mogul
The Economist turns pictures, graphics and maps into valuable digital assets.
High volume, high speed. Exactly what The Economist needs.
High-speed wire services and modern newsgathering techniques mean that The Economist has significantly more incoming information to handle than in the past. The Economist looks for images that must depict exacting information; a named captain of industry standing in front of a particular building, or a logo visible in a high street of a specific town, for example. Searching for this level of detail presents its own issues.
Right image, in no time
As stories are written the graphics department begins the process of selecting appropriate images to support the copy. Picdar’s solution allows the team to be highly defined in the pre-selection of images. This is only possible because the system allows for free text searching, a feature not available in many other solutions in the market. If, for example, there is some uncertainty about the spelling of a person’s name, the system allows for searching by broader terms. Its speed of response is also critical in providing the picture desk with the maximum amount of time to judge and continuously review the images available.
Manage, archive and re-use in seconds
To help manage and work with the volume and variety of images, The Economist uses a suite of solutions from Picdar, comprising Picdar’s Media Mogul® DAM and Media Mogul Picture Desk products. Together, the solutions provide a digital asset management (DAM) solution for people in publishing environments who need to manage, archive and repurpose media files in and out of print and web media at high speed and in high volume from multiple sources.
Pictures from everywhere
The Economist receives a constant feed of pictures via satellite from three news wire photo services, in addition to photographs bought from most of the main picture agencies as well as many smaller, specialist sources, plus commissioning graphics and illustrations.
“We rarely own the copyright. That belongs to the artist and the original must be returned,” says Penny Garrett, head of graphics at The Economist. Picdar’s solution ensures that these rights are not abused.
Proving Picdar’s case
Finding an asset management solution that is able to support all the variations of file formats in the market was becoming an urgent requirement, and, to Garrett’s delight, it was clear that this was a problem that Picdar had solved.
IT is involved right from the start of any technology review process at The Economist and Picdar’s ability to adapt a new asset management system to fit within the technologies already installed on site was a major plus.
Said Garrett. “There was no real contest from the other vendors. The people at Picdar know what they are talking about, and were able to deliver a stable, scalable system that can be easily used in our environment. Picdar has an excellent development team who were able to meet some of our more specific requirements”.
Whatever platform suits you
For The Economist’s picture desk, one of the pre-requisites for any incoming picture solution was that it must interface with the Apple Macintosh platform. Mac remains the de facto platform for these types of environments as it is more robust and reliable than PCs for the type of high-speed image work that The Economist needs to do. But, given the mix of technologies at the newspaper, both PC and Mac platforms needed to be supported by any picture solution being introduced. Resolving issues
Garrett was impressed with the way that Picdar had been able to resolve many of the most critical issues for The Economist’s picture desk, which has to operate at high speed in a fast moving market. The fundamental requirements of searchability, compatible with the Macintosh and PC environment, great resilience and scalability, tried and tested with quick retrieval facilities, easy to use, and quick for new people to learn are all met by Picdar’s solutions.
Adapting to change
The Economist runs the Media Mogul DAM solution and Media Mogul Picture Desk on Sun Solaris with 144Gb mirrored disks, supporting the thousands of images the newspaper processes every week. Post publication, the solution also allows The Economist to archive past usage of images and graphics, invaluable when stories are followed up in future editions or repurposed for other areas of The Economist’s portfolio. Garrett and Dunlop are relieved that “Picdar stops us falling flat on our face.”
Without Picdar’s Media Mogul, The Economist would be hard pushed to deliver the best images to support its brand of news, comment and opinion into the hands of world leaders.
The ability to work with thousands of media files, across different standards at very high speed means that The Economist’s picture desk can concentrate on the core business of getting the image right rather than wrestling with the technology.
