Le Point goes digital with 4D Concept
THE CHALLENGE
In 2013, Le Point magazine wanted to renovate its production and publishing management tools in order to adapt its production to the digital transformation that the press sector was undergoing.
As a first step, Le Point wanted to replace its existing publishing back office, which was becoming obsolete and posed problems in terms of maintenance and adding features. The magazine was was slow in accessing its internal resources: regular data archiving made the resources unavailable for business use.
In a second step, Le Point wanted to automatically categorize and enrich information from different sources: images and articles from print feeds, regional and national daily and weekly newspapers, existing research archives, AFP, etc. The different origins of the data did not help the search for information. Changes in data and in quantity over time required an adaptive technology and publishing system.
These needs concerned two professions in the publishing chain of the magazine: journalists and researchers. An innovative cross-media publishing process was necessary to help to better integrate them.
THE SOLUTION
4D Concept met the different needs of the magazine by suggesting a customized, innovative solution that was suitable to the problems of faced by cross-media distribution.
The proposed solution consisted in associating a system that was both authorial and editorial and that managed the content editing, publishing workflow and production follow-up with a flow aggregation module to bring together information from different sources, enrich it and allow its direct use by researchers and journalists. This solution was based on MarkLogic technology, a native XML database that met multichannel publishing, volumetric and durability constraints.
THE BENEFITS
4D Concept solutions brought many benefits to journalists and researchers at Le Point magazine. The publishing teams of the magazine gained in response time when writing an article and enhancing it with the media. The system also facilitated research related to a theme which led to unparalleled time-saving by researchers. They were able to build a very rich database supporting a large amount of different data, connected to Wikidata and Geonames. The wealth of information was now brought under control and organized within the same system that allowed them to react and offer articles that were richly illustrated, indexed and published quickly. In short, Le Point’s investment in the XMS publishing system was the correct choice, facilitating exchanges between the various actors in the publishing chain.
