US publisher McClatchy has switched editorial production of its ‘Miami Herald’ to its new North Carolina data centre, a process IT vice president César Mendoza says was as easy as deciding to do it, acquiring the licenses and “going right head and do it”.

A full rollout for the ‘Miami Herald’ and ‘El Nuevo Herald’ was completed on March 28.

Mendoza says the data centre arrangement – based on CCI’s NewsGate technology – reduces the burden on the local paper by leveraging the infrastructure and the expertise of one central environment.

“We now have a modern multimedia platform that allows us to publish on multiple channels and allows us to implement a two-way integration between the print and online departments."

The ‘Herald’ can now integrate a number of workflows that were previously separate, such as budgeting and assignment, and will explore built-in support of resource and content sharing across the McClatchy newsrooms hosted in the data centre.

"Although it has been a project of some magnitude, it has been a fairly smooth one,” Mendoza says.

The McClatchy centre in Charlotte also hosts the ‘Charlotte Observer’ and ‘Raleigh News & Observer’ (North Carolina), and ‘Rock Hill Herald’, the ‘Sun News’ and ‘The State’ for South Carolina.

McClatchy news systems manager Neil Mara says the objective is to centralise and standardise systems. “The efficiency and cost effectiveness of the data centre model makes it much more affordable to move the individual news operations to a modern multichannel publishing platform, and it provides us with the possibility to share resources and content across newsrooms,” he says.

Adding new properties to the NewsGate centre has become a process almost exclusively run by a corporate McClatchy team in collaboration with the local organisation with minimal CCI assistance. "The timing is up to us. All we need to do is to agree we want to do it, acquire the necessary software licenses and then go right ahead and do it," says Mara.

McClatchy Company is the third largest newspaper company in the USA, publishing 30 daily newspapers, 43 non-dailies, and local websites in each of its markets.