CCI will integrate Escenic's Content Engine in a US installation which will be one of the world's largest.

The project will streamline multichannel publishing workflow at McClatchy Company, the country's third-largest newspaper publisher, and is part of a corporate strategy.

CCI will move websites of all of its daily newspapers to a common Content Engine platform, resulting in one of the largest installations in the world. Content Engine is part of Vizrt's online suite and will replace a number of homegrown online content management systems to become an integrated part of the CCI NewsGate-based editorial publishing platform at McClatchy.

Interactive media vice president Christian Hendricks says the move will provide faster development cycles and enhanced publishing tools, with seamless integration between Content Engine and NewsGate another important factor.

“The NewsGate-Escenic Content Engine combination will further accelerate our move away from linear-based publishing workflows to continuous and concurrent publishing workflows. This will be beneficial both to our readers and to our advertisers,” he says.

A number of McClatchy titles, including the Charlotte Observer, Miami Herald and Kansas City Star, are already using the common NewsGate platform. Implementation of the combined solution will extend NewsGate to the remaining papers and replace a number of different front-end systems and homegrown online systems.

Moving to NewsGate-Escenic Content Engine is also part of a long-term strategy to react quickly to new technology and market changes. “Ultimately, we believe that systems have to be flexible and advanced enough to enable us to meet both today’s requirements and those that are going to come down the road,” Hendricks says. “With the NewsGate-Escenic Content Engine solution, we will be able to more easily integrate any future editorial tools required to publish to new channels.”

In the combined solution, NewsGate will be the core editorial system for creating and editing content and metadata, with Escenic handling the digital publishing component.

CCI and Vizrt chief executives Dan Korsgaard and Martin Burkhalter have hailed the deal as proof of the value of their partnership.

 Our long-standing collaboration has allowed us to develop a flexible and efficient publishing platform that combines two best-of-breed systems, and we are confident that CCI's implementation of Escenic Content Engine at McClatchy will be successful."

The first rollout of the combined publishing solution is scheduled for October 2013 at The Kansas City Star.