New Zealand tabloid daily the ‘Gisborne Herald’ will switch to an ‘audience first’ business model with the implementation of Digital Technology’s editorial and advertising systems.

Despite a string of firsts – including being the country’s first tabloid daily – its use of a number of older editorial and advertising systems had prevented it from transforming into a new digital direction. the new systems will enable it to deliver digital news and advertising content to a more targeted audience, expanding channels across a variety of digital formats.

Managing director Michael Muir says the new “cohesive digital solutions” will enable them to achieve current strategic goals and allow future expansion of the newspaper: “DTI ContentPublisher provides us creative flexibility to build engaging customer experiences on every channel, while DTI Advertising extends our digital ad sales capabilities,” he says.

“The architecture creates new opportunities for us to sell advertising across the newspaper and into website sales. We needed the tools both solutions provide to increase revenue and be the go-to leaders in our media market.”

Using the new system, the ‘Gisborne Herald’ plans to unify their news team and content, and expand their digital offerings by increasing audience engagement to their print, web, and mobile platforms. ContentPublisher provides a flexible way of pushing up-to-the-minute news to the web, rather than going through a number of manual interventions.

David Page, managing director of Digital Technology Asia Pacific says the new digital solution will empower the newspaper to distribute content in a variety of mediums – including print, web, tablet and mobile – and expand their web presence.

“The new workflow and integrated software components will also provide many new benefits to the company and will enable the ‘Gisborne Herald’ to grow their new solution over the coming years to incorporate many additional features and help expand their revenue,” he says.

ContentPublisher uses a high performance, multidimensional database to serve multimedia content directly to any web-enabled device, while the browser-based DTI Advertising is designed for multichannel media companies that sell package buys for all types of ads and marketing campaigns. It handles booking, creating, and publishing all forms of digital and print advertising, and includes an accounts receivable package.