The San Francisco Chronicle is taking its existing Newscycle Circulation system into the cloud.

The flagship Hearst Communications business – which serves the San Francisco Bay area as well as northern and central California – sees immediate benefits from lower operational costs, Tier-4 data security and automatic upgrades.

It will also deliver a PCI compliant circulation based on industry standards, critical for the newspaper to remain compliant and current with the latest audited circulation rules and reporting through Alliance for Audited Media.

Newscycle says the decision was made for scalability and the proven and reliable technology the platform provides. “The San Francisco Chronicle’s information and applications will be protected in a tremendously redundant data centre – featuring massive bandwidth and the highest level of network availability in the news media industry,” says Americas sales vice president Randal Meske.

Chronicle vice president of information services Melorie Acevedo says the newspaper is a long-time circulation customer: “Newscycle’s cloud-hosting is a progressive move forward for us.

“We know it is stable, and able to handle our size of installation where others can’t. We have ever-changing and complex needs and we need a flexible and powerful system - and it should be easy to use to accomplish our goals.” With no need to support servers or handle hardware changes, “always having the latest version of the circulation software will be such a bonus for us,” she says.

Meske says the Chronicle is an “innovative and trailblazing newspaper” needing the flexibility and automatic upgrades having their circulation system in the cloud provides: “The scalability of the installation exploits the strength and power of the software.” 

Migrating to the cloud platform will also allow them to focus on exploring new revenue streams, and audience engagement and retention plans instead of responding to the constant needs of on-premises hardware and support.