International financial daily the ‘Wall Street Journal’ – part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation – has started the systems transition which will see global print and online editions produced on EidosMedia’s Méthode platform by November. US domestic, Europe and Asia print editions and online output for the domestic and international markets switches to the new system as part of a strategy to create a 24/7 integrated editorial operation, rolling from time zone to time zone as the day progresses. WSJ deputy managing editor Jim Pensiero says adoption of Méthode was an enabling step in a complete reengineering of newsroom processes: “It is giving us a degree of visibility and control over our workflow which has significantly increased our agility and flexibility – especially in dealing with breaking news stories.” The implementation uses a new ‘compound story’ function, accommodating variants in headlines, text and picture content for different channels. In addition, the story can follow different workflow paths and be worked on by more than one person at a time – allowing it to be taken through to publication by online editors while still being prepared for print. EidosMedia project manager Julien Febvre says the WSJ operation uses this feature to the maximum: “There are points in the workflow when as many as four people can be working on a story simultaneously in several different editions,” he says. The scale and complexity of the ‘Wall Street Journal’ operation, plus the critical time-to-market factors operating in financial reporting, made this one of the most challenging projects the developer has undertaken. The Méthode platform serves around 900 users distributed between newsrooms in the US, Europe and Asia. Other Dow Jones editorial operations scheduled to be transferred to Méthode include the magazine ‘Barron’s’ and its associated portal, the website ‘MarketWatch.com’ and the Dow Jones newswire service. Méthode is based on XML, CSS and SVG standards, object-oriented technology and distributed, multi-tier architecture to provide an integrated workspace in which virtual teams can draw on multiple sources to create content for distribution via multiple publication routes.