EidosMedia Installs at WAZ, Makes M?thode Portal Server Facebook-Friendly

By: E&P Staff WAZ Media group, headquartered in Essen, Germany, will implement EidosMedia's M?thode publishing platform for its flagship daily, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and seven other titles. The installation will serve a combined editorial staff who number almost 1,000.

M?thode will "play a fundamental role in the new technical workflows we are building," WAZ Project Manager Markus Wendler said in a statement. "First the five North-Rhine Westfalia dailies will share one common M?thode platform chosen by the editorial teams. This approach allows significant synergies and productivity gains."

Among Europe's largest media groups, WAZ publishes 32 dailies, 18 weeklies, 176 special-interest and trade magazines, and 107 advertising papers (and prints and 400 customer magazines) in Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe. It owns 16 printing sites in Germany and abroad. The group also has stakes in German and Albanian television broadcasters.

Separately, EidosMedia announced that its M?thode Portal Server now allows newspapers to incorporate a number of Facebook-friendly features into their portals, including automatic log-in for Facebook users. Visitors already logged in to their Facebook accounts enter the news portal without entering their credentials and user data. Information from the Facebook profile can then be used to provide customized content to users.

Once in the news portal, users' comments on news articles can be shared to their Facebook pages with a single click, promoting more traffic for the portal.

"The M?thode Portal Server gives news organizations a range of ready-to-use Web 2.0 functionalities on a single platform," EidosMedia President Angelo Grampa said in a statement. "It lets news organizations take advantage of new developments without incurring internal R&D costs, and the Facebook integration is the latest addition to this range."

With interaction between news and social media "still in its early stages," Grampa added, "this is an area with considerable potential."