'Midland Reporter-Telegram' Goes Live on Atex AdBase

By: E&P Staff Hearst Corp.'s 19,654-circulation Midland (Texas) Reporter-Telegram is live on AdBase, the Atex integrated advertising system.

The West Texas daily chose AdBase as a single system to handle all aspects of advertising, from ad order entry and rating to pagination, billing and financial reporting. The system also handles invoicing and accounts receivable for print and digital advertising.

AdBase replaces the Reporter-Telegram's legacy accounting, classified, retail, pagination, and production systems, while delivering new online capabilities through the AdBaseE browser-based order-entry and customer-service portal. The paper's mywesttexas.com Web site now offers customers a self-service option to place, style, schedule, price and review ads over the Internet. Ads can run on the Web site and/or in print. With limited promotion, mywesttexas.com has had 700 new visitors in the first week of operation.

"From an efficiency standpoint, we saw how Atex AdBase could really streamline our business practices and let us do a lot more packaged-type selling and then do up-selling on those packages," Publisher Dave Wedel said in a statement. "Online, we saw how people could upsell themselves."

With the paper's 15-year old advertising system, "we developed a ton of manual processes," said Classified Advertising Manager Brandi Price. "Our accounting and classified systems didn't talk at all, and when we passed information between the systems manually, lots of information was lost in translation."