Ottaway Newsrooms Standardize on Jazbox

By: E&P Staff Ottaway Newspapers, the community newspaper subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co., signed an agreement for groupwide installation of the Jazbox content-management system from MediaSpan's Harris & Baseview division, based in Melbourne, Fla.

For publishing to print, Web, and wireless devices, Jazboz uses an intuitive, database-centered structure able to conform to each paper's workflow, allowing for modifications to workflow in the midst of a production cycle. All components can be sourced from a single database and placed from a common set of writing, editing, and design tools. The system's new OnePlan feature helps plan and budget before stories are created.

For Ottaway's 15 dailies, 12 Sunday editions, 18 weeklies and numerous specialty publications and Web sites in nine states, 13 sites will operate from new IBM R6000 servers with built-in fail-safes.

Installation has begun with a model system at Ottaway headquarters, in based in Campbell Hall, N.Y. "We are replicating equipment and the publishing environment and using live data," Information Services Vice President Ron Regan said. Installations will continue for the next two years. Until now, the group has largely relied on a DewarView editorial software.

The Ottaway group has a total daily circulation of 437,000 and Sunday circulation of 488,000. Its largest paper, the Times Herald-Record, Middletown, N.Y. -- a tabloid circulating 81,000 copies daily -- has a approximately 126 users in its newsroom.