KnowledgeView has successfully completed in December 2006 the installation of an integrated news management, editorial production and archiving system for the Al-Watan Qatar newspaper, published by Dar Al Watan Press Establishment. The successful completion of this installation has transformed editorial production in All-Watan to digital workflow with immediate benefits greatly improved editorial efficiency and better editorial quality.

Al-Watan Qatar is one of the leading newspapers in Qatar, established since 1995 with over 120 journalists and reporters for its offices in Qatar. Al-Watan's chairman is Hamad bin Sahim al Thani, a member of the royal family.

The intergeneration and editorial training tasks were done in cooperation with Al-Watan IT and editorial production teams. The systems installed included RAPID Browser 1.4.5 operating on top on MySQL, RAPID Acquisition and RAPID Archive 1.3 operating on top of the TEXTML server from IxiaSoft. RAPID Browser was integrated with Adobe InCopy authoring software, with text finally exported to Quark Xpress 6.5. The system benefits from real-time replication and backup facilities.

Mr Hassan Younes, Editorial Director for Dar Al Watan Press Establishment stated that he is pleased with the complete installation of KnowledgeView's RAPID Browser and RAPID Archive systems for Al Watan, and he thinks that the new systems are of great help for the newspaper workflow".

Editorial workflow used by Al-Watan

Editors use RAPID Browser to view news items acquired from News agencies text and photos, correspondents emails, remote offices, RSS, local text and photos. They create their items, using Adobe InCopy integrated with RAPID Browser, or get their items sent from the typesetters, then after designing the page with the production department, send their items with the changes to proofreaders, who correct and send them to the layout department. The layout people take the stories from folders divided by section and page number, and use Quark to produce the paper. KnowledgeView have discussed with Al-Watan production team the possibility of using Adobe InDesign for page production in order to take advantage of the tight integration and LiveEdit facilities of InCopy and InDesign.

Photos are sent to the production department, using RAPID Browser's workflow, whose members, after designing the page, redirect the photos for retouching to the photo editing department, which in their turn get sent to layout. Editors create news packages of text and photos using RAPID Browser's 'relate' actions, and can send or copy these packages all the way to final page production.

Items sent from the proofreaders to the layout department, get copied in the background to a pre-archive database collection, where they are retrieved by the archivists, classified and exported to RAPID Archive. The archivists have the facility to edit the archived items' meta-data, benefiting from RAPID Archive's support for multiple thesauri and authority lists such as IPTC, regions, personalities and institutions. Editors have access to the TEXTML archive search from within RAPID Browser, and can export back to RAPID Browser items needed for re-use.

News feeds used by Al-Watan were: AFP Arabic, RSS content, QNA Arabic, SPA Arabic, Reuters Arabic, Reuters Photos, Reuters Graphics, RSS news, and full-body feeds from PR Newswire, GNN Network and CCN Matthews.

KnowledgeView and Al-Watan will continue to work together to ensure better implementation of the system for editors and to advance towards adoption of the methods of the convergent newsrooms for publishing to paper, Web and mobile.