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El Mundo Deportivo launches digital editions with Méthode

Friday 14. August 2015 - Spain's oldest sports daily has created a high-performance news portal using EidosMedia's digital publishing platform.

Based in Barcelona, El Mundo Deportivo is a key source of sporting news in the region of Catalonia and nationwide. The paper’s publisher, Grupo Godó, has selected EidosMedia’s digital publishing platform Méthode in order to bring together their print and digital operations across the group’s portfolio. The print editions of El Mundo Deportivo entered production on the new platform at the end of last year and the paper’s online edition has now gone live using Méthode’s dedicated Web CMS.

“Delivering sports news online is a very time-critical process,” said Oscar Mateu, CIO at El Mundo Deportivo. “We have to get the latest news and results to our readers with the minimum delay. At the same time big events can drive massive peaks in visitor volumes in a short period of time. We have to be ready for that and our site has to be able to scale its response to meet visitor numbers.”

Méthode cuts time-to-market for news items by allowing a story to be published first in digital channels, while it is still being prepared for print publication. Using this ‘compound story’ approach, a news item can follow different publication paths while remaining a single editorial object. Pagination of stories for Web publication is fast and flexible using a drag-and-drop mechanism to place stories in front and section pages, with dynamic reformatting to fit the page slot. Advertising is catered for through several mechanisms, from preferred placement positions to sponsored blocks of stories associated with a named advertiser. This is also the first implementation of the Méthode Web CMS to make use of Active/Active architecture, allowing extremely efficient load-handling, while greatly facilitating maintenance and recovery operations.

The new site uses ‘responsive design’, with page sizes and layouts adjusting automatically to screen dimensions, allowing a single codebase to serve all sizes of reader devices from smartphones to desktop displays, eliminating the need for dedicated mobile editions.

In addition to providing the editorial environment and content store for the print and digital editions, Méthode is interfaced with the content delivery networks that allow the site to cope with the periodic high visitor volumes typical of sports news sites, as well as external sources of sports results which are imported and paginated automatically in the portal’s pages. Other important external feeds are the paper’s popular real-time, live-blogging commentaries from ongoing sports events, which Méthode allows to be seamlessly merged with comments and content from the newsroom.

“From live match commentary to results and analysis, the online edition El Mundo Deportivo offers a complete real-time sports panorama to Spanish fans,” said Cristina Bergese, EidosMedia delivery manager. “They are making excellent use of Méthode’s productivity-enhancing functions, as well as achieving important synergies between the print and digital editions.”

The Méthode platform is used by more than 110 staff in Mundo Deportivo’s Barcelona newsroom.

http://www.eidosmedia.com
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