45 million assets from more than 140 years of newspaper history united in one system: CUE DAM (formerly DC-X) is now the content hub of all editorial departments at The Hindu for digital assets such as PDFs, photos, texts, and videos. The use of the CUE digital asset management system is an important step in the digital transformation journey that the Indian media house has embarked with the support of Stibo DX.
The digital asset management system CUE DAM is now the central storage location for The Hindu's editorial staff. This is where all editorial content is gathered and managed centrally for all channels in the cloud, location-independent. The fast search as well as the workflow and rights management capabilities in CUE DAM form the basis for a flexible and cross-editorial handling of all data.
Preserving valuable data
The first issue of The Hindu was published in 1878 as a weekly medium. Since 1889, it has been published daily. With a daily circulation of almost 1.5 million copies, The Hindu is the second largest English newspaper in India and is printed at 21 different locations. In addition to the English edition, a Tamil and a business edition are published daily. The Hindu has always stood for independent journalism and a balanced presentation of the news in India and abroad.
The Hindu’s editorial team emphasizes the importance of importing the historical newspaper archive, which dates back to 1881. Thanks to automatic text recognition with OCR, the scanned newspaper pages are now fully keyworded. Thus, content and stories from old issues before the digital era can be found quickly and easily through searches in CUE DAM.
"CUE DAM will be the central repository for all our digital assets which can be accessed seamlessly from within the CUE client itself by the editorial staff as they work on developing a story," explains Suresh Vijayaraghavan, Chief Technology Officer at The Hindu.
Images and more available on the go
The flexible input and output of data in CUE DAM is very important to the daily operations within each newsroom. New content can easily be delivered from outside the system, stored in a media-neutral way, and made available for further production systems. For this purpose, The Hindu has set up an upload website for photographers, which can be used to upload data to the system while on the go.
High performance, scalability, redundancy, and maximum data security are guaranteed thanks to the architecture of CUE DAM and Oracle's cloud environment. The digital asset management system combines various software solutions via several interfaces and thus offers an optimal basis for The Hindu's digital data management.
A strong partnership conquers all
The entire implementation of CUE DAM at The Hindu was run remotely. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, no face-to-face meetings took place. With intense communication and dedicated project teams on both sides, the project could be implemented successfully despite the challenging situation.
It lays the foundation for further cooperation between the two companies. The next step in The Hindu’s digital transformation journey is the introduction of the CUE Publishing Platform as their new editorial system.