Cyberpresse: Montréal dailies unite on single portal, aggressively address market needs

Nstein cms create flexibility: microsites can be whipped up in mere days

Gesca is a powerhouse Canadian publisher of French-speaking dailies. Cyberpresse, a news portal formed in 2001, was in search of tools that would allow it to showcase not only the quality of its content—aggregated large newspapers in the Gesca publishing family—but also to provide the online news agency the ability to generate up-to-the-minute, in-depth content on the fly. With seven properties, and an arthritic publishing system, Gesca wanted a content management solution that would allow it to aggressively innovate and meet audience -- and advertisers - needs. All that was missing was the robust, flexible and cost-efficient CMS solution to allow the news portal to deliver a product that added timeliness to its value proposition. Its CMS product was adequate for its implementation at the time, but the ongoing cost of hardware, software development and bandwidth was quickly making it less that optimal for Cyberpresse’s expanding needs. Further, the system was not agile enough to allow updates to breaking news, and creating speciality sites required a tremendous amount of IT input.

In his role as Gesca CTO, Matthieu Delorme approached the task of sourcing a new content management system by building a list of negotiable and non-negotiable features. Tops on his list were speed to go online and skil sets required. Past solutions required knowledge of an arcane language, Delorme wanted to make sure mainstream programming skills would suffice. Having worked with Nstein's text mining in the past, he built that functionality into the requirements doc.

Delorme implemented the system and tested the system with a new product Mon Volant -- an automotive site. The challenge was all that much greater because sales had found a sponsor who wanted the site live for an automotive show -- that was a mere six weeks away. The challenge was met, and the test passed. When the whole portal went onto the system, Cyberpresse saw a 20 percent increase in traffic, but more importantly, it saw a meteoric rise in audience engagement, for which Delorme credits the text mining.

The real success story may be how pleased the editorial team is. What used to take 20 minutes to publish a breaking story -- now only takes a minute.