Reader's Digest

Know what you have, what you can reuse & resell

What was an impossible task -- became Possible, and what was unviable -- became Opportunity.

With its 80,000 readers, Reader’s Digest, is the number one selling consumer magazine in the United States. Publishing for more than 80 years, the company has amassed volumes of content – all housed in segregated repositories – with virtually no means of knowing what was contained in each. An opportunity arose for Reader’s Digest to expand its brand and its business in a joint venture with HowStuffWorks.com. In a feasibility study, a team of eight editorial members manually sifted through back issues, marking them with Post-Its®, then searching for the soft copy before finally converting it into the proper format. After two and a half weeks, the team managed to accrue only 28 assets. This was hardly a scalable solution and put the opportunity at risk.

Nstein's Digital Asset Management provides a complete census of all content...

To streamline and automate this process, Nstein implemented a media hub solution for Reader’s Digest that automatically ingested the content from more than 60 magazines and 40 books, semantically analyzed and enriched those pieces of content to make them more easy to reorganize. Post installation, the editorial team responsible to look for data for the HowStuffWorks.com project was able to scale back to four people – and in a matter of only one week was able to pull more than 200 assets – all in the proper format. This represented a more than 3500 percent productivity increase, but more importantly, Reader’s Digest was business enabled. What was an impossible task became possible, and what was unviable became opportunity.

...leading to new products creation

Additionally, it was only after all its assets were in the Media Hub that editors discovered that more than 60 percent of editorial pieces were 100 words or less. This discovery is fostering discussions of a mobile initiative, and plans are underway to continue examining how the Media Hub will assist in new business ventures.