Integrated news publishing - Technology and user experiences: Report of the IMU2 project

Fast networks and multipurpose terminals enable the integrated delivery and use of media content originally targeted at different media. The emerging multiple media portals accessed by a variety of terminals require semiand fully automatic procedures for managing the content. News services benefit from an integration of news sources that goes deeper than mere listings of links provided by many current Internet portals. This deep integration groups news articles from different sources and media into common and personal categories as well as interlinks the articles. The integrated media publishing system, IMU, developed in this work, automates parts of the news content acquirement and processing work of the portal web master. The IMU active proxy server extracts the metadata from news web sites and also – through video analyses – from television news broadcasts. This makes an automatic classification and linking of related articles and TV clips possible. The deeply integrated material is partitioned into news composites called channels, which can be personalised by the user. The automatically computed event and media calendar allows for a new type of integration of news and information about up-coming events. The news content is further utilised by setting up personalisation procedures for monitoring the business environment. Through the interfaces for PC, TV, WAP and MP3 terminals, the user accesses the same news content at work, at home in the living room and on the move. To balance the automatic procedures with journalistic judgement, we created web tools for human editors to control and override the automatic operations and for creating new content. The community feature enables groups to produce and share their own news and to discuss topics internally.