Online Journalism News

Northcliffe to introduce geo-tagging and adopt new web-publishing platform across news sites

Northcliffe Media is to introduce technology to allow the addition of geographical information to online news stories.

The regional publisher has developing an enhancement of Tera, its existing group-wide content management system (CMS), to enable geo-tagging across the group's 'Thisis' websites.

The addition of geographical data through the new 'ArticlesPlus' enhancement is intended to make accessing editorial and classified content easier for the user, Robert Hardie, Northcliffe Media content strategy director told Journalism.co.uk, rather than as a tool for developing new editorial products.

The revamped CMS will also enable filing of news stories to web and newspaper from a single interface.

To improve search engine optimisation (SEO) further Northcliffe is also adopting a new web-publishing system across its range of websites.

"More than anything else, going forward, search is massively important to us," Hardie said.

"Because of the vagaries of our technology currently we actually perform badly on search, so our growth of unique users and page views has been in spite of our ability with search rather than because of it.

"We will replace all the technology that drives our sites in March this year, there are two key reasons for doing it, first is search and the second is stability, because if you have a site that is unstable then it doesn't matter how well the sites doing on search people won't use it."

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