The Washington Post is one of the most highly respected newspapers in the country. Built on a foundation of gutsy writing and thorough research, thousands of people rely on its news-breaking journalism and reader-friendly design to get their daily news.

A newspaper like this is the perfect example of an environment that requires extensive and meticulous asset management on a regular basis. Not only do all of The Post’s articles need to be stored and archived, they also must be searchable for historical or day-to-day research. And The Post’s vast asset management system must be accessible at all times to every writer, researcher and editor.

But this type of asset management has not always existed at The Post. And with somewhere in the neighborhood of two million assets, managers at the paper were faced with a serious challenge when they were trying to determine how best to organize the company’s diverse pool of digital information into a usable and easily accessible system.

Employees have needs, too

Anticipation of the Y2K bug finally inspired the managers at The Post to replace the old mainframe text archives with a sleeker, more efficient asset management system. After conducting extensive product research and surveying a large number of users–mostly reporters and researchers–the team developed a wish list for the paper’s new system.

"First and foremost, we wanted to build indexes to fit peoples’ needs," says Charles Olson, systems manager at The Post. "Our goals were to make sure the system included a Web browser interface and that common searches would work quickly." Because newspaper employees are constantly working on deadline, overall speed and efficiency were also major considerations.

The managers at The Post eventually decided on TEAMS asset management software from Washington, D.C.-based Artesia Technologies. They chose Artesia’s software because it is easy to use, has vast storage capabilities and is a Web-centered model, so the company’s employees would not have to install new software in order to use it.

The biggest challenge to implementing the new asset management system was that, up to this point, all of The Post’s assets were stored on a variety of sources in a number of different formats. Additionally, the newspaper’s writing and documentation styles had changed over the past 20 years, so files were oozing with inconsistencies in format. The assets needed to be standardized–an onerous task, to say the least. Scripts that were written to help clean up the data aided this process, and eventually, all of the files were standardized.

Olson and his crew decided not to dive right into the new system all at once; instead, the company installed it in layers. After a few weeks of testing, they tried out the first stage of the new system online with an internal focus group. "This test period gave us the opportunity to tweak what we could tweak," Olson says. Researchers were the first group to try out the system, followed by the reporters.

In search of truth

One of the main features that the staff at The Post was looking for in an asset management system was a useful search function. According to Tom Scott, project leader at Artesia, reporters and researchers can use the TEAMS asset management software to conduct searches in a variety of ways. Researchers, reporters and editors are able to do three different types of searches: a full-text or word search; a category search arranged in groups in the same way as seen on yahoo.com; or a Boolean search for an individual value such as "business section" or "sports section." "Additionally, these search modes can be combined to create a more powerful information-seeking device," Scott says. For example, researchers can search for results that are not less than 20 column inches long (these would be more likely to contain more information about the topic) or for stories with the keyword in the lead paragraph. Results are ranked by relevance.

Owing to the unique ways newspaper reporters and researchers sometimes need to search, the basic TEAMS package was supplemented with a few customized features. "Since the fields we use are so news-specific, we wanted the system to automatically include the meta data that goes with each story," Olson says. "These fields include keywords such as headline, byline, section and type of story (for example, analysis or interview)."

This turned out to be both a time- and money-saver for the company. Before the new asset management system was in place, a group of employees had to work each night to manually index the data pertaining to all of the stories that were published in the paper that day. Besides being labor-intensive, there was a great deal of room for error because the data being entered was open to interpretation and contained many arcane codes. "Depending on the way a person worked and thought, everyone used different keywords," Olson says. As a result, he says, "The archive was full of inconsistencies."

Now employees at The Post use TEAMS to automatically enter the keywords for each story, decreasing the time and effort it takes to search and to do research. "Before we used this system, reporters often requested basic subject searches from researchers," Olson says. "But now, reporters don’t have to rely on the researchers; they can easily conduct their own subject searches. This allows reporters to be more proactive and, in turn, frees up the researchers’ time to work on more complex news stories–which is what they were hired for in the first place."

Olson continues to receive more requests for log-ins to the systems, attesting to the usefulness of asset management for the paper. At this point, about 1,100 Washington Post employees use the system, primarily as a research and archive tool. This number includes staff members in the Washington, D.C., newsroom as well as domestic and foreign bureau employees. And there are many ways that The Post staff will be able to increase the usefulness of its asset management system. For example, the staff presently archives text files only. But Olson plans to add photos, graphics and other documents to the system in the near future.

With the help of the right asset management software package, the team at The Post has been able to compile its assets into what has become an in-house library of previously printed articles. This standardized and customized system makes it possible for the staffers to concentrate on reporting the facts instead of spending too much time searching for them within an antiquated system.

Dynise Balcavage lives and writes in Philadelphia.