This is where Chris Feola, Belo Interactive vice president of technology, stepped in. Feola, a former journalist who had switched to IT, focused on content management in building VelocIT. His one major goal: to build a system that was a simple process but had deep and rich data. First Feola conducted a massive inventory of all Belo?s content. This step helped the organization understand what type of content VelocIT would have to catalog, define and then distribute. Content pieces were then categorized by type, and each story was split into byline, headline and body?with equal importance given to each piece of content. The next step was to encapsulate the content with code that would allow it to interact with other content and also accept direction from any VelocIT user?s desktop. For example, a story that ran in the Dallas Morning News on Feb. 1, 2003, is broken down into pieces and labeled as: Headline A, on page B15, top right corner in a package with Story A and Photo A. VelocIT users can later reassemble that package, by picking and choosing which parts they wish to use.

The Roll-Out

VelocIT was first rolled out in December 1999 and cost about $60,000. Within 30 days of its launch, VelocIT was able to provide broad distribution of content and keyword searching on news content. VelocIT is built primarily out of legacy systems, including CText Advision, CCI and SII, and it publishes content from all these systems to the Web. Users access VelocIT using a Java Applet client on any PC running Windows and Internet Explorer. Data is stored and published on a single Oracle 8i repository. It took more than two years for full system rollout?the last site was added in March 2002?with a final bill of approximately $1.5 million. Annual maintenance costs hover around $10,000, but Feola says this is a bargain as they estimate a savings of $80,000 annually because they no longer have system support people at any of the sites or have to pay for hosting or support at any of the sites. Prior to VelocIT, sites had their own internal or external hosting and support.

At peak production, VelocIT can move several thousand stories in a course of an eight-hour shift, whereas before VelocIT, the most efficient way of moving stories was to manually cut and paste. According to Kirkham, only three or four stories from each section of a single day?s Dallas Morning News could run on DallasNews.com using the old method. Now she has time to post nearly 80 percent of the paper?s content, updating that content throughout the day. In addition, Kirkham receives automatic e-mails from newspaper editors when breaking news is available to post.