EAST PROVIDENCE, RI — Creative Circle Advertising Solutions Inc. and its sister company, Creative Circle Media Consulting Inc., have signed an agreement to partner with Advanced Technical Solutions, an Acton, Mass.-based provider of software for the newspaper industry.
The two companies recently announced their first two joint products: a new editorial content management system, or CMS, for newspapers that can manage both its print and online editions; and a merged system for managing print and Web classified ads. They first worked together in 2006 to create The Chicago Tribune’s Triblocal initiative for print and the Web.
The partnership was announced at the Editor & Publisher Interactive Conference.
The CMS merges Creative Circle’s two Web content systems, mediasiteQ and communityQ, with ATS’s MediaDesk program. The companies said the combined system would allow newspapers to manage user contributions, press releases, blogs, discussion forums, and multimedia offerings, in additional to editorial content.
“This system is driven by a Web-based CMS that handles both staff and user content and it has the capability to produce niche products, zoned sections or full newspaper print products very efficiently,” Ray Toothaker, founder of ATS, said in a statement. “And it can scale to any size newspaper.”
“We don’t think newspaper sites should be like bank sites,” added Bill Ostendorf, CEO of Creative Circle. “They should not look the same every day. Newspaper Web sites need to be alive and change with the news.” He added: “Static sites are death to newspapers.”
They also said the new system would allow for savings in IT and production costs, and also help publications manage increased user content as they reduce staff levels.
The other new initiative is the combined print and online classified ad system, which uses Creative Circle’s adQ: Intelligent system for Web classifieds and ATS’s AdVisor system for print classifieds. They said it would also be scalable for small and large newspapers alike.
“The newspaper industry has needed this for a long time,” Ostendorf said. “A truly Web-savvy, Web-driven classified system with all the features of a traditional mainframe system – and all for a fraction of the cost.”
Creative Circle Media Consulting was founded 25 years ago, with its Web-focused sister company Creative Circle Advertising Solutions founded in 2004. The latter business has received $750,000 in investments from the quasi-state Slater Technology Fund and raised roughly $1 million in two funding rounds that closed in April 2007.
Creative Circle also redesigned the print edition of Providence Business News and continues to serve as the Web developer for PBN.com.
Additional information is available at adqic.com.
By PBN Staff
May 20, 2009
source: pbn.com