OpenText announced that its Enterprise Information Management (EIM) solutions are the driving technology behind a unique collaborative effort involving newspaper publishers and sports news photography at the London 2012 Olympic Games. Images taken by national press photographers that are part of the National Olympic Photo Pool (NOPP) are being distributed through OpenText’s Content Hub for Publishers (CHP) to dozens of news media outlets within minutes of the action.
Using OpenText’s CHP solution hosted in the cloud, more than 50 top sports and news photographers capturing key moments of the 2012 London Olympic Games are able to transmit pictures from their privileged vantage points at Olympic venues to a single distribution point.
These images are then reviewed and edited by a team of skilled photo editors located in the main press centre in the Olympic park. OpenText CHP generates extended semantic metadata using text mining technology, adding valuable search tagging terms. Images are then released for publication, simultaneously being delivered not only to the contributing members of the NOPP, but also to a web portal which allows the 1,100 titles published by members of the Newspaper Society to access the content in real time. More than 700 images were distributed in this way during the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. On average, 650 images per day have been added since, and the total number is expected to top 15,000 by the end of the Games.
Mark Finch, Vice President, Customer Experience Management at OpenText said: “The National Olympic Photo Pool is a very worthwhile initiative to encourage British sporting and journalistic talents and we are thrilled to be part of it. London 2012 is an exciting time for everyone across Britain and we are glad to be able to bring together communities of photographers and publishers with our unique technology offerings.”
The NOPP was established, with OpenText support, in response to an initiative from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which was keen to see sports photography of the national newspapers made available more widely throughout the UK. The offer was taken up by the national newspaper members of the Newspaper Publishers Association (NPA) trade body which has been coordinating a number of Olympic photography projects.
Detailed planning for the NOPP began more than a year ago by Andrew Moger, an independent consultant to the NPA and former Picture Editor of The Times, and Mike Sharp, Group Development Executive at Trinity Mirror, supported by a select group of senior sports photographers from across the industry.
Andy Moger said, “We’re delighted to be working with OpenText to bring our vision to life, making British sports photography more accessible to the national and local press during the Olympics Games. By providing photographers with one central hub of high quality photographs we can really showcase the best in British sporting photography. It also allows those publications that are part of the scheme across the UK – large or small – with an opportunity to access photography to help support their Olympic coverage efforts, making sports more accessible to a new generation of journalists and readers.”
Mike Sharp, a digital imaging technology specialist, commented: “No blueprint existed for the practical aspects of collating, editing, and distributing images on this scale within the tight time constraints we set ourselves. We therefore needed to find a technology partner with a proven track record and a system which could meet the demands of newspaper publishing houses across the country, for both their print and online editions. OpenText was a natural choice having been in the industry for many years.”
