New K4 Customers Incorporate Multiple Titles, Print and Online Content

Jenkintown, PA (December 12, 2007) – Managing Editor Inc. (MEI), an Adobe Systems portfolio company and a leading provider of software solutions for the publishing industry, today announced several new SoftCare K4 Publishing System installations in different markets. The newest K4 sites include the widely read and recognized Parade Magazine, Congressional Quarterly’s prestigious titles, and 60 titles published by Advanstar Communications Inc. MEI is the exclusive distributor of K4 in the Americas.

MEI also announced new installations at major university newspapers including the University of Virginia’s Cavalier Daily and Northwestern University’s Daily Northwestern, expanding the software’s reach across North America and showcasing its ability to function in different publishing environments.

“Through these installations, K4 is shaping the way a huge audience receives its news and information every day,” said Dennis McGuire, CEO and president of MEI. “This growth enhances the scale of K4’s influence as the most popular and powerful editorial system available.”

Parade Magazine
The most widely read magazine in America, Parade has a circulation of 32 million and is distributed by more than 400 Sunday newspapers, including The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, New York Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post.

Parade is owned by Advance Magazine Group, who originally purchased K4 in 2005 for all of its magazine properties, including Condé Nast Publications, Fairchild Publications and the Golf Digest companies. It is among the first Advance titles to install K4 Version 5.8 and Adobe Creative Suite 3. The publisher expects to complete its upgrade roll-out of CS3 and K4 5.8 to all the other titles by March 2008.

Congressional Quarterly
Congressional Quarterly Inc., a leading source of political journalism since 1945 with the largest news team covering Capitol Hill, has also installed K4. CQ is using the system to manage the print and online production of its well-known CQ Weekly magazine, as well as its legislative news daily, CQ Today.

CQ has a unique K4 setup that allows writers to submit content via InCopy connections from remote locations on Capitol Hill. Back at the office, editors access that information and begin the process of editing and designing print pages.

K4 also feeds CQ’s Unified Data Repository (UDR), a massive database that contains all of the publisher’s content stored in XML. The UDR, a content-management hub that receives CQ authored stories from K4, is the central repository through which all CQ electronic publications are produced. This means that CQ’s K4 system feeds news to two print publications, nine Web sites and countless other data services.

“Congressional Quarterly’s unique K4 setup keeps their production fluid, fast and ahead of their competition,” said George Mahlberg, Editorial Systems Project Manager at MEI. “They were able to adapt very quickly from their legacy system. The transition was very smooth.”

Advanstar Communications
Advanstar Communications Inc., a leading worldwide media company providing integrated marketing solutions for the healthcare, fashion and power sports industries, also recently purchased K4 for implementation across a total of 60 titles. The company currently produces 67 publications and directories and 150 electronic publications and Web sites, as well as educational and direct-marketing products and services. Before the end of the year, Advanstar will have K4 installations in New Jersey, New York, California, Kansas, Illinois and Ohio. Advanstar titles such as Pharmaceutical Executive and Managed Healthcare Executive have already completed multi-issue implementations of K4.

Advanstar first started migrating to an Adobe-based workflow in 2006. Eventually, the publisher decided to incorporate K4 as well, in order to take advantage of the benefits of a database-driven solution, including control of standards and rights management, required metadata, use across a distributed environment, transparency of the workflow itself, and automation of routine tasks.

MEI is also providing custom development that will allow Advanstar to use K4 to format articles for XML conversion that is compatible with its content management system. Using K4’s XML Exporter module, the publisher will be able to automate a process that previously required manual, outsourced work.

Carl Bishop, Project Manager at Advanstar, said good planning and establishing standards for design and style have made the installation a smooth one.

“The critical success factors have been good training, communication and template building assistance from a designer in advance of the training,” he said.

University Dailies
K4 has also seen increased growth in the college newspaper market, including The Cavalier Daily, the independent daily newspaper at the University of Virginia. The paper has a print circulation of 10,000 distributed on campus and in the surrounding Charlottesville, Va., area; it also publishes a daily online edition with expanded and enhanced content. With a staff of more than 150 students and a history of producing award-winning content, The Cavalier Daily is an entirely student-run, non-profit organization with an operating budget based solely on advertising.

Another award-winning college paper to step up to K4 is Northwestern University’s Daily Northwestern. The Daily Northwestern is published Monday through Friday during the school year and is run entirely by undergraduates, many of who are students at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Like The Cavalier Daily, The Daily Northwestern is independent of the university and supported entirely by advertisers. Current circulation is 7,000, representing the only daily publication for both Northwestern University and the city of Evanston, Ill.

The Cavalier Daily and The Daily Northwestern round out an impressive list of college papers currently using K4, including the Duke Chronicle, Yale Daily News, Columbia Daily Spectator, the University of Pennsylvania’s Daily Pennsylvanian, the Indiana Daily Student, the Northern Star at Northern Illinois University, Texas Tech’s Daily Toreador, the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois and UCLA’s Daily Bruin.

About K4
The SoftCare K4 Publishing System, integrated with Adobe InDesign and InCopy, allows publishing professionals to manage design and editorial workflow and to control the entire production process. With its multi-level security controls, open SQL architecture and robust customization options, K4 supports a transparent and secure production workflow for individual workgroups or entire publishing enterprises. K4 is a product of SoftCare GmbH of Hamburg, Germany. With more than 240 systems installed in publishing houses, agencies and magazines worldwide, K4 has already revolutionized the editorial workflow for more than 13,300 users. MEI is the exclusive distributor of K4 in the Americas, with more than 100 installations managing more than 7,500 users.

Managing Editor Inc.
610 Old York Road, Suite 250
Jenkintown, PA 19046

Media contact:
Paul Weinstein
pweinstein@maned.com
215-886-5662, x278

About MEI
Managing Editor Inc. is an industry leader in the development of quality, proven software solutions for the evolving publishing industry. The Page Director® Series of Advertising and Classified Layout Systems, K4 Publishing System, AdsUp® order-entry and CRM system, Integrated Production Suite (IPS), Wave2 self-serve advertising platform and IPS AdTrac deliver automated pagination, workflow, customer relations and digital asset management solutions to newspaper and magazine publishers, as well as to other print and electronic publishing markets. MEI is a portfolio company of Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE), and has twice been named a laureate of the Computerworld Smithsonian Collections. Additional information regarding MEI’s products and services can be found on the company’s Web site at http://www.maned.com.

This release was published on openPR.