Press Release
Olive Software Helps The City Paper in Nashville Shift Towards Paperless Future of Newspaper Publishing
Publisher Helps Local Advertisers Reach New Online Readers Through Electronic Edition, Saves Resources and Reduces Paper Consumption
Santa Clara, California, November 13, 2007 – Although newspapers still make up the largest category of overall advertising expenditures in the U.S., a new study shows that advertisers are steadily shifting money towards Internet advertising as readers increasingly go online for information. The City Paper in Nashville, Tennessee is capitalizing on this trend by using Olive Software’s ActivePaper Daily to deliver an electronic edition to their growing Internet readership. The seven year-old paper is a free daily that covers local community news in depth, rather than simply repurposing light news, celebrity news, or using wire copy. Approximately 90% of the content is locally generated and because of this local focus, the paper’s readership continues to grow.
“We are a free daily in the mold of European commuter dailies, but since Nashvillians don’t typically commute via train or the bus, we distribute the paper in office buildings rather than commuter stations. Because of this, our readers are more likely to read The City Paper at their desks in the morning. And what we found was that increasingly more of them were actually reading the paper online. Because of this online readership growth and the expense of printing and delivering the paper each and every day, we are slowly evolving the paper from a print product to a primarily digital product,” said Albie Del Favero, Publisher at The City Paper. “There are lots of places to go to get national news, but there are very few places to get in-depth local news,” continued Del Favero. “That’s why we remain focused on providing local, and not national or international news.
Olive ActivePaper Daily provides functionality that PDF and straight HTML electronic editions cannot match. Readers can access a publication in its original format anywhere, anytime—with just a Web browser—and without additional client software. In addition, the underlying XML-based format means web users can search the full text of every article, ad, and image caption. Publishers can reuse and repurpose their content inside Olive into new applications with new business models, such as digital archives and mobile subscriptions, to increase revenues using their existing content assets.
“Forward thinking publishers can no longer view themselves solely as providers of magazine or newspaper publications, but rather as providers of rich, contextual, value-add information that has applicability in multiple formats, devices, and web properties. Olive Software is helping companies easily and cost-effectively make the most of their content and take advantage of the power of evolving, dynamic digital world,” said Yuval Rachmilevitz, President and CEO of Olive Software.
Connecting readers and advertisers in a new way
According to figures compiled by the Newspaper Association of America,
online advertising at newspapers continued to grow in the second quarter
of 2007, rising 19.3% to $795.7 million, while print-only advertising
at newspapers fell 10.2% to $10.5 billion in the second quarter, the fifth
consecutive quarter of decline.
“The electronic edition lets The City Paper – and its advertisers reach more readers. National advertisers are already moving online, but many local area advertisers have yet to develop an online ad presence. With our electronic edition, our local advertisers can reach out in new ways and readers can immediately interact with them,” said The City Paper’s Del Favero.
ActivePaper allows The City Paper to redefine traditional markets for their information and the RSS capabilities allow them to push news from their electronic edition to the paper’s HTML site, which the paper uses for their blogs, to report breaking news, special features, and event listings.
“Before we used Olive, there was no way our print advertisers were exposed to our online readers and we were short-changing our advertisers. But with Olive ActivePaper, readers view ads and can click through to advertisers websites. It’s a win-win situation: we save a lot of money on printing and our print advertisers still get exposure to the eyeballs,” said Del Favero. “Furthermore, we sell the combined readership of both our print product and the e-paper, rather than strictly circulation numbers.”
Greening up news delivery
The electronic edition also saves considerable resources, allowing The
City Paper to save money not only on printing costs, but also reducing
paper use and gasoline used for distribution.
“We’re not only cutting costs with our electronic edition, but we’re saving resources. The City Paper typically uses over 1.5 million pounds of newsprint per year. By moving just 25% of our readership to the electronic edition, we’d save almost 400,000 pounds of paper and reduce our carbon footprint dramatically,” said Del Favero.
To view the paper, visit www.nashvillecitypaper.com and select e-paper.
About The City Paper
The City Paper is a free daily tabloid founded in 2000 as an alternative
to The Tennessean, after the city’s other paid daily newspaper,
the Nashville Banner, was shut down in 1998. It is published Monday –
Friday and has daily readership of 136,000 and cumulative weekly readership
of over 252,000.
About Olive Software
Olive Software (www.olivesoftware.com) is the
leading provider of digital publishing solutions that allow organizations
to publish rich, interactive and searchable media by automatically transforming
documents into intelligent content components, or microcontent. By unlocking
the information within documents, Olive better enables publishers to meet
the immediate demands of the evolving Web, empowering them to redefine
traditional markets for their information. Olive Software is based in
Santa Clara, California, with sales offices in New York, Washington DC,
Denver, Los Angeles, London, and Paris, and R&D facilities in Israel.
Media Contacts:
Sasha Frey
Marketing Manager, Olive Software
+1 720.747.1220
sashaf@olivesoftware.com