ANSA Joins the Community of Superdesk News Innovators
More than 20 years ago, ANSA became one of the first news outlets in Europe to venture into mobile journalism, with SMS-based news alerts. Now Italy’s top news agency continues to blaze a trail of innovation with Superdesk as its digital newsroom system.
“ANSA has chosen the Superdesk platform for its flexibility and API-centric structure, to support effectively the evolution of our editorial and business strategy. Superdesk handles production at scale, which is especially important in today’s always-on news environment,” said Angelo Marrara, ANSA’s Chief Technology Officer.
Superdesk’s support for the NewsML-G2 standard will play a key role in those plans. NewsML-G2 is an advanced data format that provides a means of exchanging news content as well as the metadata that describes it. This flexibility makes it possible for news agencies to do more with their existing production volume, turning articles, photos and videos into new products and services as quickly as the market shifts.
ANSA currently distributes over 3,500 news items, more than 1,700 photos and 60 videos a day to its customers in Italy and around the world. It has global 24/7 operations, with bureaus in 74 countries.
ANSA has 27 shareholder publications
As ANSA has always been at the forefront of technological innovation, the choice of Superdesk confirms its leadership in covering global news and distributing information in real time, the world over.
In addition, ANSA’s implementation of Superdesk is aimed at consolidating a variety of different systems and workflows that have resulted in duplication and bottlenecks in the newsroom.
Boosting the efficiency of editorial processes is one of the features that sets Superdesk apart from other news management systems. It provides a consistent overview to everyone involved in news production, from managing editors in the newsroom to reporters filing stories from the field. That not only makes life better in the newsroom, but is also good for the business’s bottom line.
“Our mission to create the infrastructure for the future of journalism is not just about advanced newsroom technology,” said Sava Tatic, Sourcefabric’s managing director. “It is also about providing a platform for growth and development, enabling news organisations to become authors of their own destiny.”
As the latest Sourcefabric development partner, ANSA joins a community of news agency innovators around the world that includes Australian Associated Press and NTB, the national news agency of Norway. Each member owns its own implementation of Superdesk while also contributing to the open-source code base of features and functions that benefit the entire community.
Sourcefabric z.ú., Europe’s largest nonprofit developer of open-source tools for news media, offers a co-development model for Superdesk in partnership with clients like ANSA to provide a flexible, web-based platform for content creation, production, curation, distribution and publishing.
“A modular, extensible approach to software tools is essential in the face of ongoing disruption in the media business,” said Sava Tatić, Sourcefabric’s managing director. “News organisations with this flexibility will be in a position to survive and thrive.”
About ANSA
ANSA is the no. 1 Italian news agency and one of the top ranking news agencies in the world. Twenty-seven publishers of major Italian newspapers are the company’s shareholders. Since 1945, ANSA has been collecting, publishing and distributing news, images and in-depth analysis in a variety of methods and on all platforms.
Present wherever events occur, the moment they happen: ANSA is the only agency with its own offices both nationally and in the rest of the world, with 22 offices in Italy and 73 offices distributed on five continents. By collaborating with an important network of 88 agencies and international partners, ANSA is able to independently cover global news and to distribute information the world over.