Football-crazy fans in Barcelona will get the news sooner with new digital editions driven by a systems upgrade at El Mundo Deportivo.

Grupo Godó - which publishes the sports title for the Catalonia region and nationwide - will use EidosMedia's digital publishing platform Méthode to bring their print and digital operations together groupwide.

Print editions went over to the new platform at the end of last year, and the online edition has now gone live using the dedicated Méthode Web CMS.

Chief information officer Oscar Mateu says delivering sports news online is a very time-critical process: "We have to get the latest news and results to our readers with the minimum delay.

"At the same time big events can drive massive peaks in visitor volumes in a short period of time. We have to be ready for that and our site has to be able to scale its response to meet visitor numbers."

The new system - which has 110 users in the Barcelona newsroom - will cut time-to-market for news by allowing a story to be published first in digital channels, while it is still being prepared for print. The 'compound story' approach means a news item can follow different publication paths while remaining a single editorial object.

The implementation is the first to make use of 'active/active' architecture, which EidosMedia says allows extremely efficient load-handling, while greatly facilitating maintenance and recovery operations.

"From live match commentary to results and analysis, the online edition El Mundo Deportivo offers a complete real-time sports panorama to Spanish fans," EidosMedia delivery manager Cristina Bergese says. "They are making excellent use of the productivity-enhancing functions, as well as achieving important synergies between the print and digital editions."