A glimpse of EidosMedia’s soon-to-be-released Neon digital news platform and the integration of customers’ AI innovations were highlights of a customer event in Milan.

Emerging technologies are employed to raise the productivity and quality of multichannel, multi-site news operations.

Eidosmedia chief marketing officer Massimo Barsotti said that with the impending release, the Future of Content event was "an opportunity for customers to see the full range of powerful authoring and digital delivery features.”

EidosMedia’s Mèthode is in use at News Corp sites in Australia, London and the US, as well as China Daily, Le Figaro, Le Télégramme, FAZ, the Financial Times, HT Media, Mediahuis and the Seattle Times.

User innovations exploit the ProActions framework which allows them to create their own AI tools and integrate them into the Swing and Prime workspaces. During the event, German publisher SWMH was honoured with an innovation award for a one-click ‘story packaging’ tool which journalists can use to create headlines and summaries for multiple channels with a single click. SudwestdeutscheMedienHolding (pictured) owns 140 companies and employs more that 4500 staff.

Other ProActions innovations include inline shortcuts – allowing authors to use enhancement routines without taking their eyes off the text – and a tool to automatically generate and format newsletters from a collection of news stories.

“There was a lot of very impressive tech on display at our customer event,” Barsotti said. “What we saw was the end-to-end transformation of the entire news operation, from accelerated authoring to advanced digital delivery and automated print-page layout.

“We’re looking at a new model for sustainable, high-productivity journalism.”

He also paid tribute to the “inspiring work” customers had achieved with the technologies. “We saw some very impressive applications of AI models to achieve new levels of productivity in authoring and layout.”

Centrepiece of the event was the demonstration of an integrated digital-to-print workflow starting with the new Neon digital-first platform and ending with automatic generation of layouts for multiple print editions.

“By cutting time-to-market and manual intervention, these tools favour the development of highly competitive news portfolios,” said Barsotti.

Introduced at last year’s customer event, AI-driven print page layout is now a mature technology and in use at several large customers in Germany to accelerate print-publishing operations. As well as a demonstration of its integration with digital-first workflows, the event also featured a guide on how to introduce this potentially disruptive technology to a conventional print publishing environment.

Customers were also introduced to a new planning-and-tracking tool for the financial services sector, and a module that provides real-time data on cloud deployments. Against a background of ransomware and other cyber-attacks, EidosMedia also presented a ‘rapid-recovery’ facility for customer platforms that uses remote workspace technology to provide a pre-configured platform, allowing editorial processes to resume quickly following a hacking attack.