The Akron Beacon Journal Begins New Chapter by Selecting Clickability for Ohio.com

San Francisco, CA (PRWeb) January 9, 2007 -- The Akron Beacon Journal selected Clickability's cmPublish platform to host its website property Ohio.com, Clickability announced today. Ohio.com is the online partner of the Akron Beacon Journal. It is replacing a legacy Content Management System (CMS) supplied by Knight Ridder, its former parent company, with one from hosted CMS vendor Clickability.

The migration off their legacy application presents a new chapter in the Beacon Journal's online presence. Following the first generation of online publishing -- when media companies simply copied stories from their print editions to their web sites -- social media trends have forced publishers like the Beacon Journal to rethink their internet strategies.

"We're at a crossroad where we're being challenged by community publishing and other emerging Internet technologies," said Linda Lyell, Vice President Ohio.com "Clickability understood our business challenges and cmPublish will provide us a toolset to capitalize on them. The platform will allow us to react to the news faster and package it in unique ways that will appeal to our audience."

Ohio.com will continue to be the leading online source of news and information in Northeast Ohio, but it also plans to embrace community publishing by providing destinations for citizen journalists to publish content. Under the Ohio.com brand, readers will be able to contribute articles, blogs, and opinions as defined by editors through cmPublish. "As an example, Ohio has a great sports community from high school through the pros. We want to provide a venue for fans to share opinions as well as get breaking news and insight," said Lyell.

In addition to user generated content, Ohio.com will introduce a calendar for Ohio readers to track local events and community reminders. Integrated video, podcasts, RSS feed, and more will also be available to complement the featured articles and news coverage the Beacon Journal is known for.

Ohio.com conducted an extensive vendor evaluation including traditional and hosted vendors, to find the right CMS solution. Despite offers of free hosting, free bandwidth, and promised services offered by competing vendors, the Beacon Journal selected Clickability for its unique understanding of publishing sophisticated, constantly-changing, high volume sites.

"Clickability was able to meet all of our requirements with an easy to use product, we were impressed by their management team's dedication to its company and customers, and inquiries into their references were rock solid," added Lyell.

When choosing a CMS platform, information technology managers had to choose between a packaged application or a hosted one. The decision is critical to Ohio.com, as the site anticipates large spikes in traffic around news events.

"After putting cmPublish through a punishing product and architecture evaluation and even visiting their co-lo facility, we are confident in Clickability's ability to host our web infrastructure," said Jim Arnold, IT Manager at Ohio.com.

The relaunch of the Ohio.com site is scheduled for the spring of 2007.

About Ohio.com

Founded in 1995, Ohio.com, is online website of the Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio's leading online source of news, weather, sports, business news, obituariess, entertainment, events, classifieds, real estate, rental and automotive listings in Northeast Ohio. Ohio.com has been awarded twice by the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists for "Ohio's Best Website" in 2004 and 2006.

About Akron Beacon Journal
Founded in 1839, the Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio's only four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, serves readers in Summit, Medina, Portage, Stark and Wayne counties in print and reaches Northeast Ohio online at Ohio.com. Now in its 168th year, the Beacon Journal is active in founding and supporting organizations, programs and events that promote the well-being of the Greater Akron community.

The Beacon Journal and Ohio.com are owned by Sound Publishing, a subsidiary of Black Press.

About Clickability

Clickability is the leading single source provider of on-demand web content management software, delivering award-winning, fully integrated hosted solutions to the top names in the publishing and enterprise worlds. Clickability's solutions are in use by more than 400 publishers including: The Wall Street Journal, CNN Interactive, and Time. Clickability is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information about the company, visit www.clickability.com or call 415.575.5125.

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