Belo Interactive Receives 2001 TechNews Best Practices Award for VelocIT
Dallas, TX— Belo(NYSE:BLC) announced today that Belo Interactive, Inc., its Internet subsidiary, was awarded a 2001 TechNews Best Practices Award at the NAA Newspaper Operations SuperConference 2001 in Orlando, Florida. Belo Interactive received the New Media Award for its development of VelocIT, a content operating system, which allows content to be published in multiple media without using additional resources to re-create or re-design the content for each medium.
TechNews, a bi-monthly magazine published by the Newspaper Association of America that highlights operations and technology advances within the newspaper industry, has given the award annually since 1996 to publicize outstanding innovations developed by employees of NAA-member newspapers.
Belo Interactive’s in-house technology team developed VelocIT to give Belo’s readers and viewers access to more news and information faster as the emergence of the Internet and wireless devices continues to redefine newspaper publishing.
The architecture of VelocIT is based on Object Oriented Information Architecture, or the standardization of content as an object that can be used interchangeably in any medium.
Just as hardware is standardized for use in any number of appliances, VelocIT standardizes content so that it can be published to multiple media including the Internet, print, email, video, wireless devices or even future devices. Whether VelocIT receives content in the form of text or html Web-based code, each piece of content can exist separately and feed from one editorial system to another seamlessly.
DallasNews.com, Belo’s online version of The Dallas Morning News and the Company’s largest website, along with 15 other Belo Web sites, is currently being produced using VelocIT. Before the use of VelocIT, a story published in the printed version of The Dallas Morning News had to be re-designed or manipulated before being published on DallasNews.com. Through the use of VelocIT, which takes and applies Web-specific rules to the printed version of the content, the story can be published instantly on DallasNews.com without the use of any additional resources.
Jim Moroney, president of Belo Interactive, said, “As our customers rapidly gain broadband Internet access to our interactive sites, our success depends on our ability to rapidly and seamlessly integrate the delivery of video, text and graphics to any customer anywhere, using any device. This is the promise of VelocIT, and why we have spent so much energy as a company developing it. VelocIT is a content operating system that uses separate objects, or small pieces of software, to separately manage content and package it for delivery. This means VelocIT can manage any kind of content — text, video, graphics — and package it for output on-the-fly to any device – television sets, Web browsers, WAP phones, and even devices that have yet to be invented.”
To date, VelocIT is the only content operating system of its kind and Belo Interactive has patents pending on Object Oriented Information Architecture.
About Belo
Belo is one of the nation’s largest media companies with a diversified group of market-leading broadcasting, publishing, cable and interactive media assets. A Fortune 1000 company with more than 9,000 employees and $1.6 billion in annual revenues, Belo operates news and information franchises in some of America’s most dynamic markets and regions, including Texas, the Northwest, Arizona, Southern California, Rhode Island, and the Mid-Atlantic region. Belo owns 17 television stations (six in the top 17 markets) reaching 13.7 percent of U. S. television households; owns or operates six cable news channels; and manages three television stations through local marketing agreements. Belo publishes five daily newspapers including The Dallas Morning News, The Providence Journal and The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, CA.). Belo Interactive’s new media businesses include 38 Web sites, several interactive alliances, and a broad range of Internet-based products. For more information on Belo, contact Skip Cass, Belo’s senior vice president, at 214-977-6602. Additional information, including earnings releases, is available online at www.belo.com.