Press - Picture Desk

CanWest Global Communications Corp. Chooses MerlinOne for Chain-wide Solution - Adds Canadian News Desk and 3 New Papers

Quincy, MA, June 18, 2004 - CanWest Global Communications, Canada's leading international media company, has selected MerlinOne Inc. to provide Merlin Picture Desk®, Merlin Universal Archive, Trax assignment management system and Scrounger digital camera photo outtake management and editing systems for their Canadian News Desk in Winnipeg. In addition, three properties, the Regina Leader-Post, Saskatoon Star Phoenix and Victoria Times- Colonist will receive new installations of systems from MerlinOne, and seven existing Merlin sites (The Edmonton Journal, Windsor Star, Calgary Herald, Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Province and Sun, National Post, and the Montreal Gazette) will receive upgrades to their systems and install TRAX and Scrounger. A historical note: the Montreal Gazette's Merlin system was the very first installed anywhere, and has been in service for 10 years this past September!

Merlin Picture Desk will manage all wire and local images for daily production, providing the staff with a single centralized location for its data,and allowing anyone to quickly search for archived items as well as live photos and graphics for daily production. Installation is scheduled for later this year.

The multi-user, cross-platform Merlin system will allow anyone at Macintosh™ or Windows™ workstations to search and retrieve images and graphics for production or reference in seconds. Merlin Webmaster makes items in Merlin available to anyone with a web browser-and appropriate access permission-via each site's intranet.

Merlin also serves as the picture desk for each paper, taking live feeds from the wire services as well as input of locally scanned and digital images from the Journal-Sentinel's photo staff. Once in Merlin, librarians, photographers and editors can select images that will remain permanently and allow Merlin's user-defined autopurge cycle to delete images not needed for long-term archival storage. Their systems configuration will allow the easy sharing of assets among the properties.

Reporters and editors will use their Trax Assignment Management system to initiate a photo or graphic request. Photographers will enter the Trax assignment number to automatically update digital camera files with selected metadata as they import them in Scrounger. Images selected from Scrounger go directly to the Merlin picture desk, where additional metadata can be added. Links are automatically created from image or graphic to assignment or outtake.

CanWest Global Communications Corp. owns 11 English-language major metropolitan daily newspapers in Canada. A diversified media and communications company with operations in publishing, radio and television broadcasting, telecommunications and printing services is headquartered in Winnipeg.

About MerlinOne - MerlinOne, Inc. is a leading provider of digital asset management systems and electronic document discovery platforms. E-Sheets® is the foremost electronic tearsheets service. The Merlin picture desk management solution has over 140 major installations at corporations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Harvard University, Pfizer, Habitat for Humanity and The White House. MerlinOne technology helps companies manage photos, text, graphics, PDFs, multimedia and e-discovery material.

Press Contact
David Farrell
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