Press - Picture Desk Reports

Picture Desk System Tracks Content Status, Costs & Staff Productivity

Quincy, MA, December 18, 2006 - For photo department managers who are watching costs tracking freelancers and managing productivity has become almost as important as selecting just the right shot. "Gathering this fundamental business information has been a job in itself, " said John Harrison, VP of Sales & Marketing at MerlinOne. "By mining information already in the Merlin digital asset management system or Trax assignment management system, the new reporting module collects content usage and status information, then from that data, generates production and business reports. This kind of information is vital to manage staff, workflow and improve content. "

"The response to the report module has been tremendous, " continued Harrison. "The Chicago Tribune, Hearst Magazines and CanWest photo center in Winnipeg have already ordered the new add-on software. "

"Reports can be generated for different departments or applications. For example, the photo assignment report tracks the number of assignments each photographer shot, whether they were late, how many images were shot, and how many were published, " said Harrison. "And the freelance budget report lists the number of assignments, number of images shot per assignment and percent of images that were actually published. So at a glance, photo managers can track their spending and the productivity of their freelance staff "

"The desk assignment report lets an editor know which department initiated photo or graphic requests, how many were completed and which ones made it into print. With tighter newspaper staff budgets, the report will help papers focus on important assignments and weed out ones that never make it into print, " said Harrison.

For librarians, a report shows what metadata fields were edited by what archivist for an easy quality control and productivity analysis. For papers with unique applications, administrative staff can create specialized reports.

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.

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