Press - Electronic Edition

The Advocate Publishes in the Wake of Hurricane Thanks to MerlinOne's Electronic Edition

Quincy, MA, September 5, 2008 - Hurricane Gustav stopped the presses at The Advocate of Baton Rouge (LA), but that did not stop the newspaper from publishing online. Thanks to MerlinOne's offer to convert their PDF pages to its LiveEdition online newspaper, The Advocate was able to publish the newspaper on its website by Tuesday evening.

Freda Yarbrough, Digital Media Director for The Advocate said, "Due to Hurricane Gustav our presses were down, but we still wanted to publish. On Tuesday we asked MerlinOne, who does our electronic tearsheets, if they could get us up quickly on their E-Edition product. By that night they had us up on-line."

The Advocate uses MerlinOne's electronic tearsheet (ESheets®) service to distribute their pages to advertisers. MerlinOne used these same electronic tearsheet files and converted them into LiveEdition, which enhances the pages with live links that make on-line reading a cinch. A link from the top of The Advocate's home page took readers to the electronic version of the print edition, and by Friday 11,000 reader sessions had taken place, with the heaviest use between 9 and 11 am.

LiveEdition presents the newspaper in the exact layout as the printed edition. The reader-oriented format features web tools that allow the reader to zoom headlines to read stories, jump pages to continue reading stories, as well as live links to go directly to advertiser web sites. Advanced web tools make it easy to navigate to the desired place on the page, the edition, section, or previous editions.

"We were so happy to be able to serve The Advocate in difficult times with a rapid fix. They have great people, and we are honored to have them as long-standing customers," said David Tenenbaum, CEO of MerlinOne.

About The Advocate - The newspaper is owned by Capital City Press and is published daily. Today's Advocate traces its publishing history back to The Democratic Advocate, a newspaper founded in 1842. The Advocate newspaper has been a vital force in Louisiana's capital city and surrounding communities.

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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