The News Gathering and Distribution Business - An Extended Enterprise
Miguel Garcia
Cable News Network, Inc. (CNN)

  The success of the Web and of other new-media channels has accelerated the pace and increased the complexity of the news publishing business.

  To cope with such pace, new media journalists at CNN Interactive need systems that integrate the wide array of real-time information sources, content partnerships, reference and archival material, and user participation into a coherent publishing system.

In addition, even though CNN Interactive's web site (cnn.com) is its most distinctive distribution vehicle, there are many other avenues for content distribution. Unlike the linear experience of broadcast radio and television news, CNN Interactive provides up to the minute news and information in a number of "user experiences" which take into account factors like the dominant media (text, audio, video), the richness and interactive capabilities of the viewing device, and the desired level of personalization.

The news gathering and distribution system is in effect an extended, distributed enterprise. CNN Interactive personnel and its source and distribution partners must participate in a "friction-free" workflow.

To address these challenges, CNN Interactive has been building a content management and event distribution system around a CORBA core.   CORBA has provided an infrastructure to build systems that are
distributed, component based, scaleable, support multiple language bindings, multi-platform and incrementally deployable.