February 6, 2008 - Wenner Media (New York, USA), publisher of the legendary music magazine Rolling Stone, has upgraded its editorial system: Rolling Stone, Us Weekly and Men's Journal are now using the SoftCare K4 Publishing System to manage their design and editorial workflows. K4 offers Wenner Media a professional publishing environment, where editors and graphic designers can work on their articles and layouts at the same time. Rolling Stone even uses K4 for repurposing print content for its Web site. For each Wenner Media title, it only took a few issues to fully complete the switch from Quark to Adobe InDesign/InCopy and K4.

K4 has recently been gaining more and more ground in the U.S. media market. Only last December publishing houses Congressional Quarterly and Advanstar Communications as well as the renowned lifestyle magazine Parade (circulation 32 million copies) also announced their decision to upgrade to K4. Wenner Media's 180-seat K4 purchase is the latest installation from Managing Editor Inc. (MEI), the K4 distributor in the Americas.

With a circulation of about 1.8 million, Us Weekly is the largest Wenner Media title and the first to go live with K4. The magazine's staff was able to make a complete transition to the K4 system after just two issues. "We were able to roll out all three titles in an extremely quick timeframe," said Paul Leung, system administrator for Wenner Media. "We've already seen K4's potential for speeding up production, and we're excited to see what else we can do with it in the future."

For example, Rolling Stone is planning to use K4's powerful K4 XML Exporter add-on module to repurpose magazine content for use on its Web site. The magazine's staff is also considering using K4 to standardize its electronic content in a format that would someday allow it to be repurposed in other ways, such as for release on DVDs, along with special editions, or through any other multimedia channel.

Men's Journal was extremely quick: During the production of just one issue the whole transition process to K4 was completed. This was far earlier than expected. "Going through the transition was a bit of a refresher for the Men's Journal staff, so they just ran with it," said Daniel Schrier, editorial systems project manager for MEI. New York-based K4 integrator DPCI also provided hands-on InCopy and InDesign training and support for Wenner Media.