TU has been published in the form of a printed magazine since 1854. During the last few years, investment in the online edition has consistently grown. Six journalists now work fulltime with the Web site www.tu.no. Stensvold believes that investments should be made “when times are good — in order to achieve success in the future.” “Teknisk Ukeblad is primarily a trade journal for members within engineering and technical organizations,” said Stensvold. TU distributes about 100,000 printed copies each week, and the traffic at the magazine’s Web site is growing “fast”, said Stensvold. “The traffic online has doubled during the past months. In January, we had 160,000 unique visitors, and this is very satisfactory,” he said. The market for advertising is also strong for TU — especially recruitment ads for technical positions, where TU is the market leader in Norway. With such a strong financial picture today, the publisher will continue to invest in the online edition of the magazine.

The future of the online edition was a key factor when TU decided to purchase a new editorial system. In 2005, the publisher chose the Escenic Content Studio platform for both the print and online publications. Before this they had been using Escenic only for their online. “Escenic’s content management system is primarily meant for online production, but we further developed the system so that we could include all users in our organization,” said Stensvold. “This works well, and our experience is that the system is adapted to modern journalism where news often is published from anywhere at any time.”

After hearing about the Tansa Text Proofing System, Stensvold learned that it was not compatible with Escenic’s Java-based client applications. He decided to contact Tansa Systems and ask them to develop the client proofing tools needed to work with their new editorial solution. This resulted in the development of a Java-based Tansa Client and plug-in for the Escenic Content Studio text editor. Since installing the Tansa solution for TU in Escenic, “the language is consistent and almost free from orthographic errors,” said Stensvold. This is true for all the publisher’s publications, independent of the published medium.

Stensvold has big plans for Norway’s largest trade journal in the field of technology. He believes that, first of all, it is important to avoid double coverage in print and online. “We want to avoid cannibalism between the different media,” he said. “We believe that the printed issue and the online publication can live side by side for many years. There is a synergy to be achieved between the two media, both from the editorial side and in regard to ads.” He believes that many of the online readers are subscribers to the printed trade journal. “Our wish is to have the two media complement each other,” said Stensvold. “Since technical developments in many important areas are happening fast, we see no reason why we should not succeed.”