Does pagination give you nirvana?

Charles Kulow, the moderator and operations manager at the VICTORIA (Texas) ADVOCATE, focused his panel on the motivation to adapt pagination and direct-to-plate technologies, cultural and organizational change that accompanies digital workflow, and the consequent benefits and drawbacks. Across the board, panelists expected extended deadlines, reduced costs, improved workflow, better quality and happier advertisers. The results varied.

A mere five years ago, the Associated Press announced it would use the Portable Document Format (PDF) to transmit ads via its new AdSEND product. This past year it transmitted over a million ads via both satellite and BBS site. Composite color ad transmission has become far more common than font problems. Next month the AP will launch Internet ad transmission.

Jim Gerberich, director of operations/business development at the AP, expects the Internet project to provide a new support tool for newspapers using AdSEND, and will allow ads will be able to reside on the AP server for up to a month -- available to the newspaper at will.

Rod Miller, operations manager for pre-press and systems development at the JOURNAL AND CONSTITUTION of Atlanta, said that in addition to the common goals shared by panelists, the J&C sought standard applications and a PostScript interface, and the abilities to accept both disk media and satellite ad building, to archive newsroom products and to provide newsroom control over the newshole. It also decided to avoid proprietary products because of pending Y2K issues.

The Cox corporate initiative has pushed the J&C and other newspapers to digitalize all its data so that it can be repurposed in any form, said Miller. Along with the benefits of this initiative -- enhanced flexibility, improved relationships and the meshing of talents inside the newspaper, better quality and happier customers -- however, have been ongoing demands to replace hardware far more frequently -- as often as every three years. Further, there are personnel losses as they become better trained, and the requirement to purchase software updates on the fly -- especially when advertisers deliver ads in an older -- or newer -- version.

Ken Shelby is vice president, production/technology at Thomson's Central Ohio Stragegic Marketing Group, and oversees seven dailies which use PDF files to transmit pages to two production facilities. Standardizing page delivery methods for this group, as well as for USA TODAY -- which uses the production facilities for its products -- was the impetus toward pagination. Shelby said a combination of pagination via Baseview's front-end systems, standardized fonts across the operation, and a BBS to which customers can send PDF ads and through which the dailies can share editorial content, have led to simplified training processes for the two facilities, as well as the anticipated consolidation of redundant functions.

However, the expected deadline gains did not materialize, since customers continued to push deadlines. Technical support requirements went up. Software upgrades, said Shelby, can cause havoc if not stringently pretested. Telecommunications channels can be perilously fragile. Ultimately, he advised, if you can't standardize and control the technical environment, stay away from pagination and direct-to-plate.

Bob Gibson, interactive media manager at the BILLINGS (Mont.) GAZETTE, advised newspapers to take stock of their expectations before making the move to direct-to-plate: