By Lisa Larson
Prepress Editor

A family-owned newspaper that has served parts of Kern and Los Angeles counties since 1915, the Antelope Valley Press, in Palmdale, Calif., is preparing for the future by investing in a building remodeling project and a new publishing system from Digital Technology International.

The Press (daily, 26,065; Sunday, 31,851) last month signed a contract with DTI for a complete advertising and editorial database-centered newspaper publishing solution.

The newly remodeled building and the new publishing system will help the newspaper meet their goals for the future, said Cherie Bryant, vice president of marketing and advertising for the Antelope Valley Press.

DTI’s page design and layout solution, PageSpeed 5.0, incorporates Adobe InDesign. Photo courtesy of DTI

“We’re very proactive as far as doing what needs to be done for the company and employees,” said Bryant. “We looked at all of the products out there, and we believe DTI is going to do what needs to happen here for our future.”

The Antelope Valley Press began its search for a publishing system in January 1999, and first saw DTI’s 5.0 products at Nexpo last year.

“After that, we compared everything we saw to the 5.0 product,” said Bill MacKenzie, computer services manager for the Antelope Valley Press. “We went on for another year, comparing everything to DTI, and finally, when it came down to the vote, we said, ‘Look, we’ve been comparing everything to DTI. We must think it’s pretty darn good — so let’s do it.’”

DTI’s 5.0 “Speed” solutions

The Antelope Valley Press will install AdSpeed for ROP display ads and ClassSpeed for classified advertising.

Sixteen ClassSpeed seats will be used to sell, schedule and build approximately 700 line ads every week.

Twelve AdSpeed 5.0 applications will be used to manage display ads, from creation to full-page pagination, using Adobe InDesign, which is integrated directly into the core architecture as the system’s advertising composition engine.

Ad designers will have the ability to convert QuarkXPress files and open PDF and native Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop files and store them inside AdSpeed’s SQL database.

Photo courtesy of DTI

In the newsroom, DTI’s NewsSpeed editorial system, consisting of PageSpeed, the page design and layout solution, which also incorporates InDesign, and SpeedWriter, the text editing tool that integrates Adobe InCopy.

Because InCopy shares the same text composition engine as InDesign, text editing matches pagination 100 percent throughout the entire process, allowing editors to write copy to fit based on a view of the page layout.

PageSpeed will be installed on 19 workstations, and SpeedWriter on 24. ImageSpeed will manage the paper’s photos and graphics.

“This move into DTI will pull all of the editorial, classified and advertising pagination capabilities under one umbrella for us. We were looking for a single-vendor solution so we wouldn’t have to patch-quilt stuff together,” MacKenzie explained. “DTI came in very strongly because they do all that and more.”

Tracking and planning

DTI’s Data Center, a standard feature of each of the DTI applications, gives users access to information about stories, graphics, photos, ads and page layouts from one central location using a consistent user interface.

“The Data Center’s ability to unite projects in a meaningful way, so that you can see progress on individual parts by going to one place, was very important to our news side,” said MacKenzie.

The Antelope Valley Press will also use DTI’s new PlanSpeed for integrated, computer-automated pagination of advertising and editorial content. PlanSpeed will be used to paginate an average of 1,316 stories on 322 black-and-white pages and 144 color pages per week, said DTI.

Training and installation are slated to begin next month, starting with ClassSpeed, followed by AdSpeed and NewsSpeed.

“We know that we could have made a good step forward with just about anyone else out there, but we felt that if we went with DTI, we would not only make that step, but we would be prepared for additional steps,” MacKenzie said. “DTI’s solutions will give us a good open avenue to do things we haven’t even thought of yet.”

Cox upgrading to 5.0

Cox Newspapers, which own the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post and several other publications, is standardized on DTI systems and is looking forward to upgrading to the 5.0 modules, said John Reetz, director of the CoxNet wide area network and assistant managing editor of news operations at AJC.

“We’ve had a good relationship with DTI. We’ve worked with them on building a couple of tools that have enhanced their software, such as AdShare, a plug-in to AdSpeed,” Reetz said.

AdShare allows you to flag in the database any type of advertising document built in AdSpeed for sharing across CoxNet.

“We use it to build a virtual spec ad library at Cox,” Reetz said. “If they have a spec ad in hand when they go out to make a sale, there’s a 65-percent chance they’ll make a sale.”

The other tool DTI developed for Cox is the Editorial Budget tool, which has changed the workflow in Cox newsrooms and greatly increased the amount of editorial sharing amongst the newspapers. Instead of the news budget existing as a single document, it now is a database that can be searched by category or keyword.

“We are quite comfortable with our relationship and are heavily committed to DTI,” Reetz said of the upgrade. “We are very excited about the InDesign product. Our design people who have been trained on InDesign are really excited about it.”

Other DTI installations

The News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash. (daily, 128,973; Sunday, 145,023), is installing a 150-seat advertising system from DTI, including AdSpeed for display ads and ClassSpeed for classified advertising. The paper is also implementing ImageSpeed graphics management software, and PlanBuilder, which plans both ROP and classified sections. Output will be completed through DTI’s database OPI solutions, SpeedDriver and SpeedFTP.

The Des Moines (Iowa) Register (daily, 157,705; Sunday, 252,254) signed a contract with DTI for a 90-seat ClassSpeed system.s

DTI