The Daily Racing Form installed ProImage’s NewsWay workflow management solution to manage the complex digital workflow from its New York editorial offices to seven print sites.

First published in 1894, the Daily Racing Form is America’s oldest horse racing newspaper. During the racing season, the publication prints up to 100,000 copies, seven days a week.

NewsWay automates and manages a complex workflow at the Daily Racing Form. The browser-based system designs and tracks production plans, accepts QuarkXPress pages and data from proprietary systems, produces soft and hard proofs, transmits pages, pairs pages and produces plate-ready bitmap images for each print site, helping the newspaper to improve its print schedules.

“Before NewsWay was installed, the newspaper was outputting single pages to film and manually stripping them into four-up flats at each site,” said Rick Shafranek, sales manager at ProImage. “Due to NewsWay’s automation, they will save time and reduce the chance for human error.”

Read across the United States, the Daily Racing Form is made up of multiple editions. Each edition includes three to six different sections — one section for each racetrack — along with its editorial section. Each editorial section has regional versions, and each of these must be routed only to its regional print site. The Past Performance sections are listed by racetrack and are combined with the regional editorial for each edition.

From the Daily Racing Form’s office in New York and its satellite office in Lexington, Ky., NewsWay manages the edition planning and digital workflow to its seven print sites. The sites are located in Miami; Los Angeles; Hamilton, Ohio; Hammond, La.; Port Washington, N.Y.; Seattle; and Welland, Ontario. The publication uses a nationwide frame relay network for communicating.

Each site prints up to five regional editions and deals with a combination of more than 100 different racetracks. Of these, approximately 25 are selected for publication on any given day. Daily page counts range from between 144 and 170 per edition, with up to 500 unique pages being produced nationally.

Based on the edition plan and production schedule, NewsWay routes the pages to the respective print sites. NewsWay’s customizable Edition Planner automates many aspects of the complex edition building process.

The NewsWay Edition Planner was an important component of the system to Tom Thill, the industry consultant who was brought in by the publisher, and who is now employed at the newspaper as director of print and production.

“This is where NewsWay differentiated itself from the rest of the solutions we looked at. NewsWay has the ability to customize an Edition Planner exactly to our specifications,” Thill said. “Since we don’t know the final page count for some of our Past Performance sections until late in the process, we needed a system which will allow us to transmit early single pages to the remote print sites.