by Tara McMeekin
Associate Editor

Nearly a year and a half ago, The Herald in Jasper, Ind., found an efficient and profitable way to offer reprints to its readers. With a daily circulation of 12,647, the newspaper has a strong community focus.

“We take a lot of pictures in the community and we have an excellent photo staff,” said John Rumbach, co-publisher and editor of The Herald. “We go into the schools a lot, we shoot a lot of sporting events — high school especially. We shoot a lot of community events and we pride ourselves on our documentary photo work. There are pretty good pictures coming out of the community, so obviously if a parent sees a picture from the schools that has their child in it, they might want a reprint of it.”

Employing only two full-time photographers and one photography intern, The Herald decided it could no longer burden the small photo staff with the added duty of making reprints. The Herald turned to dotPhoto to handle the printing and distribution of reprints.

When readers visit www.dcherald.com they can order reprints by choosing the “Photo Reprints” option. From there, they can view, select and purchase the photo they want.

“It was just a hassle for [the photographers] to get in and make reprints,” Rumbach said. “This came along and made it very easy for us.”

DotPhoto’s reprint service lets The Herald’s readers order reprints via the newspaper’s Web site, www.dcherald.com. The “DC” in the Web address refers to DuBois County, the area the paper primarily serves. Readers go to the site, click on “photo reprints” and from there they are directed to The Herald’s page within dotPhoto’s Web site.

“It’s really transparent to the reader that they’re actually on [dotPhoto’s] Web site,” Rumbach said. “When they go to dotPhoto’s site it has our logo on it, but it also has dotPhoto’s, which gives the reader the opportunity to use other dotPhoto services.”

When the reader gets to The Herald’s page, there is a listing of every week since the paper began posting photos on Jan. 27, 2001. Readers have to know what date the picture appeared in the paper in order to know which week to go to. Readers click on the week the photo ran and from there they are able to view all of the pictures from that week and select the one they want by clicking on the image. Then, there are ordering options on that screen where users can choose the size and quantity of reprints they wish to order. Once a selection is made, shipping charges are added and the user pays with a credit card.

“We just upload the pictures every day. They’re already digitized; we just turn them into JPEGs and upload them to dotPhoto’s archive. It’s just like any other site … where you would upload your own pictures and have them printed out. It works exactly the same way,” Rumbach said. “It’s really painless for us.”

Once the orders are placed, dotPhoto notifies The Herald with an e-mail and then prints the photos and sends them to the readers.

Pricing is set by The Herald, for example, $24.99 for an 8-by-10 reprint, and dotPhoto subtracts their cost from that price and sends the newspaper a monthly check for all of the reprints sold.

“We got in on it when they were offering the original deal and they return 90 percent of the remainder to us. So there’s no fee to us at all,” Rumbach said.

The Herald’s set price list is for individuals wanting reprints for personal use. Their dotPhoto page clearly states that if a user wants a reprint for commercial use there is a separate, higher charge.

“We either make [commercial users] a custom print, which is rare, or we give them a digital file,” Rumbach said.

The Herald also has to make custom prints when someone requests a reprint that dates back past Jan. 27, 2001, but Rumbach said that rarely happens.

“We have very few people come in and ask for that. It’s more of a current thing,” he added.

The Herald has made the service accessible to everyone in the community — even those without Internet access. If someone wants a reprint but does not have access to the Web, they can come down to the paper, place their order and someone from The Herald goes to the Web site and places the order just as a customer would. The Herald collects the cash from the customer and then pays for it with the credit card and account the newspaper has set up with dotPhoto. The reader then receives the reprint directly from dotPhoto.

“We’ve found dotPhoto to be efficient. The photos appear within a week or two and nobody has had any complaints,” Rumbach said.

The Herald came across dotPhoto after visiting their booth at a trade show. Since the service is provided via the Internet, there was no software for the newspaper to install. All they had to do was set up the link on www.dcherald.com. The Herald tested the service by setting up a personal archive where they could upload pictures and have them printed out.

“We do 99 percent black-and-white, so that was a concern for us because dotPhoto is a color printing process,” Rumbach said. “We were worried with the difference in our custom prints and what was produced by printing black-and-white on color paper, that readers would notice and complain, but in the last year, maybe one person has.”

Rumbach said he would recommend the service for newspapers.

“Of course it depends on their setup,” he said. “Larger newspapers have technicians available to make prints. We were doing it on overtime with our photographers. It is certainly far less expensive to do it this way than to custom make a print. The pricing on custom-made prints for us would have been out of reach.”

The Herald sells 15 to 20 reprints each month.