By Steve Terrillion
Special to Newspapers & Technology

Deadlines are nothing new in the newspaper business. You can change a story, drop a photo or insert a last-minute ad. But you can’t change the inevitable deadline. Tomorrow’s edition must be printed tonight, especially if you’re printing USA Today, which has to reach more than 2 million readers every morning.

Producing USA Today is a sometimes complex, often challenging and always fast process. All the ingredients — from copy and photos to free-standing inserts and advertising — have to come together on time, every time, without fail. And any system is only as good as its weakest link. For many newspapers, the weakest link was in the production workflow, where most workflow tracking was manual and paper-based.

USA Today can create job entry tickets for advertising operations with FileMaker Pro. The job ticket entry feature allows users to fill in additional information about an ad and to make notes for production regarding special circumstances and advertiser requests.
Photo courtesy of USA Today

Ad management and workflow improved significantly at “The Nation’s Newspaper” when we began tracking all inbound advertising using a FileMaker Pro database.

While its colorful graphics and national circulation were heralded as breakthroughs in the early 1980s — certain elements in USA Today’s production were still performed by old-fashioned methods. And while the masthead proclaimed — “via satellite” — prepress work, for example, still meant filling out paper logs and forms.

That changed in 1993 when USA Today’s Prepress Systems Administrator Miles Weissman decided to develop a database to coordinate advertising workflow in the daily production process. Weissman had worked with FileMaker Pro, a workgroup database solution from FileMaker Inc., for several years and felt that the software would make a difference in the work tracking process.

The introduction of the FileMaker Pro database application didn’t just happen. There were obstacles to overcome and lots of questions needed answers. We began using FileMaker to track a small part of our workflow and later grew it and integrated it with other systems used at USA Today. For example, we now pull advertising production information from the Advertising Operations AS/400 database directly into FileMaker Pro.

Today, advertising work tracking and job scheduling between prepress and advertising operations are carried out in a FileMaker Pro database that Weissman wrote and named “Captain.” Ads are received by Advertising Operations (AdOps) and information about these ads is entered into the Ad Management System, which is a customized AS/400 database. Captain is used to pull production-specific information from the AMS using a FileMaker Pro Structured Query Language plug-in. AdOps uses Captain to enter vital ad information, to produce and print out job tickets, to track updates on the ad and to provide an accurate record to indicate the ad’s physical location in the workflow process.

FileMaker Pro helps us keep our advertising workflow accurately tracked and documented. When someone starts working on an ad in production, they update Captain with the operator’s name, which indicates that the ad is being worked on. When the ad is completed and checked, Captain is again updated to reflect that and to show the time it was completed. We also make notes or special instructions within the database.

FileMaker Pro assures that ad work is prioritized correctly. The database allows for back-tracking jobs, so if problems arise on a given ad, the cause can be followed to the source. The system also allows managers to pull reports and analyze activity trends.

FileMaker Pro helps USA Today’s advertising workflow run smoothly, which is especially important on a tight advertising deadline. The database application is very user friendly and requires minimal training. FileMaker is also relatively easy to deploy for workgroup use. Currently, five different workgroups at USA Today are using the system, which encompasses 15 to 20 databases with up to 65,000 records.

Database and job tracking are not new or exciting ideas, nor are they front page news, but USA Today has been able to better manage its workflow with the FileMaker Pro solution. This is significant when you’re putting a paper out for 2 million readers each morning.