The Item in Sumter, S.C., is scheduled to go live on its 30-seat SaxoPress content management system from Saxotech Inc. at the end of the month.

The installation at The Item (daily, 21,885; Sunday, 21,111) began on Oct. 28 and after SaxoPress, the newspaper will install Publicus to round off its new cross-media publishing solution.

The Item, owned for the past 108 years by the Osteen Publishing Co., also produces The Messenger, a semi-weekly publication serving Hartsville, S.C.

Bill Ghrist, data services director for The Item, 
prepares the cabinet to install the SaxoPress servers.
Photos courtesy of The Item

The Item will use SaxoPress for all of its editorial workflow — writing, editing and producing all of its print and online content. Publicus will automate production of both of Osteen Publishing’s Web sites, www.theitem.com and www.hartsvillemessenger.com.

The search for a new editorial system has been a tedious one for The Item, which first sent staff to look at new solutions last year at Nexpo 2001 in New Orleans.

“Bill Ghrist, our information technology guy, has watched Saxo for awhile,” said Chip Chase, managing editor of The Item. “That was actually the first system that he sat me down at Nexpo in New Orleans last year to look at.”

Chip Chase

Chase was impressed, not only with Saxotech, but also with many of the solutions he saw at Nexpo.

“I was blown away. We had eight demos (from various vendors) scheduled for one day and I was blown away each time because of the powers of today’s systems compared to what I was accustomed to,” Chase said.

What Chase was accustomed to was a 1987 application from Morris Communications called Tecs 2, a system for which it was becoming increasingly difficult to find replacement parts.

“It served us well. It’s still functioning very well for us, we just know that we need more power,” Chase said.

After looking at a slew of editorial solutions last year in New Orleans, Chase and Ghrist had to start narrowing down their list. Chase said they narrowed the list by looking at systems that were functional and that would not be intimidating to his newsroom staff.

“You can have all the functionality and power in the world, but if people are scared to use it or intimidated by it, it’s not going to work,” Chase said.

Chase was looking for a system that would not be overwhelming in terms of training, was user-friendly and that would run in an environment to which the newspaper was already accustomed. Since The Item also produces The Messenger in Hartsville, Chase also wanted a system that was truly cross platform because The Item works on PCs and The Messenger uses Macs.

The Hartsville site, located about 45 minutes from The Item’s office in Sumter, has a full editorial staff. In addition to printing The Messenger, The Item does all of the photo toning for the semi-weekly newspaper. There will be editorial workstations at each of the newspaper’s locations.

Although The Item wasn’t in dire need of a new editorial system, the newspaper began looking out of basic necessity for the future.

“We knew there was probably a whole lot more we could do if we looked at these new systems,” he said.

Editorial staff gets on board

Chase and Ghrist went to Rockville, Md., a few months ago for basic training on the SaxoPress system. In mid-October, Klaus Andersen from Saxotech came to the newspaper for additional training with Chase and Ghrist. The Item then conducted a Super User Training session in which Chase and Ghrist trained a core group of users at The Item for five days.

“We tried to pick some people (for the core group) who, despite what they say, really catch on to computer systems pretty quickly, and representatives from different aspects of the newsroom and our Web [person],” Chase said. We will essentially have training sessions with different members of the newsroom in groups of five or six.”

Chase will do the majority of that training and then the core group can assist users around the newsroom as necessary.

Designed to fit

The Item uses QuarkXPress for layout and pagination of the newspaper, which will make Saxotech, complete with Quark XTensions, and Publicus a good fit.

The Item had been seriously considering one other vendor as well, but that system lost out because it was not integrated with Quark.

“I’ve got people here who have been using Quark since ’94 or ’95 and it’s senseless to me to make them have to re-learn another system when they’re expert-level users,” Chase said.

Integration with Quark was a major part of the decision to go with the Saxotech package.

Publicus will allow The Item to publish content to its Internet site more efficiently and easily. The newspaper is currently trying to come up with better ways to integrate its Web presence with the print publication and also offer services to local companies that use the Internet.

“We’re hoping that our Web presence is one of the most aggressive in the Carolinas when we’re finished,” Chase said. “Everybody’s fighting the same battle trying to find ways to generate revenue utilizing the Web presence and I don’t think anybody’s doing it real successfully, so we’re going to stick our hand in and try another idea.”

Publicus will save The Item considerable time in moving stories to the Web. Much of the posting will be done through automation and the newspaper will be able to set the time it wants copy to go online at www.theitem.com, which Chase said will coincide with the availability of the print version each day.

“With our Web guy doing it all manually it could be 8 o’clock in the morning sometimes (before copy was posted),” Chase said. “This is going to enable us to do it in a much quicker fashion because essentially, it’ll all be done the night before and we can decide what time we want it to go live.”

Ready for the future

The Item is still creating pages by imaging film, however Chase said that computer-to-plate may be something that’s in their future. The newspaper is well positioned to implement CTP down the road and currently has two Hewlett Packard full-page proofers.

“If you have a page that’s perfect, you don’t have to run it back through the [raster image processor], so there’s a lot of advantages there,” Chase said. “Hopefully, eventually we can use that as a segue to go straight to plate.”

Chase sees a lot of benefits for the newspaper on the horizon with the new Saxotech systems.

Among the biggest benefits of the new systems, according to Chase, will be the newspaper’s ability get things out in a more timely fashion on the newsroom side, while taking a lot of pressure off of the graphics people.

“Now we get pages done and often we’re waiting on photos,” Chase said. “This will allow us to process the images basically instantaneously and so pages, as soon as they’re proofed, can go right on out.”