Digital workflow is taking over the community newspaper publishing world. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

Nonetheless, a few small market publishers insist on shooting pages with a process camera. But fewer are doing this every week.

As printers shift to computer-to-plate and other digital methods, the process camera is going the way of the Linotype.

A call from the printer saying it will no longer accept flats to shoot will eventually arrive for everyone. Many of those printers are eliminating the camera completely.

“I respect only those who resist me, but I cannot tolerate them,” Charles de Gaulle told The New York Times in 1968. Your printer is going to find itself in the same situation - forced to modernize and unable to maintain two different prepress processes at once.

When that happens, conversion to a digital workflow becomes a rush job.

Emergency conversion

Still, abandoning the camera requires an emergency conversion recipe for those caught in that position. Following are some ideas on mixing up such a brew that will perhaps make forced digitization easier to swallow.

Newspapering has been described as an organizing contest. Workflow is a funneling and distillation exercise.

Community newspaper reporters, editors, readers, advertising representatives, publishers, classified personnel, stringers and the janitor all push bits and pieces of information toward the deadlines.

That information is poured into the top of the process, distilled, reduced, refined and comes out the other end as the final copies of the newspaper.

The most difficult part of that process, I have found, is merging separate work products from the two separate subcultures of news and advertising.

Avoid the blast

Management must concentrate on avoiding an explosion when it tries to mix the different products into one batch.

The dummy, whether it is hand-drawn thumbnails or the product of an ad order entry system married to an automatic pagination by set preferences, is critical.

In this case, as we deal with primitive prepress, we must usually assume that the dummy process is fairly primitive as well. One small weekly publisher I knew (not so long ago) waxed the back of finished ads and placed them directly on blue line grid sheets. The editor was then left to fill in around them.

Something as simple as placing the finished ads on QuarkXPress documents and forwarding them on from advertising layout to the editor might work at your newspaper. But usually, the two departments need simultaneous efforts and require the two final products be put together as a package later.

At the same time the editor is massaging copy and writing heads, the advertising production department needs to make final corrections, and so on.

Getting it right

But how do you get the right ad, the right size, in the right ad hole?

And when you do, how can you make sure that the last hand to touch it doesn’t drag the graphic out of whack, or rewrap the copy, or blow out the headline?

Maybe the answer is two containers -one for news and one for ads - and perhaps a numbering process that tries to idiot-proof the merge.

Get everything on one side made and everything on the other side complete, and then pour the two sides in together.

Creating rigid rules and nomenclature facilitates the combination.

Third-party review and a signoff system can help as well. A typical workflow might involve a precise dummy with an accurate ad numbering system, editorial workers filing all finished and correctly named pages for an issue in one folder and advertising production doing the very same.

A digital compositor puts the two products together, paying close attention to the numbers of ads and names of pages. After such a merger, then a PDF file is created to preserve the font and graphic information - intact and portably.

Review key

Finally, following review and approval, the completed page is shipped to the printer by way of a file transfer protocol, or FTP application. Easy enough.

Another key is developing a workflow. Most printers don’t want all the pages arriving at once. It is better to receive the page files one at a time in a progressive flow so that those pages can be dealt with in signatures.

Such a flow also allows more efficient uploading and a better approval process. But it also is quite a leap of faith for a newspaper publisher that is used to getting the entire product completely finished, collected and then dropped off at the printer.

The day is coming, soon, when you won’t be able to find a printer willing to shoot those pages. Then what are you going to do?

Rob Carrigan specializes in prepress systems for weekly newspapers. He is the publisher of the Ute Pass Courier in Woodland Park, the Gold Rush in Cripple Creek and the Extra in Teller County, all ASP Westward LP weeklies in Colorado. He can be reached by e-mail at RCarrigan@aol.com or rcarrigan@ccnewspapers.com.