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The Daily Breeze in Torrance, Calif., marked the end of pasting up pages and the end of QuarkXPress pagination when it launched editorial software built around Adobe Systems Inc. software two years ago.

Instead, the newspaper (daily, 70,225; Sunday, 72,230) switched to a foundation of Digital Technology International’s NewsSpeed 5.4 software, meshed with InDesign and InCopy from Adobe Systems Corp. Integration was completed in early 2004.



The Daily Breeze now handles its editorial and pagination with Adobe-integrated software. 
Photo: Daily Breeze

“Prior to DTI we had an SII/Quark thing going and we pasted up some of our pages and then section fronts were done in Quark,” said Phillip Sanfield, associate editor of the Daily Breeze. “We worked like that through much of the ‘90s with several more pages becoming Quark pages each year.”  

The Daily Breeze had been considering paginating since 1998, Sanfield said, but financials held the newspaper back for a couple of years. The newspaper also had an inkling that it wanted to transition away from Quark.

Not thrilled

“We weren’t thrilled with where Quark was heading in terms of lack of response with newspapers,” Sanfield said. “Adobe InDesign seemed to appeal to the design types in the newsroom, so we started looking into that.”

DTI’s integration with Adobe sealed the deal for the newspaper, providing it with pagination and editorial capabilities.

Sanfield said InDesign was an easy leap for designers that previously worked in QuarkXPress.

“They already had some familiarity with either Photoshop or Illustrator,” he said.

In total, the newspaper has between 85 and 90 people using the editorial app Ñ everyone from editorial clerks and administrative staff to city editors and all of the reporters.

Mac based

The Daily Breeze was also one of the first newspapers to go all-Macintosh in the newsroom with DTI.

“That presented a few side issues, but our IS folks have really got this wired now so we’re solid,” Sanfield said.

Sanfield said the rapid pace at which technology evolves now means newspapers are looking at moving targets in terms of pagination.

“We had an SII system in here for 20 years and it updated a little bit but not that often,” he said. “Now as soon as you buy the product they’re always about to release the next one or they have the next one in progress. We’re on (NewsSpeed) 5.4 right now and it took us a few gray hairs to get it in and launched.

“There are some things (in Adobe CS2) that we wish we had but we can’t just go in and update the InDesign piece of this puzzle, it’s a major upgrade that needs to be done that DTI basically needs to release to us.”

That’s because of the integration between the apps. All of the newspaper’s writers and editors are working directly in InCopy for word processing and editing. Even stories that come in from reporters in the field as Microsoft Word documents for example, or stories that come in over the wires, are automatically converted to InCopy in the DTI system.

Filing cabinets

Sanfield equates the integration to being able to go to one file cabinet (the DTI database) that is divided into folders with photos, stories and graphics.

“When a reporter filed a story in the past and moved it over to Quark, it was like using two different filing cabinets Ñ there was no bridge between them,” he said. “Now it’s the same cabinet, it’s the same file. If a reporter needs to make a change while it’s on the editing desk, they can get into it and the changes will show up as soon as they save.”

While this close integration makes the system super-efficient, it also makes upgrades more difficult. The newspaper, therefore, cannot just go out and buy Adobe CS2 and plug it right in.

Happy where they’re at

It took the Daily Breeze almost a year to fine-tune the apps and make them stable, so Sanfield said he is not in a big hurry to undertake any additional upgrades at this point.

“To start the process over right off the bat is something that we want (to wait) a year or two to do.”

The editorial and pagination make archiving of pages, Web posting and late additions significantly easier for the paper, too, Sanfield said.

“If you have a late story you build a hole for it,” he said. “It’s basic pagination really, which we didn’t have before.”

Flexibility in deadline for its approximate 48 pages a night is increasingly important to the Breeze since it turned printing of its daily over to Southwest Offset Printing in nearby Gardena, Calif., in April (see Newspapers & Technology, February 2005). SOP approached the Daily Breeze about publishing the paper after The New York Times chose the printer to produce its West Coast edition, thereby ending NYT’s 20-year agreement with the Daily Breeze.

On most nights, Sanfield said his paper actually gains between five and 10 minutes on deadline since the partnership commenced.

Pagination makes it possible

Printing offsite is not something the Daily Breeze would have been able to do without this editorial and pagination software, according to Sanfield.

“We had to be able to send PDF or EPS files,” he said.

Quality has also improved for the Breeze since it began its partnership with SOP.

“It was pretty good before, but our reproduction is really outstanding now,” Sanfield said.

NewsSpeed 6, now under development, will further automate the pagination process, DTI said, and will support Adobe CS2 integration as well as new Web publishing tools.