The (New York) Daily News is in the midst of a project that will bring all of its advertising production operations in-house by year-end with help from Mediaspectrum Inc.’s EngineBridge production software.

The EngineBridge installation at the Daily News includes AdWatch for tracking and management of both print and online ads. The application will integrate with the newspaper’s existing Admarc and ATS front ends and will work alongside Adobe InDesign to build ads and manage content, Mediaspectrum said. Mediaspectrum “eProofs” will also be deployed eventually to streamline traditional proofing and allow the News to offer proofs and an ad upload portal to advertisers and staff members.

‘Unique requirements’

“Being the fifth largest daily circulation paper, our requirements are fairly unique due to a varied roster of advertising clients and we needed a solution with an automated component level assignment to ads and a ‘drag and drop’ assignment feature into other applications,” said Neil Maheshwari, vice president of finance and general manager of business operations. “We also want seamless integration with our existing OPI servers and (OneVision) Asura preflight solution, which was offered by Mediaspectrum.”

The Daily News also plans to deploy Mediaspectrum’s AdWatchEX browser-based tracking software as part of the installation.

Prior to this project, the Daily News outsourced all of its ads to Applied Graphics Technologies.

“Mediaspectrum is a long-term strategy for us - not just a software package,” said Joseph Pennisi, vice president of IT for the Daily News.

Guinea pig

North Jersey Media Group, which prints The Record (serving Hackensack and Bergen County) and The Herald News (serving State County) at its Rockaway, N.J., facility, completed a similar project 13 months ago. That project and some of the workflow the newspaper implemented was instrumental in developing key aspects of  some of the behind-the-scenes pieces of Mediaspectrum’s AdWatch tracking module, according to Mike Colonna, IT manager for NJMG.  

“They wanted to either mimic or make better what we had,” he said. “They were pretty much able to mimic everything, but one thing they did add that we didn’t have was (the integration) with OneVision, and we encouraged them to use OneVision’s Asura job ticketing.”

The Asura piece of the puzzle, Colonna said, allows users to query their advertising software to find out everything about an ad, then set up the job ticket and send it to Asura.

“We wanted to streamline that process and that’s the process they actually sell now,” he said.

Unlike the Daily News, which when its project is complete will have brought all ad production in-house, 90 percent of NJMG’s ads are created externally. NJMG had in-house ad-building capability prior to its installation, however.

No preflighting here

NJMG is one of the first newspapers to eliminate ad preflighting altogether - something Colonna credits to the new workflow.

“We don’t have a preflight department,” he said. “We were able to do that because of our workflow and we had [Mediaspectrum] come in and fine-tune it.”

Following the deployment of ad tracking functionality - what Mediaspectrum bills as AdWatch - NJMG was able to deploy the e-tearsheets module of the EngineBrige app in a fairly short amount of time, Colonna said.

“The whole workflow was up and running and fully in production in 90 days and once we were comfortable, it took us about 30 days and we had e-tearsheets up and running,” he said.

Next up for NJMG is the addition of Mediaspectrum’s e-proofing module and the AdWatchEX Web client.

NJMG uses the workflow for both dailies, as well as all of its commercial work.