Editor’s note: The dream of a “lights-out operation” or “production without manual intervention” is today almost reality, despite the fact that many tasks continue to be done manually. Automation permits major advances, but also involves certain limitations.

The automation of many tasks in newspaper production has been reality for several years. Newspapers already use software and robotics to perform a number of production tasks, from webbing up to pagination.

Still, much work remains. While it’s perhaps unrealistic to assume that newspaper production will ever attain the level of automation found in other manufacturing industries, the drive to mechanize as much as possible will continue.

“All controlled and repetitive processes to which the manual intervention of an operator brings no added value are predestined for automation,” said Antonio Jorge Bafaro, production manager at the Argentine newspaper La Nacion.

Automate to grow

There are several areas of production in which automation is making major advances. Let us first take a look at some of the factors driving the trend towards automation:

*The possibility to develop new activities within the newspaper - Media convergence, for example, is making it increasingly necessary to digitize the workflow as far as possible, with the ultimate objective to be able to format and transmit the same information to all distribution channels through a simple mouse click. “We decided in favor of a totally digital workflow as the basis for our media convergence process,” said Norbert Schmid, chief information officer of the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany. “Today, the entire content (texts, images, complete pages, ads, ad elements such a logos and boxes, video and audio information) are stored in a content management system that supports all current and future distribution channels.”

*Relieve personnel from routine tasks so they can devote their attention to activities that give a greater added value to the finished product - “Now that the editors are in a position, using templates, to automatically lay out their articles, the design department can concentrate on more sophisticated jobs, such as creating information graphics or special pages with a highly complex design,” said Carlos Alberto Lora, head of IT at South American newspaper El Colombiano.

*Outsource some of the tasks traditionally carried out within the newspaper - “Newspapers are starting to give advertising customers the possibility to produce their own ads and enter them into the newspaper database for later publication, thereby relieving the newspaper personnel of this work,” said Don Oldham, chief executive officer of Digital Technology International.

Two sides of the coin

When the decision is taken to launch an automation project, the anticipated benefits are obvious, said Sue Klose, advertising development director at Tribune Publishing in Chicago, which recently purchased CCI Europe’s AdDesk software for 10 of its newspapers.

The software will enable “fewer mistakes, higher speed, moderate personnel reductions and a greater flexibility to be able to assign personnel to more demanding tasks,” she said.

That doesn’t mean automation is without drawbacks. After a while, there is the risk that “personnel forget how certain tasks are done manually - just like how being used to using calculators has caused many of us to lose touch with simple arithmetic - and this can turn out to be a real problem in case of systems failing,” said Anthony Cheng, senior vice president of Singapore Press Holdings.

The fact must also be borne in mind that the newspaper is a product that must be produced new every day, and that makes it “vital to have available back-up systems as well as a certain number of personnel to ensure that, in the event of failure of the automated systems, the newspaper still gets to the readers,” said Jacques Valembois, technical manager of Imprimerie Rossel, which produces Le Soir in Belgium.

Nor should it be forgotten that every new system must be integrated more precisely with the existing systems.

Personnel automation and human operators seem to be a contradiction. But these are two closely interconnected variables. “The absence of analyses and advance agreements on what is to happen with freed-up personnel can condemn all automation efforts to fail,” Bafaro said.

Conversely, automating certain tasks may appear to be possible but not economically justifiable, said Purnendu Sen, technical director at The Times of India Group.

That’s one reason why inserting continues to be done manually at The Times of India, “because people are cheaper than machines,” he said.

But that will change as print runs become more complex. “With print runs between 800,000 and 1 million copies, manually inserting four to six items daily is slow and no longer practical,” Sen said.

Automation also means training.

“We continuously train our people so that they stay state-of-the-art and are therefore better able to manage new equipment and new tasks,” said Valembois.

However, the level of automation that has been reached already in some production areas, such as printing, also makes it necessary to “redefine the tasks and competencies of the personnel,” said Manfred Werfel, Ifra research director.