The Boston Globe is in the midst of a project to implement a state-of-the-art advertising workflow - an undertaking made more complex because The New York Times Co.-owned daily not only has to integrate the app with external systems, but also acts as the disaster recovery site for The Times.

In total, three NYT dailies, The Globe, The Times and the Telegram & Gazette in Worcester, Mass., are anchoring their workflows around printnet workflow software from ppi, according to Paul McGeary, The Globe’s manager of publishing systems.

In the first endeavor of its kind for NYT Co., The Globe and the Telegram & Gazette will work from one ppi server housed in Boston, while The Times will work out of its own server in New York. That configuration, McGeary said, will allow The Globe to function as the disaster recovery site for The Times ppi workflow while The Times will likewise serve as back up for The Globe and T&G’s ppi apps.

Paul Klier Jr. of The Boston Globe’s pagination department works with ppi’s AdPag product.
Photo: The Boston Globe
 

Another major piece of the project will be The Globe’s upcoming integration of the ppi app with business software from SAP (see Newspapers & Technology, May 2006). PPI’s relationship with SAP was key in the NYT group buy.

“Basically ad order entry, financial and all that will be in a big SAP box,” McGeary said. “The theory is that if we take an ad in SAP, SAP knows how to send it to ppi and ppi knows how to understand it and process it,” McGeary said.

The backup functions of the three dailies, meantime, will also include the capability of protecting the papers’ CCI Europe editorial software, McGeary said.

New vision

The installation marks a new direction for The Globe, which in the past has used highly customized apps.

“We’re trying to use the ‘out-of-the-box’ solution now,” McGeary said. “Certainly we started that with some of [our CCI Europe software] although New York and Boston were customized and Worcester tried to use it out of the box and did fairly well. We really want to use these things as close as possible to the way they’re built so we don’t get into a lot of custom code where every time you do an upgrade it has to be triple checked to make sure that the upgrade didn’t break something custom that was done for us.”

The shrink-wrapped mentality means changing some of the group’s work practices but McGeary said resistance has been minimal.

“People understand that it’s a new world order,” he said. “The newer systems really do through configuration what you used to have to hire a programmer to do. A lot of things can be done just because of the configuration options that are available now with newer systems.”

Choosing to integrate ppi with its existing output apps (including those from CCI Europe and alfaQuest), created some unique challenges for The Globe.

“Their whole workflow is based on them doing the final output, so there were some snags that we hit when we decided to do it another way because we wanted to go out through CCI, at least for the ROP stuff,” he said. “And ppi had it’s roots in Europe - and in Europe typically an editor has complete control of a page including the placement of ads so you don’t do a lot of parallel processing in the way that an American paper does.

“Here, you’ve got several people all with their hands in a page so we had to change so we had to change some of the assumptions there.”

Thus far, McGeary said the apps have performed as advertised, with only an occasional glitch.

“We don’t always know that while it’s happening and at 10:30 at night you’re not going to pretend, so we keep the old system around as a kind of safety belt.”

That old system includes a mix of aging homegrown and legacy systems - a 15-year-old advertising pagination app and 30-year-old ad order entry software. Although the daily hasn’t completely cut off its old systems, McGeary said 85 percent to 100 percent of the ad production is running through ppi - including all classifieds and all individual ad creation and management for classified, display and ROP.

“There are a few sort of oddball products, like we have a weekly events magazine that we haven’t [transitioned to ppi] yet, but most nights, the entire paper is done in ppi.”

McGeary’s goal is to completely phase out the old systems by May.

In addition to its integration with SAP, McGeary said the standardized database architecture of ppi makes the process of producing common pages much easier.

“Our zoning scheme is only going to get more and more complex, so that ability to manage a number of products is key,” he said. “Part of it’s the order entry and that’s why we got into SAP, because they can handle those complex combination buys but also the ability to manage all the 13 variations of our Sunday paper.”

Cost effective

McGeary said The NYT Co. like other newspaper publishers, is looking for effective ways to cut costs, and this deployment is in keeping with that strategy.

“We all read the papers, we know it’s a tough time in the industry, so any time you can cut costs by not having to duplicate systems, or not having your own separate environment for a disaster recovery system it’s beneficial,” he said.

The cost savings will be even more apparent when the SAP integration takes place.

SAP will function as a universal box, linking The Times, The Globe and the Telegram & Gazette, McGeary said. The International Herald Tribune may also be added to the mix.

“If you call The Boston Globe, the ad goes in there, if you call the Telegram & Gazette the ad goes in there, if you call The New York Times the ad goes in there,” McGeary said, explaining how the software will oversee the process and fuel more combo buys, something the papers rarely do currently.

“For instance, you could buy the Northeast edition of The Times and The Globe’s West zone. If you wanted to do something like that, ppi will allow us to paginate wild combos.”

All of the ppi and SAP hardware will be housed in New York and the backup will be in Boston.

“We’ll be the (backup) site for The Times as well, but in this case, with the ppi system, we have our own primary plus New York’s backup and in New York they have their primary plus our backup,” he said.

McGeary said the project is the newspaper’s next step in consolidation. “There was a day in the industry when computers first came in and there was an awful lot of free money,” he said.  “You could pay an enormous amount for a system and still have a return on investment. Now the easy money has been saved and we really need to hone in on what can we save an how can we save it.”