Publishers are turning to browser-based workflow applications to streamline the management of production data across multiple sites and customers.

Spanish-language newspaper publisher Impremedia and The Ledger in Lakeland, Fla., are among a growing number of companies that migrated to Web-based software to handle myriad production jobs.

Impremedia publishes three dailies, a weekly and two magazines at seven print sites. The Ledger, meantime, coordinates the production of 57 commercial jobs in addition to its own daily. Each publisher deployed Presteligence’s browser-based NewsXtreme to lasso its respective workloads.

Los Angeles-based Impremedia late last year rolled out NewsXtreme in a bid to better control the process of producing the publisher’s mix of newspapers and entertainment magazines, according to Bob Mason, chief technology officer.

Impremedia publishes La Opinion, La Opinion Contigo and La Vibre in Los Angeles; El Diario La Prensa and Hoy in New York; La Prensa in Orlando and Tampa, Fla., La Raza in Chicago, El Mensajero in San Francisco and Vista Magazine in Miami.

Photo: The Ledger
Standing, Al Tamalavitch and Lee Mieles, prepress image technicians, and seated, Chuck McDanal, production systems manager for The Ledger in Lakeland, Fla., view pages in NewsXtreme.
 

While it operates the facility that prints the Los Angeles publications, the other six sites are owned by outside companies.

“We started rolling out the workflow with La Opinion in Los Angeles where most of our technology is actually centralized out of our corporate office,” Mason said. “We got that up and running and we’re expanding it out to Chicago, San Francisco and New York — we’re in the process now of configuring Hoy New York, which we recently purchased from Tribune.”

All of the publisher’s products go through NewsXtreme before being sent out for printing.

“We start the process with doing page planning and then we take our files directly from the layout system — in the case of Los Angeles, we take dummies from (Software Consulting Services’) Layout-8000 and we create those dummies in the Presteligence system,” Mason explained. “That gives us our page tracking from the very beginning, before pages are actually output.”

App uses file naming to route jobs

Presteligence can establish by file name whether a job came from the editorial system, the classified system, or from a local workstation and then determine to what location and what device a file should go.

“If we get a page that comes out of the editorial system, based on the file name I know that it’s a Los Angeles (La Opinion) page that needs to go to the Washington Street printing facility and it’ll automatically route that process and based on rules, determine what type of file should be delivered,” Mason said.

NewsXtreme also allows Impremedia to perform Web-based soft proofing. Once a page comes into NewsXtreme it shows up in a Web browser in a preplanned set of pages.

“The Web site actually shows the end user, in this case the newsroom, what pages have come in, what ones have been approved and what ones are yet to come,” Mason said.

The app notifies a user that a page has come into the system and the approver opens the page, reviews it and clicks a check mark to indicate that the page is released. Final approval is generally assigned to one person at a site, Mason said, and in the case of Los Angeles that task is given to a designer who’s been involved in creating the pages.

“In the case of our remote properties like Chicago, we can take the pages right off from here and send the page or deliver the PDF via an FTP site back to their location and then they can come to the Web site and look at it and make approvals.”

That final action is what sends a page to the physical production facility where film is imaged.

No more drop folders

For Impremedia, NewsXtreme has simplified the publisher’s once-arduous process of using drop folders for every job.

“It really does simplify the whole workflow,” Mason said. “I’ve got a map here that I showed some of our executive awhile back and it is two and a half pages wide of all the different locations and folders and things you had to know in order to drop a page.

“Now it’s simple, you just drop a page to one location no matter what system you’re on and the file name decides what to do from that point forward.”

That’s been a huge benefit to end users that were often confused as to how to send pages to the proper location.

“We’ve freed up a lot of time that they were spending troubleshooting,” Mason said. “It gives us some real quality control and management oversight, and having all of the pages planned into the site gives everybody from the creative group to editorial on through to production real-time information about where we are to meet our deadline and where we are in the process of sending pages.”

Fla. Daily leveraging app

For The Ledger, leveraging a workflow solution helps manage The New York Times-owned paper’s heavy workload, which in addition to its daily includes 57 commercial jobs.

To that end, The Ledger (daily, 73,736; Sunday, 89,847) last month began using NewsXtreme following two weeks of testing page setups and configurations, said Greg Summitt, prepress manager.

For The Ledger, NewsXtreme facilitates detailed job scheduling, drives pagination and enables tracking and reporting, he said.

“It gave us all of these various elements on an updated output management system to give us standardized reporting and production times and schedules.”

Because of the paper’s heavy commercial load, the remote access capability of the browser-based workflow app appealed to The Ledger.

“We wanted the commercial customers to get a post-RIP page view so they can approve (jobs) and then they move on to plate,” Summitt said.

The Ledger’s commercial jobs are a mix of weeklies, biweeklies, monthlies and semi-annual coldest web publications.

True WYSIWYG

All told, The Ledger stands to have between 75 and 100 possible users accessing NewsXtreme between its own daily staff and commercial customers, all of which he believes will see the benefits.

“They’ll definitely see the advantage of process control,” he said. “We’re trying to get to the point where we can honestly tell them, ‘what you see is what you get,’” he said.

One of The Ledger’s biggest jobs is printing a regional edition of its parent’s flagship, New York Times. That is handled by Agfa’s Arkitex workflow app.

“All of The Times satellite print sites use Arkitex so we have that here, too,” Summitt said. “We happen to be one of only two sites owned by The Times that also does satellite printing for The Times.” The other is The Boston Globe.

The Ledger two years ago installed two Advantage violet computer-to-plate units from Agfa and it was at that time that the daily began evaluating workflow software. Before NewsXtreme, The Ledger used an aging Oman workflow app from Agfa.

“When it all washed out we were looking for long-term software updates with a service contract and Presteligence was willing to meet that need,” Summitt said.

Through that contract, The Ledger will get upgrades to its NewsXtreme and BlackMagic app (which the publisher already had installed for inking) whenever new versions come out.

“We had one BlackMagic server so now we have two and those drive six different HP wide-body plotters here,” Summitt said. “We were looking to drive TIFFs and PDFs out to the Web for our multimedia presentation and for the e-tearsheet project we were doing (also through Presteligence).”

Summitt said NewsXtreme has tied together the workflow from the business system front end all the way through postproduction.

“To be able to do reporting and clarification on any issues that cause delays and to reduce the number of error-inducing steps and the number of hands that touch the materials from front to back has just streamlined everything,” he said.

It’s also caused the entire staff to pay more attention to specific jobs, he said.

“If our sales staff incorrectly put information on their ticket, not only does it affect billing, but it now affects all the way through to platemaking, so we have the ability to track those types of things and reduce those errors a great deal.”

NewsXtreme has also allowed The Ledger to do some microzoning and ZIP-code zoning of its own daily product.