Special Report: Best Practices 2004

You won’t find the latest whiz-bang technology in the 2004 Presstime Best Practices Awards winner’s circle. Instead, this year’s honorees have tackled challenges that newspaper executives face daily, all in innovative, duplicable ways.

This is the eighth time that the Best Practices Awards have been bestowed by Presstime staffers and representatives of NAA’s Technology Group, and the first since TechNews and the awards moved to the pages of Presstime magazine.

Special thanks go to two additional judges: Robert McLane, a member of NAA’s environmental, health and safety committee and director of safety programs at The Washington Post; and Ed Pieratt, chairman of NAA’s pre-publishing and new media committee and director of technology for the newspaper division of The E.W. Scripps Co. in Cincinnati.

Winning teams will receive $1,000 and an award plaque at this month’s NEXPO® 2004 conference in Washington. And newspaper executives everywhere have received a few new tips on how to do what they do best–better.

Here, in no particular order, are the winners:

1. The Los Angeles Times uncovers unsafe practices through detailed investigations of many on-the-job injuries. The result: Incidents recordable by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration at one production center dropped from nearly 40 in 2001 to fewer than five in 2003.

2. The Sun in Baltimore measures performance not just of pressroom equipment and teams but also individual personnel. Without this “holistic” approach to improvement, production stumbling blocks might go unnoticed.

3. Special software tools and a firm commitment to the fee-for-content business model enables Web site administrators at the Post-Register of Idaho Falls, Idaho, to save time and money while enhancing PostRegister.com’s customer service.

4. By transforming a conventional online real estate listings section into a multimedia Web portal, The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post brings dynamic content to those without Internet connections via several interactive kiosks in shopping malls throughout its market.

5. Witnessing the confusion that can arise when ad builders, sales reps and others collaborate on advertisements, The Dallas Morning News devised software that allows all parties to see the current state of an ad throughout the production process via the newspaper’s intranet.

6. In an industry that “[doesn’t] really like to standardize things,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has boosted quality and reduced waste through its ISO certification.

7. The Honolulu Advertiser enjoys greater online visibility by syndicating its headlines to several third-party Web sites using the Rich Site Summary, or RSS, format.

First Published:
January 30, 2004