Solutions in Unexpected Places

New Media Award:
Assisting Online Directory Advertisers

by L. Carol Christopher

The Boston Globe’s boston.com allows online-directory advertisers to automatically access site-traffic statistics. Staffers developed the system by inserting clear pixels with unique IP addresses into more than 700 online-directory pages.

For many local advertisers, the World Wide Web is still too much of an uncharted frontier. But not in Boston.

The Boston Globe’s boston. com, which provides multipage sites for 700 or so local advertisers in its online yellow-page directory, decided to provide them with a roadmap to success.

Advertisers can now get automatically generated traffic reports to see how their Web advertising is working. While shrink-wrapped software offers similar details for banner and tile ads, directory advertisers typically remain in the dark about site usage.

Boston.com delivers on-demand traffic numbers for every Web page of a directory site, as well as the total number of page views and page views by day of the week, explains Operations Manager Monica Hubert. Customers also receive a monthly report via e-mail.

Equally important, boston.com staffers are ready to help when directory sites don’t draw traffic. "If a customer doesn’t have x number of page views, we analyze the numbers and figure out how to help them," says Hubert. Help may come in the form of a redesign, listing in another yellow-page category, or additional, complementary advertising, she says.

Dave Beck, NAA’s media-technology director, applauds the project’s concept, appearance and navigational design. He also describes it as gutsy.

"There’s no opportunity to put a spin on the numbers," he explains.

Boston.com met Beck’s two key criteria: assisting customers and simplifying staff duties. "This project accomplished both," he says. "It has a self-service feature that allows customers to look at their numbers any time, and it makes things easier on the staff."

The site went live Oct. 1, following a summer of intensive work combining the efforts of 10 people–staff site designers, software engineers, and four full-time, paid summer interns, who inserted the HTML trick that actually tracks the page views.

The interns went to each of boston.com’s 700 directory sites and inserted a clear pixel into the code of each page. Each pixel has a unique IP address; when a page is requested, its pixel logs a page view into boston.com’s database.

Project Manager Patrick Martinack says the biggest development problem, aside from keeping the interns awake in the face of some seriously monotonous work, involved communications. Designers, engineers, and interns all could be working on the same page at the same time, and reworked pages appeared without the magic pixel, so their page views weren’t tracked. "We learned we had to involve the designers so there was no conflict," he says.

In addition to Martinack, Hubert and the interns, the project relied on the efforts of software engineer Darren Chamberlin and boston.com’s design department–Margaret Gebauer, Kathy Weller, Calvin Chin, Andrew Gershman, Camille Thomas, Kristen Bevilacqua and Anya Malkin.

Although the project now includes such features as frequently asked questions, a guide to reading the reports, contact information and tips for search-engine inclusion, Martinack expects development to continue. Next on the agenda: archived traffic reports that extend the current three-month limit so advertisers can view and compare reports from different time periods. n

Editorial Award:
Syracuse’s Database-Driven Planning

by Heidi Ernst

Both BEAT (Budget and Editorial Assignment Tracker), top, and POST (Page Output Tracking System), bottom, were designed in-house at Syracuse Newspapers Inc. Both use standard Microsoft Access databases and were developed in a few months by involving many departments.

Being cheap and easy isn’t always a good thing. But it sure worked for the homegrown editorial systems that Syracuse Newspapers designed last year.

The company behind the Syracuse Post-Standard, The Herald-Journal and Syracuse Herald American produced each system–one for editorial budgeting, the other for page tracking–in only a few months.

"Syracuse Newspapers didn’t overcomplicate. They asked how they could make their mission happen for not a lot of bucks," says John W. Iobst, NAA vice president of technical research. "The combination of efforts they developed internally to make operations work better was what took them to the top."

Having the right attitude made the projects a success, says Bart Pollock, the papers’ managing editor for systems. "It just took resolve on the part of the different departments to improve communication," he says. "Once you have a will, finding the way is not that hard a thing."

The first dilemma, late press starts, surfaced at weekly process-review meetings. Paginators weren’t sure if pages were RIPing, and pre-press staffers didn’t know which pages they were waiting for. Within a few months, a team representing many departments had designed POST (Page Output Status Tracker), a program in a Microsoft Access ’97 database. Access already was installed on all 225 newsroom PCs; pre-press installed one new computer to run POST.

Five screen displays show deadline times, when pages are output and received–or not–and when negatives are produced. Newsroom managers also can check which pages were output late.

"It has revolutionized deadline performance here," says Pollock. Of 140 recent editions, the press started late only nine times because of late newsroom page output–and all but one were delayed less than 12 minutes.

Building on what they had learned, staffers undertook a second effort. Called BEAT (Budget and Editorial Assignment Tracker), the three-month project aimed to keep management abreast of newsroom assignments.

"We asked how we could use this as a planning and organizational tool, as well as to let department heads know what’s going on," explains Chris Becker, manager of editorial-production systems. Overcoming the reluctance of some staffers to share advance details, the IS and editorial team created a user-friendly system that lets editors enter essential assignment data such as deadline, length, graphics and news budgets. Reporters’ work schedules are stored and deadlines are tracked automatically.

"You can create and save as many queries as you want," says Pollock. "And one of the coolest things is that it’s like a giant game of Go Fish–you can say, ‘Give me all your stories with the word "environment" in the description.’" Better yet, librarians, researchers and designers use BEAT to collaborate on stories in progress.

BEAT, which runs on all newsroom PCs, uses Access ’97 as its database engine as well, but it’s written in Visual Basic, which the paper already had. The original version has been rewritten to increase speed, says Becker, and will debut early next year.

Cost savings are difficult to quantify. "How do you put a value on better long-range planning?" asks Pollock. "What’s most significant is that we’ve accomplished these goals through the highest levels of interdepartmental cooperation," he says. "Everybody makes some effort, and the result is an improvement from which all of us benefit."

Business Award:
CoxNet–Sharing WANdering Ads

by Mark Toner

CoxNet’s AdShare program takes advantage of a common system architecture at all 16 Cox Newspapers properties, as well as the wide-area network linking them. A plug-in designed for its ad-building software, AdShare is itself based on a similar editorial-budgeting tool developed for the WAN.

Many of Cox Newspapers’ smaller publications used to have just one creative staffer. You know, that pixel-stained wretch permanently parked at the Mac in the back room, cranking out spec ads for clients, promotional materials for staffers and–oh, yeah, the ads that actually pay the bills.

Now each paper has more than 40. Credit a new twist to Cox’s groundbreaking wide-area network, which dates to the 1996 Olympics–long before the words "intranet" and "virtual private network" became techie obsessions.

The Olympics are long over, but CoxNet continues evolving beyond its original editorial content-sharing role. This past year, it jumped the wall separating the newsroom from the advertising department, allowing the company’s 16 newspapers to share spec ads, art, copy and design concepts.

"It was an outgrowth of everything we’d done in editorial," says John Reetz, CoxNet’s director. "We wanted to use the technology in a different way, just as we try to use stories in different ways."

AdShare, as it’s called, allows staffers at any Cox paper to tap into spec ads designed by their counterparts at other Cox properties. Designed as a plug-in to the papers’ AdSpeed ad-building software, developed by Digital Technology International of Springville, Utah, its strength is its seamlessness. Users simply search and pull spec ads from the WAN as if they were browsing their local file server.

Demand for spec-ad material is growing industrywide, and several vendors have launched Internet-based services in the past year. But aside from shuttling material via couriers or FedEx, CoxNet marks the first concerted newspaper-group effort to pool creative resources.

"They took full advantage of their network," says NAA

Pre-Press Manager Joan Phillips, touting the result as a powerful "single resource."

While AdShare benefits greatly from existing infrastructure–the WAN itself, plus common DT systems at all 16 Cox papers–other newspaper groups have consulted with Reetz as they ponder networks of their own.

"I think five years down the road, you’ll see a lot of interest," he predicts.

It actually was an editorial project–a budgeting tool developed for CoxNet–that got Reetz thinking about ads. Since Cox’s advertising and editorial systems use the same DT databases, it dawned on him that the budgeting tool might translate easily to AdSpeed. So in

early 1998, Reetz, Jennifer Simonds, CoxNet’s advertising-and-marketing specialist, and Systems Manager Perry Patrick worked side by side with DT programmers to develop a prototype, polling staffers at different Cox papers to ensure AdShare fit the varying work flows.

"We were looking for something logical for a creative person at a big paper and an account rep at a smaller newspaper," Reetz explains.

CoxNet now boasts 400-to-500 spec ads at any given time, and again its role may expand–this time to include Newspaper In Education and promotional materials. And while anecdotes of time-strapped staffers at Cox’s smaller papers pulling spec ads from AdShare abound, Reetz notes that those papers also contribute to the cause.

"They don’t generate the volume, but they do produce spec ads others use," he notes.

So once again at Cox Newspapers, it’s share and share alike.

Pre-Press Award:
A Provident Page-Tracking Solution

by Bob Sims

The Providence Journal’s page-tracking system was built using Microsoft Excel.

Page tracking through news and production departments can seem more a nightmare than an organized process.

The whereabouts and when-to-comes of pages making up multiple editions are too often tracked by a universal and usually faulty method: Flurries of last-minute phone calls and colorful dry-eraser boards marked with asterisks, bullets and exclamation points.

"Why am I getting another copy of page 2 from the Lino?" is the perpetual question facing pre-press workers. All too often, the answer is at the other end of the news desk, ext. 1234, where the caller is met by a ringing, unanswered phone.

Should there be such misery?

No. While commercial page-tracking systems have been available for some time, The Providence Journal found an inexpensive alternative. The paper’s staff now uses off-the-shelf Microsoft Excel software to track pages through a seven-edition production cycle.

"Rather than spend $50,000-to-$60,000 on a page-tracking package, they took it upon themselves to look at a less expensive way," says Joan Phillips, NAA’s pre-press manager.

The page-tracking system uses shared Excel workbook files; programmers created 28 macros imprinting pages with time stamps and colors. Users on any of four Macintosh computers can access the same Excel workbook simultaneously and see the status of the ad stack in red, the news hole in yellow, and pages fully paginated and ready for transmission in green. Added to the traditional traffic-light colors are an indicator that a negative has been received and another to show that a plate has been made. Other macros mark makeover pages for edition changes to accommodate zoning.

The daily workbook file also includes general comments shared department-to-department about overall production issues for a given night or edition.

"Through the input of various production staff, the program became the ‘stone soup’ of page flow, with each department building in their needs to make the program a success," says Linda Natale, assistant operations director.

John Hazard, director of quality improvement and training, built the initial Excel files in about four hours. Refinements were made by observing work-flow processes and sharing ideas with copy editors, ad builders, page assemblers, platemakers and press operators. Lisa LaRoche, who directs pre-publishing at the Journal, was another champion of the project.

Along with the estimated $60,000 price tag for a proprietary system, the Journal spared workers the 40 department-to-department phone calls related to page tracking per night, the trio estimates.

Hazard now is weighing Excel to track inserts for salespeople, production workers and circulation staff. n

Press & Materials Award:
Guatemala’s Gizmos

by Clark Robinson

Borrowing a concept from a commercial press, staffers at Prensa Libre built a bustle-wheel system (above) for their web presses, reducing fan out.

Where is the new hotbed of technical innovation in press maintenance? Try Guatemala.

That’s right. The 2000 TechNews Best Practices Award winners for Press & Materials come from south of the border–south of Mexico’s border, that is.

TechNews recognizes Maintenance Manager Jorge Pineda, and Mechanical Technicians Walter Romero and Juan Carlos Galindo of Prensa Libre S.A. for not one, but two outstanding press innovations. The first solves the ubiquitous fan-out problem on tower presses, the second an irritating and costly parts problem on automatic web pasters.

The fan-out phenomenon is a major cause of misregistration. Newsprint expands as it takes on moisture from one printing unit to the next, making it difficult to lay down successive colors with precision.

The 120,000-circulation Prensa Libre was suffering a bad case of fan out on its Goss Urbanite presses. "The advertisers were complaining," recalls Pineda. " We had a lot of waste, and we had to run a lot of make-good ads."

In researching the problem, Pineda visited Prensa Libre’s commercial-printing plant. The plant uses a Harris 1000 horizontal press to produce, among other jobs, ad inserts for the newspaper. To Pineda’s surprise, the commercial press was not experiencing fan out. The reason can be summed up in two words: bustle wheels.

To prevent a ball-bearing screw in its web-pasting system from breaking (upper right), staffers altered the paster design, removing ball bearings and a ball-bearing ramp, as well as selecting a more flexible bronze sleeve.

"The wheels run on top of the paper and deform it to correct for fan out," says Pineda.

"They are commonly used on horizontal presses, but we had never heard of them working on a stacked configuration."

Undaunted, Pineda and Romero (with input from Galindo) produced mechanical drawings for a mechanism that would allow bustle wheels to be installed on the Urbanites.

Determining a workable design was a process of trial and error. Mounting the mechanism on the press proved difficult–problems arose with both the distance and the angle. Complicating

matters, the Harris bustle wheels were also sharp at the point they touched the paper, much like the wheels chefs use to slice pizza.

Both the mounting problem and the wheel geometry initially caused web breaks on the Urbanite. The final design places flat, aluminum wheels at just the right position on the web.

"Adding the bustle wheels reduced our registration problem by almost 50 percent," says Production Director Lazaro Urizar. "Our advertisers are happy, and so are we."

Observes NAA Vice President of Newspaper Services Tom Croteau, "Prensa Libre has demonstrated how creativity and resourcefulness can be combined to solve problems that have arisen from an increased use of color in newspapers. And by fabricating the bustle-wheel assembly in-house, they accomplished their goal at a minimal cost."

Solving the web-paster problem involved similar feats of mechanical ingenuity. Among the most important systems on an offset web press, automatic web pasters allow operators to maintain running impressions during a roll change and paper feed.

Prensa Libre’s paster used a ball-bearing screw to lift newsprint rolls into the press. Unfortunately, the screw was breaking every 15 days and was expensive to replace.

Frustrated, Pineda, Romero and Galindo decided to change the design. They used the same screw, but removed the ball bearings and ball-bearing ramp.

They also changed the sleeve to bronze, a more flexible material than the manufacturer’s steel, and one less prone to breaking the screw.

Since making these changes on their eight automatic pasters three years ago, Prensa Libre has not had to replace a single screw.

For these heroic efforts, TechNews says, "Felicidades, Prensa Libre!"

Packaging & Distribution Award:
Ingesting Odd-Size Inserts

by Mark Toner

The Sun News’ flexible backstop allows odd-shaped ad materials to be fed into inserters.

With the feast of inserts served up to them daily, mailroom personnel are used to stomaching just about anything. But at The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C., they just couldn’t digest, of all things, a pizza slice.

Along with the occasional door hanger, odd-shaped inserts resembling bottles and ice-cream cones created heartburn for workers, who struggled to find ways to stuff them into hoppers designed for rectangular preprints.

"Variations in insert shapes and sizes are growing so much wider now, regular hoppers have a difficult time," notes Harshad Matalia, NAA’s post-press manager.

While typical preprint advertisers are generally aware of equipment limitations, the problem reached geometric proportions in Myrtle Beach, a resort community whose merchants often ask to insert extra brochures and door hangers. Making matters worse, The Sun News also prints three smaller weekly newspapers, whose mom-and-pop-business advertisers don’t necessarily understand why, say, a triangular insert shaped like a pizza slice won’t fit into a rectangular hopper feeder.

"We’d been saying no for so long, it was obviously becoming an issue," says Packing Manager Walt Shrewsbury.

Working in a "melting pot" mailroom full of different equipment made finding a ready-made solution difficult.

So Shrewsbury built one himself.

While not exactly made of piano wire and chewing gum, his widget incorporated the skeletal remains of cast-off mailroom equipment. Tools included a leftover hopper kit from a retired Harris 848, an L-bracket from an infeed gate, random parts from a Muller 275, and a variety of nuts and bolts. Shrewsbury even devoted some quick-release handles he had "lying around the house" to the cause.

After much tinkering and numerous revisions, the result was what Shrewsbury calls the "flexible backstop," a simple contraption with fewer than a dozen parts.

"They call it all sorts of names here, but that’s a more appropriate term," he jokes.

In technical terms, the contraption is just that–a flexible backstop. In layman’s terms, the backstop…well, flexes so the stops match the shape of the insert, acting as supports as they are fed from the top of the hopper.

"It sets the pocket to the insert," Shrewsbury says.

Traditional feed aids are typically bolted to a shaft or a bracket, limiting their flexibility. So Shrewsbury added the quick-release handle and bolted the stops to one side of the feed tray, allowing the entire assembly to rotate about 30 degrees in either direction–enough to wedge in a pizza slice.

The configuration also allows the widget to be pulled off and changed on the fly without stopping the inserter. That’s important, since most of the small businesses using odd-shaped inserts want zoned or single-copy placement. Equally important in the paper’s capacity-strained mailroom, it allows several differently shaped inserts to share a single hopper.

Shrewsbury continues refining the backstop, adding repair capabilities by including a small bracket and a reflector triggering the system’s photo cells. He has grander schemes in mind, but they’ll have to wait.

"I have to get the machine shop involved," he says.

And with heavy machinery on his side, the world wonders just what else Shrewsbury will be able to create.

Health & Safety Award:
Upgraded Program Yields Results

by Anna America

Creation of a modified work program, placing injured employees in less physically demanding jobs with the permission of their doctors, reduced lost work days.

A companywide emphasis on safety, including new committees and management-performance criteria, helped The San Diego Union-Tribune prevent injuries.

When David M. Ferguson took over as The San Diego Union-Tribune manager of safety and workers’ compensation five years ago, the company’s safety program wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t winning any awards, either.

The comprehensive overhaul Ferguson helped orchestrate has changed that. The goal, Ferguson says, was simple: Reduce the impact of work-related injuries on the company’s bottom line. The results have been dramatic.

From 1996 to 1998, the number of lost-time injuries dropped from 65 to five, out of a staff of about 1,875. Even more telling, from 1995 to 1998, the number of lost work days plunged from 3,772 to 28. Another improvement any company would envy: From 1994 to 1998, the Union-Tribune’s workers’ compensation premiums fell more than 54 percent.

"The improved safety program had a remarkable impact on reducing injuries and lost work days," observes Donald N. Hensel, NAA’s environmental-and-safety services manager. He gives the program high marks for its broad, multitiered approach.

Most significant, Ferguson argues, was a "modified-duty" program placing injured employees capable of working into less physically demanding jobs for up to 90 days.

"We’ve got all the departments on board, so we can always find a place where they can be useful," Ferguson says. Previously, a worker unable to perform his or her regular job was not allowed to work at all. That hurt both the company and the employee, since workers out on injury leave get only partial pay.

Ongoing communication with treating physicians and therapists makes the program work, says workers’ compensation specialist Rhonda Russell. Any time an employee is injured, Russell and the treating physician work together to create a modified work plan. She also follows up to ensure employees are recovering as expected and complying with doctors’ work restrictions.

Another element involved beefing up safety committees. The company now has nine such committees, up from five, and the groups have been empowered to "proactively identify and minimize hazards that lead to injuries," Ferguson says. The ergonomic safety committee, for example, evaluated equipment and furniture, and recommended a host of changes.

Company officials also began detailed quarterly reviews of workers’ compensation claims with the insurance carrier. This kind of attention, says Russell–herself a former adjuster–helps ensure nothing falls through the cracks. As a result, claims close faster, reducing reserve dollars.

One of the most crucial factors, however, has simply been the emphasis placed on safety companywide, Ferguson says. Written policies have been expanded, and safety is a regular topic at staff and management meetings. And to drive home just how important safety is, managers are rated in their performance appraisals on how well they implement and maintain company efforts.

Ferguson and Russell also found other ways to communicate directly to front-line workers. The pair spent a day working side-by-side with mailroom staff, loading carts and feeding hoppers; they plan additional "field days" in other areas. The benefits are twofold, Russell says. "Not only can we experience first-hand the safety issues of the job site, but also it builds credibility for us, because the staff sees that we really care about making this a better and safer place for them." n