Full Pagination, Ahead of Schedule
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has completed its transition to full pagination two years ahead of schedule, rolling out a Macintosh-based system to almost 600 editorial users and paginating more than 10,000 broadsheet pages a month.
"From the editorial standpoint, we can say we're complete, 100 percent to negative--including ads," says John Reetz, assistant managing editor for news operations and head of the company's pagination effort "There are cleanup and fine-tuning issues ahead in l998, but basically, we're done."
While the paper's classifieds remain on an old Camex system, all other systems have been replaced by Digital Technology International of Orem, Utah, which is supplying systems to all 16 Cox Newspapers properties, as well as a wide-area network linking them.
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Planning (top) paid off in the implementation of The Journal-Constitution's nearly 600-seat system. |
The AJC's pagination committee, led by Reetz and co-chaired by Rod Miller, pre-press director, and Jim Davis, director of technology support, started as a news committee when pagination became a priority in 1994. It then switched to three-way leadership--news, pre-press and computer services--as the effort broadened in late 1996, then swept through the rest of the paper in 1997.
Tests of the DT system on the High Style and Home and Garden sections, and the daily editorial pages, began in 1993. The first significant order for DT software came in January 1995, when the AJC ordered editorial databases, ImageSpeed for managing graphics, PageSpeed for page design and layout, WireSpeed for managing wire input, SpeedPlanner for auto ad stacking and page design, AdSpeed for display-ad makeup, the AdManage database for managing the flow of ads, and Speed Driver for open pre-press interface and generating Postscript away from user workstations.
The first major launch later that spring involved AJC's suburban weeklies and one daily, generating 350 pages a week from a suburban newsroom and printing plant about 25 miles northeast of the downtown headquarters. The next significant step came with the daily business-news sections in late winter 1996.
"We took a brief time-out for the Olympics, then came back full speed in September 1996, moving quickly to features, then through the winter to spring 1997 and our largest project--metro and national--with 158 users," Reetz says. When sports was added last summer, editorial pagination was complete, he adds.
The pagination project had a huge impact on pre-press, reducing composing-department headcount by 65 percent--even as page count increased at an annual rate of more than 8.3 percent, according to Miller.
"Our products are processed in a more fluid way," he says. A new product-planning group holds responsibility for layout integrity through final output, while an output desk tracks news and advertising content and images pages once the editorial department releases them for publication. On the editorial side, the only staffing increase came with an innovative image-control desk, staffed by a team of newsroom and former pre-press employees who tone and output all color.
The DT system has replaced or is in the process of replacing many aging legacy systems, all proprietary (though some had crude interfaces for simple data exchange). With a common system, staffers tout the ability to handle large products such as zoned sections, and track photos, graphics, pages and page elements. The system's open, PostScript-based flavor allows it to "interface with the rest of the advertising world" and resolved imaging bottlenecks, Miller says.
The system also sparked other advances. "With the new technology, the newsroom also saw the opportunity to advance on many fronts: database journalism, fast and solid links to other Cox newspapers, quick and easy access to the Internet," Reetz says. With high-speed Internet access available from each of the nearly 600 newsroom Macintoshes, "I'd say we're the most wired paper in the country," he adds.
A key component is DT's Locations database, allowing Cox Newspapers--using T1 lines and frame-relay technology--to instantly access the databases of its other newspapers on a read-only basis. "It's as easy and quick to hit the Grand Junction [Colo.] database as our own," Reetz says.
DT's pagination system is installed on Sun servers running Solaris 2.5.1 and Sybase 11.0.2.1. The database configuration includes an Enterprise 4001 server for news, the primary pagination database for current stories and page layouts, a Sparc 1000 server for advertising, one database for ad text and scheduling information, two databases for production photo and news art, and one database for user login and access information. "You can split similar databases, such as the news database and AP newswire, onto separate servers to take advantage of distributed processing," Davis says. "Each of the databases is fully integrated so the user doesn't need to know where the data are stored."
With Macintosh clients featuring Apple event scripting, staffers have been able to customize the applications, making "a huge impact on workflow throughout the pagination process," Davis says.
To help with the transition, the systems department provided support using a team of newsroom-based, software-support specialists.
"Most of them are former editors and are responsible for most of our editorial success with pagination," Reetz says. "People have adjusted well."