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Eponymous desktop-publishing developer Quark Inc. reorganized to address longstanding customer-service problems and plans to integrate its systems with other companies' software, its chief operating officer said during this morning's pre-press keynote.
"Quark is committed to the newspaper business," said Chuck Bland, acknowledging that "we have heard from our customers that we were a hard company to do business with."
Quark's XPress product is used by 2 million customers, he said, and newspapers represent a significant chunk of that. Quark has increased tech support staffing by 30 percent, and customer troubles with clumsy registration and slow shipping are being resolved.
The newly formed Quark Marketing Inc. was created to offer complete software solutions for vertical industries. "QPS in and of itself is not a solution in the newspaper industry," Bland acknowledged.
For newspapers, joining QuarkXPress and QPS (a publishing system for multiple users and functions) are AdSentry (for managing digital advertising from multiple sources), Assistant (a page-planning system), QPSViewer (for real-time viewing of an edition's production status) , NewsFlash (which integrates online production and management) and Quark's Digital Media System, a digital-asset manager.
Expect the company to continue to change, he said. "Quark is not the same company it was 90 days ago," he said. "It won't be the same company 90 days from now."
The morning's sessions continued with a look at three cutting-edge tools. The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle worked with Xerox to print instant, on-location editions during several events. Alan English, assistant managing editor of photography, likened the experience to "hooking your newsroom to a laser printer capable of printing 1,200-to-1,600 copies per hour."
Flat-panel displays and the newspaper industry have finally met. The Wall Street Journal is the first to distribute content to the Rocket eBook, which also allows users to download books from more than a dozen publishers.
Polaroid Marketing Manager Jonathan Agger outlined new digital-proofing solutions, which use pigmented printing ink, halftone impressions and the same imaging laser found in many platesetters, "truly enabling computer-to-plate workflow."
--by Bob Sims