For two years, News-Journal advertisers increasingly wanted to send material by e-mail, and then by the Internet. But the paper had to discourage many of those requests, says Debbie McNerney, who was operations manager of the creative-services department at the time.

“We needed to get organized for this,” recalls McNerney, now digital pre-press manager.

Last spring she recruited George Puglia III, a computer-support specialist, to tackle the problem of Internet transmission. They searched for a solution that would cost the advertiser nothing, be simple to use, and be fully automated. The few available products required hardware and software for both the paper and clients—a practical and financial nightmare for everyone involved.

	A World Wide Web site streamlines digital-ad delivery.

Their solution was to develop a World Wide Web site hosted by the paper’s Internet-service provider. McNerney provided Puglia with the information needed on the site, such as transmission instructions and forms asking for file information. Within four months, Puglia scripted the News-Journal Rapid Ad Delivery site (http://nj1.n-jcenter.com/adexp), launching it in April 1998—perfect timing in light of Florida’s summer fires that stopped ground deliveries, making customers aware of online-transmission bene- fits. McNerney began training advertisers one month after the launch, a task that takes only a few hours if the customer is computer literate and familiar with Adobe Acrobat, which converts ad files into the PDF format the News-Journal encourages.

With a dedicated server and two gigabytes of space, Rapid Ad Delivery automates the entire ad-transmission process. A PERL script accepts the uploaded file, writes it to disk, and formats all ad-order information into a text file. A Macintosh Quadra 950 retrieves a file with an FTP automation AppleScript and prints it out, alerting the ad-services department to its arrival. While the paper still gets ads by other means, like disks, the number of advertisers using the site is climbing steadily.

“The technologies they employed are not necessarily new,” says Eric Wolferman, NAA senior vice president for technology. “What is noteworthy, however, is the News-Journal’s ingenuity in using these tools to offer a very practical system for advertisers to get their materials quickly and efficiently to the newspaper.”

THE WINNERS Press Materials Post-Press Health & Safety Table of Contents

In fact, the idea is so ingenious that an undisclosed newspaper-integration supplier has approached the News-Journal about buying it. Talks are in the works, according to Frank Allman, director of production systems.

Servicing customers better is the key to this project, says Linda Klayman, current operations manager of creative services: “Someone can talk to me from out of state or the next town, and in 20 minutes we can tell them if their file is okay or not.”

Team members agree that the process has a lot of potential, and they hope to add more information to the site, including rates and deadlines. Puglia says the site can even handle sound and video files. “Of course, we haven’t used those capabilities yet,” he says, “because it’s hard to get sound in a newspaper.”

Watch this space—we’ll let you know if the News-Journal figures out how to do that.

Heidi Ernst is a Flushing, N.Y., free-lance writer, E-mail, heidi_ernst@time-inc.com; phone, (212) 522-7437.