USA Today: One Foot in the Digital Future
by Supriya Nayalkar
Imagine barreling down whitewater rapids in two canoes, with one foot in each canoe. That’s how Stephen Terrillion sees his job as production director at USA Today.
"It’s not a comfortable feeling, but at least I’m not in the water," he quips.
Why two canoes? Because the Arlington, Va.-based national newspaper, with a 1.7 million daily circulation, is in the midst of digitizing its pre-press operations, culminating in a much-heralded move to convert all 33 of its U.S. print sites to computer-to-plate production. Until the crossover is complete, Terrillion is overseeing two complex and completely different work flows–conventional and digital.
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| Satellite-broadcast dishes stand outside USA Todayıs Arlington, Va., facility, located on Washington, D.C.ıs doorstep. |
The production department is located on the 12th floor of USA Today’s distinctive semicircular skyscraper with a bird’s eye view of the Watergate Hotel and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts across the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. Airplanes flying in and out of nearby Reagan National Airport often buzz right by the building, where editorial and advertising materials from around the world arrive to be assembled into one of the nation’s most widely read daily papers.
Evolving Conventions
Even USA Today’s conventional work flow is still pretty unconventional.
Until recently the newspaper shot film, using it to make veloxes–"our plate stage," Terrillion explains. Veloxes were then rolled onto a drum system, digitized and transmitted via satellite to the remote U.S. printing sites, where they were received by Ricoh film-recorder systems. The paper has used the Ricoh system since 1982, manufacturing its own replacement parts.
The veloxes are gone now, as are the oversized cameras that used to line the halls between the composing and image-assembly areas. Both were replaced by three Eskofot scanners, used to scan pages and input ads.
Digital scans of signed-off pages are now transmitted to 31 of USA Today’s print sites, each staffed with roughly five employees who use them to make plates. That move alone saved seven-to-eight minutes per page, according to Terrillion.
Legacy systems have been consistently replaced to hasten the digital shift. Scitex color machines that once took up an entire room have been relegated to a quiet corner of an electronic-imaging department mostly occupied by PCs and Macs, and will soon be phased out entirely. A 450-seat CCI Europe pagination system has replaced the newsroom’s elderly Atex front end, providing the ability to generate PostScript files of paginated pages. The paper’s entire editorial staff now uses the CCI system, as does the production department, which has four CCI work stations to place ads and another four to process editorial images.
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| Compositor Peter Flick checks a regional-ad split before it is scanned and transmitted to remote-print sites. USA Today typically runs about 25 such splits a day. |
Page assembly is now a combination of old-fashioned stripping and CCI ad placement. CCI places all editorial and national ads, though a complex series of regional ads poses problems for the system and has to be handled separately. The paper typically runs about 25 regional-advertising splits per issue; it transmits local ads separately to print sites, where staffers double-burn their plates to accommodate them.
Dual Work Flow, Dual Challenges
Not having the printing step on their to-do list doesn’t make life easier for the folks in pre-press. While the previously mentioned 31 print sites use film, the other two–one in Warrendale, Pa., the other in Minneapolis–now run CTP systems live, producing 165,000 copies daily. Another 17 sites have CTP "up and running, but aren’t making plates at all sites yet," Terrillion says. "We hope to be off [conventional] plates at all and film by the end of the year."
There’s the rub–because only two of the 33 sites are now running CTP live, everything must still be output to film and paper. Digital files are RIPed and transmitted to both an imagesetter for the conventional film-and-paper stage, and to the network-operations group, which organizes, assembles and sends digital page images to the CTP sites.
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| Image Assembler Ha Nguyen checks front-page editorial color. Because of the paperıs current dual work flow (see p. 24), digital files must be checked against physical page images. |
Complicating matters, editorial PostScript files must be scanned at 800-by-1,000 dots per inch for traditional output, while ads are scanned at 1,000-by-1,000 dpi for both CTP and conventional output–all before being sent to the print sites.
"Double-RIPing every element that comes through doesn’t affect quality, but it does affect work flow," says Terrillion.
Files are guided through this process by an Autologic Information International output-management system known as Oman, which directs PostScript files to one of three RIPs. Files then go to one of two AII 3850 imagesetters, or the paper’s Scanview Dotmate 7000P or AGFA SelectSet 5000 output devices, then finally on to the CTP work-flow system for satellite transmission.
Regional-ad splits add another CTP wrinkle. The digital-ad files are still transmitted separately, and remote-site staffers still double-burn plates. Since that work is now all digital, image placement–to the thousandth of an inch–becomes critical; USA Today’s ad-operations department is developing its own ad-layout system to help perfect this process.
There are, of course, "a lot more places to mess up" when producing CTP and conventional pages side-by-side, Terrillion notes. Proofing devices help maintain high-quality color and consistency across both platforms.
The pre-press department sends complete digital pages and outputs them to one of two Seecolor proofers, whose software drives color HP DesignJet 1050C plotters using newsprint to match printing-press characteristics. An OCE proofer is also used to check black-and-white page proofs.
By that point, the page image may have already been transmitted to the remote site, but staffers still have time to alert workers there to any problems. Similar proofers will be installed at each print site. USA Today still maintains a Goss Community press on the building’s sixth floor, but that, too, will be phased out in coming years.
Getting Pages From Coast to Coast
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| Network Operations Coordinator Earl Griffis speaks to staff at the paperıs 33 print sites. The conventional system has no storage ability, so staffers must be ready when pages are sent. |
Everything comes to a head at the futuristic Network Operations Transmission Center (NOTC), which overlooks USA Today’s array of giant satellite dishes. Two operators work in alternating shifts, monitoring 15 ever-changing computer screens and verbally communicating instructions to staffers at the 33 print sites via FM satellite band. That’s necessary because the conventional system "works like an old fax machine," Terrillion explains. "There is no data storage at the conventional print sites." In other words, if staffers at each site aren’t ready to receive a page transmission, it won’t be buffered or saved-–it needs to be resent.
Here’s where the difference between conventional and digital really shines. Now RIPed page images are sent to the NOTC server for transmission and are automatically saved by PCs at the local CTP sites when received. Work continues on developing NOTC’s page-assembly system, which allows staffers to compile different digital elements as they come in–page folios, ads and editorial pages–"like mail-merge on a PC," Terrillion says. "It’s almost a back-end pagination system."
The digital satellite uplink can beam the 250-to-300 daily page transmissions in four hours, compared with the 12 hours it could take conventional transmissions.
"With the conventional method, we’d have to send ads all day long, and editorial would take five-to-six minutes per transmission," Terrillion says. "Now we can transmit 90 plates per hour and output using two imagesetters in tandem. We start transmitting at 8 p.m. and can get the entire newspaper out at presstime by 11:45 p.m. using just a couple of servers and a lot of controllers."
Looking Ahead
Strangely enough, going digital has proven both easier and more difficult than Terrillion originally thought. Implementing digital passthrough of CCI-generated PostScript pages took less time than anticipated, but proved "more difficult to quality-check and retain control of how pages are produced," he says.
And while going digital is supposed to make life easier, there are a few surprising advantages to the "old" way, such as being able to see composing room mock-ups. "We thought with digital, we’d just scan pages and send them to print sites," Terrillion says. "But we found it was easier to strip in pages with equipment we felt familiar with."
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| Operations Manager Julie Overman checks ad placement at one of four CCI Europe terminals. |
For now, the 48-member production department also has the challenge of putting out the paper using two parallel but different work flows. The CTP side of the equation also has required employees to undergo massive training, add major proofing steps to their work, and check for "connectivity" among conventional and CTP versions of each paper.
"Each employee who did three functions now does 13," Terrillion says.
Of course, once CTP is streamlined and fully implemented, things will get easier. Less page assembly will be required, double-RIPing will become a thing of the past, and turnaround time will be shorter, eventually allowing editorial to turn in stories later and circulation to deliver papers earlier.
As the company races toward digital work flow, it’s also relocating to a technology-rich area about 15 miles away from its present site on D.C.’s doorstep. By May 2001, all of Gannett’s and USA Today’s facilities will be based in a new office complex in Tysons Corner, Va., allowing the physical work space to match work-flow innovations now taking place.
"Right now, we’re in a labor-intensive manufacturing environment," Terrillion says. "By the time we move, we’ll have a completely automated, digital work flow, and more of an ‘office’ environment." n
Supriya Nayalkar is a free-lance writer based in Washington, D.C. E-mail, SupriyaN@aol.com. Photos by Jim Kirby, a D.C.-area free-lancer.