Where are newspapers headed?
Newspapers are designed and manufactured. There was a time not that long ago prior to the rise of Google, when owning a newspaper was delightfully profitable. Now, not so much. This has led to the sale of independent newspapers to ever larger newspaper groups.
These newspaper corporations are looking for efficiencies in design and production. They consolidated IT services, picking common systems for use by their business units. They often co-located their computing technology to gain further cost reductions. Newspaper design centers (NDCs) were set up to create display ads. Ad building can be done with off-the-shelf commodity desktop graphic design tools, like Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, MultiAd Creator, etc. Often ad building was outsourced to services in low wage countries.
Centralized servers with databases were used for ad tracking and production workflow.
This roadmap will show how a well-engineered, server-based ad dummying system can play a pivotal role in improving the efficiency of a newspaper design center.
Spending too much time with dummies?
Dummying newspapers involves fitting rectangles onto bigger rectangles, i.e., taking the space for each display ad and allocating it to a position on the pages of an edition. Manual dummying looks like having fun playing Tetris. It is not that simple. There are many complex constraints involved in doing it well.
Manual processes don't scale. Critical expertise known only to certain individuals doesn't scale. What does scale is a server-based computing architecture providing a knowledge database and highly automated services.
Consider a design center serving a large newspaper group, say one with 100 publications produced daily. All these need to be dummied. One might expect that there are 25 layout operators working throughout the group designing these publications. Do the math. With each operator doing four products per day, that's two hours per product.
Instead of two hours per product per operator, with a well engineered dummying system, designing two products per hour per operator is an achievable goal. That's four times the productivity.
How can a newspaper design center achieve greater dummying productivity?
There are a number of issues that need to be considered in building a scalable, efficient dummying platform that can be deployed not just in one design center, but industry wide:
1) What services should be provided before, during and after dummying.
2) What site-specific expertise should be moved to the NDC and how.
3) What programming and deployment strategies are needed to make an appropriate system suitable for NDCs and an entire industry.
4) What innovative technologies are needed for task optimization.
(to be continued)
Newspapers are designed and manufactured. There was a time not that long ago prior to the rise of Google, when owning a newspaper was delightfully profitable. Now, not so much. This has led to the sale of independent newspapers to ever larger newspaper groups.
These newspaper corporations are looking for efficiencies in design and production. They consolidated IT services, picking common systems for use by their business units. They often co-located their computing technology to gain further cost reductions. Newspaper design centers (NDCs) were set up to create display ads. Ad building can be done with off-the-shelf commodity desktop graphic design tools, like Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, MultiAd Creator, etc. Often ad building was outsourced to services in low wage countries.
Centralized servers with databases were used for ad tracking and production workflow.
This roadmap will show how a well-engineered, server-based ad dummying system can play a pivotal role in improving the efficiency of a newspaper design center.
Spending too much time with dummies?
Dummying newspapers involves fitting rectangles onto bigger rectangles, i.e., taking the space for each display ad and allocating it to a position on the pages of an edition. Manual dummying looks like having fun playing Tetris. It is not that simple. There are many complex constraints involved in doing it well.
Manual processes don't scale. Critical expertise known only to certain individuals doesn't scale. What does scale is a server-based computing architecture providing a knowledge database and highly automated services.
Consider a design center serving a large newspaper group, say one with 100 publications produced daily. All these need to be dummied. One might expect that there are 25 layout operators working throughout the group designing these publications. Do the math. With each operator doing four products per day, that's two hours per product.
Instead of two hours per product per operator, with a well engineered dummying system, designing two products per hour per operator is an achievable goal. That's four times the productivity.
How can a newspaper design center achieve greater dummying productivity?
There are a number of issues that need to be considered in building a scalable, efficient dummying platform that can be deployed not just in one design center, but industry wide:
1) What services should be provided before, during and after dummying.
2) What site-specific expertise should be moved to the NDC and how.
3) What programming and deployment strategies are needed to make an appropriate system suitable for NDCs and an entire industry.
4) What innovative technologies are needed for task optimization.
(to be continued)