In the summer of 2016, Kapp Advertising, publishers of the Merchandiser, began installing advertising and production systems from SCS. They knew the systems would streamline their workflow, but never imagined how drastic the improvements would be.
The transition started with SCS/Track, which combines tools for controlling and monitoring ad workflow, building ads, facilitating web-based access for online proofing and the submission of ads and content, managing current and archived digital ad assets and user-definable reporting into a single system. In the pre-SCS/Track world, the Merchandiser had 18 artists building ads across 3 shifts. This was done 24 hours a day, 6 days a week! The long hours don't do justice to how much effort was required to “track” an ad. There were barely enough hours in the day to handle the volume of ads flowing in and out ofthe art department, and the entire process was manual. When an ad was booked, a physical ticket was moved from order entry to artists, where ads were manually created, sized and saved in Adobe InDesign. Any components from previously run ads had to be tracked down in e-mails or old ad folders. Completed ads then had to be manually converted to PDF one ad at a time. And on a nightly basis, all ad files would need to be manually backed up. To make matters worse, according to Jane Means, Kapp’s General Manager, “Our regional offices booked ads all day long that were ready at 5:00pm each day. At that time, we would have to have two people drive all those printed insertion orders and pieces of paper to the corporate plant to process in the graphics department.” Means continues, “Copy (and a lot of it) would not get in here until 7:00 in the evenings and we needed to have the ads ready the next morning. We needed artists working through the night.” All that being said, it took a monumental effort by the talented staff at the Merchandiser to make all of this work, but Means and her team knew there had to be a better way. SCS proved to have a better way, and it started with SCS/Track. With SCS/Track connected to the Merchandiser’s advertising system, new orders are electronically created and assigned to artists in the system. “Once SCS/Track was in place, ads and copy are entered electronically throughout the day and, voila, the graphics department has everything they need to complete all ads, including those from the regional offices,” reports Means. “The new workflow is greatly appreciated by all departments.” One such workflow improvement, per Angie DeAngelo, Macintosh Specialist & Trainer, was pick-up ads. Per DeAngelo, “When we pick up an entire ad, every single piece of artwork comes with the ad. Our graphic artists don’t have to spend time looking for that obscure piece of artwork that ran last time the ad ran. It’s all in one nice folder, automatically.” DeAngelo continues, “Once an ad is Routed as Finished, the PDF is automatically exported to the proper folder. This used to be something we did by hand, one ad at a time. That has saved us much time and effort.” What about that nightly backup process? “That is taken care of on SCS/Track’s end, and is done in the background,” says DeAngelo. “Plus, having two servers is comforting. If one goes down, the other one automatically takes over. No more worry over how to get our production back up and running.” In the current art department, with SCS/Track in place, the same 18 artists now work Monday through Friday across 2 shifts. “SCS has been the reason we were able to move all our 3rd shift graphic personnel to 1st and 2nd shifts,” Means happily states. “They love sleeping when it’s dark and we love having all the work done by 11:00pm!” In addition to SCS/Track, Kapp has also installed Layout-8000 and SCS/ClassPag to dummy and paginate ads on pages. Much like SCS/Track, these systems have significantly improved the workflow. What’s next for the Merchandiser and SCS? As Means puts it, “We look forward to more benefits as we develop our skills with SCS’s products." 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. What services should be provided BEFORE dummying? To dummy a product one needs to know what the edition will look like and the set of ad insertions that will go in it. Insertion orders describe ads, or, more specifically, space requests. These come from a front-end advertising management system (AMS). AMSs support the sales, order entry and accounting functions. Edition designs specify what the products are to look like. If you think of edition designs as being in Edition Design Files (EDF), there are likely to be many of them tailored to various publications. Edition designs have parts that are relatively constant for all editions of a product. There are also design constraints and policies that vary with each product, e.g., desired ad news ratios, the size of the sections and the paper as a whole. An EDF can be thought of as a program or specification for combining the ads into a product. They are design templates. One complexity in designing newspapers is that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between what is designed and what is printed on the press. Successful designing must accommodate products with multiple variants, called zones. These are best designed all at once, so that corresponding common pages line up. In contrast, what eventually goes on the press are complete zones, one at a time. They may include multiple designs, such as when a tab section is part of a broadsheet paper. Typically they have different column measures. Press limitations, especially with regard to the color availability on older presses, are particularly difficult to deal with. A dummied paper is a blueprint for the assembly of the product by the pagination system. So dummying systems sit as middleware between front-end advertising and newsroom systems and back-end pagination systems. To be suitable for design center (and industry-wide) deployment, the middleware needs to be able to accept insertion orders (preferably in near real time) from a multiplicity of business units and their individual systems, store them for retrieval, access them for extracting, transforming and loading into the dummying engine. Technology that scales for NDC use offers support for multiple data protocols, including XML, JSON, CSV and fixed field for insertion orders. Of course there are situations where front-ends do not supply appropriate ad attributes in their interface files. Some files lack essential information. Others present not attributes, but instructions, usually as text commands. Dealing with this automatically requires a named entity recognizer, one which can translate RHP, into a right hand page placement request attribute automatically. Further, the ability to programmatically examine ad images to find out if they are in color, have coupons, are reverse ads, are about selling tires, etc. can help bridge the gap. Another way to supplement what AMSs provide is to use historic data. How this might be achieved will be discussed later. There are several services that the middleware can provide which can help facilitate sales. One is to support premium space reservation management. Using this service allows sales reps to sell preferred locations to advertisers willing to pay extra for guaranteed space. Deploying this service on the internet allows sales reps to cross sell products for multiple business units. Another is to help manage standby ads sales. Using this service allows sales reps to offer advertisers a lower cost way to have their ads run. Standby ads are run on a space available basis. Cross selling standby ads should also be possible. Running them instead of fillers is not just a new revenue source, but can allow making better looking pages. When dealing with dozens of products, it is helpful for there to be a centralized set of applications that provide management reporting for both sales (ad request distribution reporting) and production (page tracking) to all staff via the internet. Well run newspapers have dummies everywhere. Having a space inventory and standby ad support can accelerate sales. The dummying system's middleware must provide facilities for automating both pre- and post-dummying tasks for NDCs. Server-based technology easily out performs desktop solutions for these tasks. What services should be provided DURING dummying? Dummying newspapers on an industrial scale is neither an art nor a craft. It requires a multi-product view and all the automation that computer aided design technology can bring to the task. One of the things you do when designing a newspaper is placing display ads. In fact, it is usually what you do first when designing an edition. Sell ad space, tightly fit the rectangles onto pages and use the left over space for news: "All the news that fits, they print." You could use Tetris as a model for an ad dummying system, but as many newspapers have found, systems based on this model don't easily scale to the needs of NDCs. There efficiency concerns are paramount. Manual dummying may be fun for operators, but it falls short if you are trying to save labor costs. It does have one advantage over smarter technologies. Take such a system out of the box and you can immediately dummy with it as you would with an electronic pencil, just like you did with a graphite one. However, having a person do something a machine can do better dehumanizes the person. Being able to dummy multiple products at once yields more flexible production timing. (No more waiting for something for one product, just start working on another concurrently.) With this comes better workflow automation. Dummying is on the critical path to pagination. Anything that improves its efficiency, improves overall production efficiency. Automatic dummying is key to efficient design. What is automated dummying? Let's say you have a list of ad records and a set of page thumbnails. You drag and drop an ad onto a page. Instead of requiring you to re-position the already placed ads to accommodate the added one, the software rearranges them automatically. That's part of auto-dummying. There may be a style requested for the page. A pyramid toward the edge means that the ads are arranged in stair step fashion. Bigger ads will be in the bottom outside corners, smaller ones on top. (It's not good form to bury an ad under others. They should touch news as well.) Ads will align with columns and should not span the tops of multiple ads. Besides pyramid styles, there are thousands of others made up of combinations of style factors. Designing an entire product requires scaling up from individual pages to an entire edition. One good strategy is to deal with sets of pages by their content. Advertisers may request that their ads be put on sports, business, main news, etc. pages. Such requests correspond to the editorial "desks". Advertisers wish their ads to be among certain news content. Similarly, they often prefer that ads with products like theirs be away from their ads. (I.e., "Don't put another's tire ad on a page with my tire ad.") So dummying the sports pages together might be a good strategy. To minimize the cases where advertisers don't get their requested placement, it is useful to dummy the most restrictive situations before others. This is called targeted dummying. Think of an edition with 40 pages and 200 ads. (You wish.) Misplace 10 percent of the ads. How many pages are you likely to have made a mess of? Not 4, i.e., 10 percent of 40. The probable answer is at least 20 pages, every page where an ad was misplaced. You might as well do it manually. Computer scientists would think of dummying as solving an instance of the difficult problem of 2-dimensional bin packing. Are there other constraints? Many. To take a description of a press and compute the color availability is called press impositioning. Like other parts of the dummying problem, this, too, is a difficult NP-Hard problem. NP-Hard means non-deterministic polynomial-time hard problems. These have the highest level of computational complexity. They are, by definition, some of the most difficult to solve. Is doing impositions automatically important? The layout person calls the pressroom foreman and says "I'm designing a 40 page paper with 12 full-page color ads. Where can I run them?" The answer requires very specialized knowledge. (Even the units where inks are to used in the sequence of press runs.) If this expertise is only in the head (as it often is) of the press room foreman, this is not a good thing. Consider that he or she might be the union representative. BTW - Presses run at night and dummying is usually done during the day shift. You could end up paying considerable overtime to cover both. Artificial intelligence technology can come to the rescue. Artificial intelligence and newspaper design
It was recently reported that a way one could understand artificial intelligence (AI) was to look at Google's auto-completion of queries. I've been an AI researcher since the late sixties, when I was heavily involved in writing chess programs. Auto-completion? Really? I query Google with "Van" and it auto-completes "Vanguard login". I'm not surprised, since I type "Van" nearly once every day. But then I tried to give the auto-complete analogy the benefit of the doubt. So auto-completion looks like recording behavior (a user's query set), matching a new query to partial strings of the stored set of queries and then predicting the new query. Well, it's almost this. It needs one more operation for the AI part. One needs to improve its predicting performance over time. To do this, add the eventual new query to the query set, weight its importance and use that knowledge to predict the next similar query. (In the early seventies, pre-Alta Vista, a smart new information retrieval system predicted a query of "porn" when the query entered was unintelligible or empty.) The feedback loop is the machine learning behavior. Machine learning is a sub-field of AI. When you appreciate this you realize that with AI you aren't really building smart machines, just machines that exhibit smart behavior. Why did the dummying algorithm/heuristic end up placing an ad where it did? Having a full trace offers a better understanding of the dummying logic. AI techniques can help with both getting ad attributes and selecting templates. As operators dummy products, either manually or automatically, recording both the decisions and the context in which they are made becomes part of the growing knowledge base of dummying preferences. As new products are dummied, what happened with them is used to adjust derived preferences. This feedback loop becomes a tool for predicting dummying decisions. In short, it gets smarter. How smart? As the knowledge base grows, manually-made designs are compared to automated ones computed in the background. Automated design can be trusted to take over when the differences are found not to matter. Having a dummying knowledge base eases the transition from manual business unit based dummying to NDC automated dummying. The local expertise about advertiser's style preferences, etc. is saved in the system. This achieves an important corporate goal of making specialized expertise widely available. Systems that support automated dummying are expert systems. Expert systems are another sub-branch of AI. Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI). Dummying display ads, paginating classified sections, designing news layouts and computing press impositions are examples of applied GOFAI. As with chess programming, getting results in well less than a second makes for a good interactive user experience. The common challenge is to examine a large set of possibilities by trial and error searching quickly and effectively. This is called backtracking. Even the most pleasing screen layouts of page thumbnails can be found by backtrack search. Some newspapers have very explicit styles. Perhaps they want page A3 to have three 2 column by 6 inch high ads across the bottom with a column of one column ads stacking up the right edge. It helps to have a pattern language (or domain specific language) for specifying such patterns. The dummying routines have to sort through the possibilities to make such special shapes. There are no shortage of interesting problems to solve when doing computer aided design of newspapers. What services should be provided AFTER dummying? The results of the dummying process are exported to the pagination subsystem. Commodity desktop applications such as QuarkXPress and Adobe's InDesign are well suited for newspaper assembly. The dummying system provides the geometry in machine readable form and interfaces to these products to construct the framework for the print edition. Layout staff are designers, not paginators. Design isn't construction, nor should it be thought of as such. Layout staff need to be aware of both the advertisers' and editorial department's needs and the publisher's policies. If they do more than sketch, they do too much. The interface technology should map the design into pagination construction instructions. Columns, which are counted for dummying, are mapped into measured positions for pagination. (Sometimes newspapers change their column measure. Such as when doing a web reduction. This should be the concern of the interface, not the designers.) While there are popular commodity and proprietary tools for newspaper pagination, new free open source technology may soon challenge them. Scribus is the current leader FOSS for print publication pagination. For developers wishing to automate and optimize newspaper pagination, Scribus offers numerous advantages. Python is its scripting language and its internal document format is plain text in XML. It is wide open for programming. Interfaces should be available for all pagination platforms. The output files from dummying systems drive other production subsystems such as those for managing tearsheets, paper checking, design approvals and the monitoring of the production of ads, pages, operator and system performance, etc. Many key performance indicators are best computed from the data produced within the dummying system. Programming and deployment strategies which support NDCs. Inventing software technology is fun. Invention alone isn't sufficient to sustain a business. That requires innovation. Innovation is where invention yields revenue. Revenue only comes with deployment. The goal is to deploy durable technology that allows the fun to continue. Faster is better than slower. Small, compartmentalized, incremental releases are better than big, infrequent ones. Some systems architectures favor speed while others do not. Which do you think is more agile? An architecture built around a monolithic database that holds everything you might know about an ad or advertiser, or one that is built to provide microservices that know exactly what each needs to know to deliver a particular service? A microservice architecture allows capabilities to be delivered and debugged quickly. Supporting a microservice architecture requires an enterprise service bus, something that securely supports the transfer of data among services. A side benefit of such architecture is that the services, being independent, can be deployed on multiple smaller, less expensive hardware platforms. Roll-outs can be done in chunks for both services and equipment. A microservice architecture allows customers to enable services as they are ready for them. Developers can get new releases into customer sites faster. It's a better way to manage a growing, complex, evolving system. And it is the key to providing new value for customer support payments. ================================== SCS is a leader in providing applications used in newspaper design centers. These are used by 5 of the top 10 largest newspaper companies through out their 560 business units. These alone have over 12.5 million subscribers. SCS's installed user base of newspapers is over twice this large. by W. ERIC SCHULT
For many chain newspapers, it’s been a central focus for the past half-decade or so to centralize or regionalize operations so that precious resources can be redirected to content generation, audience building, and other key priorities important to a rapidly evolving industry. That effort has driven giants like Gannett and Lee Enterprises, among others, to standardize on Software Consulting Service’s Layout-8000™ to handle the task of dummying their daily and non-daily print products. Gannett, in particular, is seen as a pioneer in consolidation and centralization, having elected in 2010 to standardize its content management system across the chain, according to Jarod Pollock, who manages publishing and knowledge management solutions for the chain. That decision precipitated a broader effort to standardize on an ad dummying solution, as well. “The decision to move to a centralized ad dummying system was not initially in scope for this project,” he said, but “we soon realized that managing feeds from multiple layout systems [to the chain’s chosen content management solution, CCI’s NewsGate] would be expensive and very difficult to support. There were a variety of systems used across Gannett for ad dummying and Layout-8000 was not in the majority.” “They had 13 dailies at the time that were using Layout 8000,” according to Phil Curtolo, SCS’s director of sales. The majority of its papers were using one of two or more other solutions that were not ideally suited for Gannett’s consolidation goals. One, for example, was a desktop application, and another was a module tied to a legacy order entry system. Layout-8000, by contrast, “was the only one that was basically ready, right out of the box, to host all of the papers in a centralized environment,” Curtolo said. “SCS quickly stood out as a company that was in alignment with the direction we wanted to go,” Pollock acknowledged. “[The vendor’s] willingness to provide a high-quality solution based on Gannett’s requirements as well as a financially competitive bid for licensing, support and services” were key factors in the chain’s decision. The Implementation Pollock described the shift as a “group effort by many at Gannett,” including: Stacey Martin, director of publishing and knowledge management solutions; Wayne Peragallo, vice president of information technology; Alan Bruce, director of information technology, midwest region; Jim Dundas, Lora Hamlin, Denise Harris and Claire Harris, technical analysts at various Gannett papers (Asbury Park, Rochester, Port Huron and Nashville, respectively); as well as Pollock, himself, among others. Pollock explained how the implementation of centralized ad dummying was accomplished at Gannett. “The … centralized layout environment mimics our design structure,” with five regional Design Studios across the country – in Asbury Park, Des Moines, Louisville, Nashville, and Phoenix – and “five unique Layout-8000 systems hosting each Design Studio’s publications.” “We have nearly 100 properties using the centralized layout system,” Pollock said, which would be 100% if not for the recent purchase of the Journal Media Group. Gannett now has 14 more markets it plans to add to the system beginning in July, with completion slated for the end of the year. “We started the conversions conservatively and built momentum once we had a few completed,” Pollock said. “There were times when we had five different properties at different stages of the conversion simultaneously.” All of that was being done concurrently with Gannett’s rollout of NewsGate as its content management system. “We’ve added about 20-25 new pubs onto the environment since they went live with the initial 82 dailies,” Curtolo said. “We’ve done it without batting an eye. They do it themselves, for the most part. It’s been great!” Gannett, Pollock said, provides “first-level support” for Layout-8000 issues to all its properties, but he acknowledged that the company still occasionally leans on SCS for “tougher issues and bug reports.” “When we do contact SCS for help, [the vendor is] always very responsive and professional. The issues are tracked in an incident management system and we are automatically notified quickly of any status change or a suggestive course of action. This is impressive, since the issues on which we have sought SCS’s help are usually fairly complex.” The partnership with Gannett has helped SCS make Layout-8000 that much better a product, according to Curtolo. “Along the way, we improved [Layout-8000] an awful lot with input from Gannett,” he said. For example: “There was always a limitation on the number of paper, edition and group codes that could be used. You could have up to 99 of each.” While that would be sufficient for almost any other customer, Gannett had considerably different needs. “What we ended up doing with Gannett is we started implementing non-numeric codes for papers and editions. It’s at a point now where we can have 9,981 unique newspapers set up inside a single instance of Layout-8000. That was huge for Gannett. It lets them not only accommodate what they had at the time – which was 83 dailies – but also allowed them to grow as they acquired new pubs, which they’ve done quite a bit over the last two years or so.” Pollock acknowledged the “mutual respect between Gannett and SCS,” noting: “[SCS takes] note of functionality requests we make, and these are often incorporated into future releases.” Lessons Learned There were, according to Pollock, “many things we learned and many things that we did right” that may be instructive to other chains that have similar consolidation goals. “We embraced the need for standards and we found out early on that getting users to buy-in to these standards was easier than getting them to change their legacy system workflow,” he said. “Fortunately, Layout-8000 offered enough flexibility to standardize the integration to the production and pagination system even if the data coming from the ad billing system was non-standard. Early on, we ran into issues with users not being used to sharing a system with so many properties. Users would make changes for their site and not realize that it also had an impact on other sites. We have had our bumps, but all things considered, it went as smoothly as we could have hoped.” Pollock discussed the importance of forming a “core team at the beginning … to help develop standards,” and having the team revisit those standards often. The chain even wrote a terminology guide so its different properties, using various terms to describe the same thing, could learn to speak a common language. Communicating with the user community, he said, is also key – keeping the users informed about new functionality, bug fixes, and best practices, and interacting with the community with tools like Yammer, email, SharePoint, OneNote and live demos. The company also found it valuable to form an admin team “that is a mixture of power users, support analysts, infrastructure and technical analysts” and have them meet to discuss issues and other topics on a regular basis. “Obviously, there were some drawbacks to moving to a consolidated ad dummying system,” Pollock said. “Local sites were set in their ways and we knew that getting buy-in from the user community would be key to a successful project.” It was a tall order to train users on the new content management system and layout system in the same 8-week launch cycle, he acknowledged, but “our hands-on training program and extensive documentation library gave our users the tools necessary to be successful.” Even as the chain on-boards the former JMG papers into the centralized system, progress continues to expand the level of centralization beyond systems architecture, standardized software, and common SOP’s across the chain. “We have begun to centralize the ad layout for our properties,” Pollock said. “Asbury Park is furthest along with all the properties in New Jersey, New York and various others being completed out of the same location.” The dummying of papers, then, becomes a service that the regional Design Centers perform for the individual papers across the chain. Richard Cichelli, co-owner of SCS, said in a recent Editor & Publisher (Sept. 2015) article that helping chains with centralization goals has been a key focus of SCS in recent years. “We wanted to make this kind of work environment easier, because we were getting business from Tribune, Gannett, Lee, Sandusky … and so forth, that were consolidating these sites,” he said. “We scale to the high end with these design centers and it’s because of that that we have so much traction in this area. |
SCS Team
Articles in the SCS Blog are written by SCS employees and associated news outlets. Archives
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