Survey of Newspaper Production Flow for E-paper - Kungliga ...

Johan Danckwardt
Survey of newspaper production flow for e-paper 3 Theory
via ftp through a hidden production system to the newspaper where the advertising system
picks it up and places it at the right place in the folder structure. Along with the PDF version
of the advertisement there is a AdConnexion file. The AdConnexion file tells the advertising
system what type of advertisement it is, when to publish it, where to place it in the newspaper
and other data concerning billing and customer information et cetera [Gustavsson, 2005].
When booking a classified advertisement at Sundsvalls Tidning you go through the Lokus
portal. Lokus is a cooperative between about 50 Swedish newspapers. At the Lokus portal the
newspapers classified advertisements are published and made searchable. Lokus has a
booking mechanism which several of the 50 newspapers use to offer web booking to their
customers [Lokus, 2005].
When the deadline has passed and the advertisements are placed on the intended pages
through the advertising system MPress’s booking and planning tool, the pages are sent to the
editorial department for continued work.
3.4.2.2 Editorial work
At the same time that the advertisement department sells and produces advertisements, the
editorial department produces the articles and images. When a reporter and photographer at
Sundsvalls Tidning get back from a job, they receive a template in the Newspilot system. In
the template the reporter writes his story and the photographer drag and drops the images he
or she wants to use. The reporter writes the headline, main text, and the caption of each
image. The caption of the image is saved and added to the image metadata, but only if it is
different from the existing description. When a new image is put down into the Newspilot
editorial system the photographer state several parameters which will be added to the
metadata. The new image is then transferred to the Pickup archive for later usage [Eklund,
2005].
When the advertisements are set in the current newspaper’s layout, the pages are sent to the
editorial department. Here the editorial staff starts to compile the newspaper of tomorrow
using the layout software InDesign from Adobe. The staff extracts articles and images from
the editorial system, in this case Newspilot (and Pickup for older images). Along with the
content produced in-house, there are several sources of external content that have their
respective place in the newspaper edition. The external content is delivered in different ways
depending on what type of content it is and from which supplier [Kjellin, 2005].
The newspaper has predefined number of pages for each day of the week. The maximum
number of pages is decided from what the printing house can handle. When all the intended
content is placed, it sometimes occurs that there could be a odd empty spot on some of the
pages. If this happens the newspaper uses their own advertisements to for example recruit
new subscribers. These advertisements are often called plugs [Jonsson, 2005].
Parallel to the editorial work, the tracking system of Newspilot monitors every event. When
the editorial department is finished with the layout of the newspaper it is sent to the printing
house.
3.4.2.3 Imposition and printing
To get the pages in the correct order in the finished newspaper the single pages must be
placed in a specific order on the printing plates. This is called impositioning. When the
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