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

Johan Danckwardt
Survey of newspaper production flow for e-paper 5 Analysis
Image space
Unlike the e-paper design proposition it is my recommendation to decide on a number of
fixed image sizes for usage in an e-paper edition. It could be suitable to use four different
image sizes in the templates intended for the articles and a thumbnail size intended for the
headlines at the first page. It is better to work with a few image sizes in the beginning if
Sundsvalls Tidning decides on producing an e-paper edition. When creating the templates it is
important to consider that the images could be oriented as landscape or portrait. Therefore the
templates should be designed with two different sized landscape images and two different
portrait sized images.
Advertising space
As in the case with the images I recommend to decide on a few different advertisement sizes
as most newspapers do on their websites. If the template is based on three columns the
conceivable advertisement sizes could be:
Name Size
Full page 1/1 template
Half page ½ template lying
Big banner 1/3 template lying
Banner 1/5 template lying
Full column 1/1 column and 1/3 template standing
Half column ½ column and 1/6 template standing
Small board 1/3 column and 1/9 template standing
Table 5, Conceivable advertisement sizes.
5.2.3 Advertising
The advertising in an e-paper edition should be handled by the same system that handles the
advertising in the regular paper edition. As it is today the MPress advertising system handles
only the advertising intended for the paper based edition. The advertising on the web is
handled by Open AdStream and this system is only intended for the web and not printed
media according to Fredrik Welander at Sundsvalls Tidning. The MPress advertising system
is able to handle new advertising formats. To make this work, new advertising information
must be created in MPress.
My recommendation is that the advertisement graphics should be stored in a folder structure
the same way as the traditional advertisements are today. The advertisement information
containing information regarding the advertiser, placement codes, publishing dates et cetera,
should also be stored the same way as it is today. According to Jan Alriksson at Tieto Enator
there should not be any problem adding the possibility of stating information that could be
used to make the advertisements interactive. This type of information should be stored the
same way as any other advertisement information, regardless of channel.
To create an as automated system as possible it requires that advertisement information is
created so that the advertisements could be placed using a high degree of automation. Such
information is placement codes and page information. Each page should contain metadata that
tells us which page it is and what placement codes could be approved for advertisment
placement on the page. My recommendation is that the advertising space in the templates
should be fixed, but there should be several different templates obtainable to suit the
advertisement and the image belonging to the article. I therefore recommend Sundsvalls
Tidning to decide on a few fixed advertisement sizes intended for an e-paper edition as most
29