News & Tech: "Breezing" Layout and Editorial to Adobe

Regional Calfornia Daily moves to Adobe-based DTI NewsSpeed solution, experiences greater flexibility

The Daily Breeze is a pub­li­ca­tion serv­ing the cities of the south Los Angeles coun­ty area. Based in Torrance, it has a dai­ly cir­cu­la­tion of 70,225; and 72,230 for the Sunday edi­tion. Since 2004 they have also made a tran­si­tion; away from a lay­out and edi­to­r­i­al sys­tem based on Quark soft­ware to one based on an inte­grat­ed Adobe InDesign/InCopy solu­tion called NewsSpeed 5.4, by Digital Technology International.

The cur­rent online edi­tion of the trade pub­li­ca­tion Newspapers & Technology fea­tures an arti­cle, writ­ten by edi­tor Tara McMeekin, that pro­vides time­ly insight into why a com­pa­ny might move from Quark to Adobe, a glimpse of some of the bumps alone the road, and and idea of the ben­e­fits one com­pa­ny gets from such a transiton.

Why leave Quark behind?

Amongst the rea­sons the Daily Breeze had for mov­ing to an Adobe-based solu­tion was a lega­cy prob­lem Quark still fights to this day–corporate atti­tude toward cus­tomers. Associate Editor Philip Sanfield put it this way:

We weren’t thrilled with where Quark was head­ing in terms of lack of response with newspapers

He also cit­ed Adobe’s rep­u­ta­tion amongst design­ers as a rea­son they began look­ing into Adobe. Training was­n’t much of a prob­lem, as the design­ers had already had expe­ri­ence in Illustrator and Photoshop which could be lever­aged into InDesign familiarity.

InCopy integraton simplifies asset managment

Digital asset man­age­ment is one of the new focus­es as tech­nol­o­gy and pub­lish­ing become increas­ing­ly mar­ried. Moving to the NewsSpeed solu­tion stream­lined and con­sol­i­dat­ed the Daily Breeze’s assets, and InCopy enabled effi­cient col­lab­o­ra­tion. Quoted again by Newspapers & Technology, asso­ciate edi­tor Sanfield remarked:

When a reporter filed a sto­ry in the past and moved it over to Quark, it was like using two dif­fer­ent fil­ing cab­i­nets – there was no bridge between them. Now it’s the same cab­i­net, it’s the same file. If a reporter needs to make a change while it’s on the edit­ing desk, they can get into it and the changes will show up as soon as they save. 

DTI enables powerful pagination

Another fair­ly new buzz­word is pag­i­na­tion. Pagination is, sim­ply put, the process of ren­der­ing con­tent into pages. In the case of news­pa­pers the end prod­uct is well-done lay­outs. NewsSpeed has giv­en the Daily Breeze pow­er­ful and flex­i­ble edi­to­r­i­al and pag­i­na­tion that the Quark-based solu­tion did­n’t pro­vide before, espe­cial­ly the abil­i­ty to send out EPS and PDF files, enabling the use of an off­site pub­lish­er, and increas­ing repro­duc­tion quality.

The com­plete Newspapers & Technology arti­cle can be read by fol­low­ing this link.

Digital Technology Internationa’s web­site is http://​www​.dtint​.com.