History repeating in search for efficiencies

A while back I was having a discussion with a colleague about what exactly it was in newspaper production that was totally nailed down. That’s to say big and heavy and hard to shift.

We got it down to plate-makers and presses. Everything else was totally transportable – and that included people.

Back in the 1980s, the big battle in UK newspaper technology was over ‘re-keying’ – mainly getting rid of it. It was like a game of musical chairs. Whoever was left with no reason to be there when the music stopped was thrown out of the game.

‘Re-keying’ was the process by which journalists typed a story onto paper – often with a carbon copy or ‘black’ for safety – a sub editor scrawled all over it to make it readable and legal and then someone in production typed it out all over again either to hot metal or to photosetters to transfer it to print.

There had to be a quicker way and there was.  Cue ‘new technology’, cue ‘efficiencies’, cue the new reality. The music stops and the typesetters suddenly have nothing to sit on.

Next came desktop publishing: Another round of change; another seat out of the ring; and yet more efficiencies.

It’s not all onwards and upwards, however. The trouble with the desktop revolution was that it turned sub editors from wordsmiths to box-jockeys. For many, tweaking text boxes in Quark Xpress or Adobe InDesign and fitting headlines by bastardising typefaces became the norm, because it was easier than dealing with the words themselves.

And even advances can create duplications of effort.

That may come with subs drawing the same boxes in the same place, using the same style sheets and the same page furniture every day. And in the case of a typical news operation, it might be, for instance, that news editors are making decisions about stories and their places within the book that sub editors are interpreting and carrying out time and time again.

What if, having made that decision, the technology handled the mundane bit of actually applying it to the page? No duplication of effort. No tinkering with boxes. No need, actually, to have Quark Xpress or InDesign on the desktop, meaning Sub editors can get back to hand-crafting words and spaces.

That’s one of the workflow options available in our new digital content management and publishing system, Knowledge, which is designed to work in a browser over nothing more robust than home broadband.

And, of course, if print is just one of your output channels – maybe not even your main publishing channel if you’re going digital first – then crafting the words and spaces and prioritising the publication of particular stories assumes far more importance than the mundane mechanical process of box-creation.

We know from talking to publishers that this sort of flexibility – and the savings it can promote – is going to become more and more important. And while the prospect of ‘efficiencies’ usually implies a cost in terms of headcount.

That may be unpalatable, but the dilemma for publishers, particularly in these difficult times financially is not in deciding whether they can afford to update their publishing technology, but whether, actually, they can afford not to.

HTML5 - bringing consistency across platforms

I was blown away by the FT’s new ‘non-app’ app – for itself, for its potential to change the mobile applications landscape and particularly for the way it gives publishers a different route to tightening the relationship between print and digital branding.

For publishers, there was always a certain amount of tension created by having to run iPhone and iPad subscriptions through Apple’s iTunes gateway, not least because of Apple’s insistence on taking a 30 per cent cut of the revenue.

But some publishers were of the opinion that if Apple were going to take away the pain of managing subscriptions so that essentially they became the fulfilment house – and 30 per cent was what it cost – then so be it.

For others, though, it wasn’t just about giving away a chunk of revenue, it was about losing one of the key benefits of digital subscription – and that was the potential to build much closer relationships with the customers, the subscribers, the readers.

We spoke about the importance of that relationship at Publishing Expo in London earlier in the year. A lot of regional newspaper publishers already have it because they have a close connection to the people who push papers through letter boxes. Taking control of digital subscriptions would bridge the gap in the world of pads, pods and phones.

Doing it the FT way means publishers don’t have to jump through the Apple hoop at all. So that’s subscription sorted – ish, probably...

The other thing is that HTML5 means publishers can get their digital offerings out to multiple platforms – including the good old web – using pretty much the same codebase whatever the output.

For us that’s really important. We’re always talking up the benefits of what we call ‘concurrent multi-publishing’ and that is the ability to publish pretty much the same content  simultaneously to many channels in exactly the right format for each and it’s what we built our Knowledge digital content management and publishing system to do.

And we know from our own experience that those channels can change pretty quickly. One minute we’re developing for e-reader, say the Irex, then along comes something like the iPad which turns the market on its head and creates a whole new set of challenges – and opportunities of course.

As an event, the FT’s adoption of HTML5 may not have been as seismic, but you can bet they’re feeling the rumble down Cupertino way.

HTML5 brings a level of consistency into creating digital content for multiple platforms. That helps publishers to maintain the look and feel of the brand, even if we as developers do have to take into account the many hows and whys of getting content out there.

And we know that once we have the wrapper looking good, we can fill it with content exactly how and when we want – and change the dynamic of the way it’s done so that publishers can make the whole process more efficient.

We’re demonstrating at two of the UK’s most complex evening print publications that creating and processing content for multiple platforms is a unified process  – and we’re sure we can offer even more efficiencies in that area.

We know from talking to other publishers that in these straitened times they’re going to be looking for even smarter ways of maintaining the level of service with a much lower cost base.

For us, feeding HTML5 into that strategy is pretty much a no-brainer and the potential benefits are huge.