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.