Newspaper Workflow

My first job in the industry I work in was for a daily paper as an Ad Compositor. It's where I picked up a large part of my current work flow. I've taken that workflow to a variety of small newspapers over the years because by and large I've found at those papers what I consider to be an unnecessary but all too common workflow. I'm going to cover that in this post and then present my workflow as an alternative. I am speaking towards QuarkXPress specifically, but you can apply this to just about any design app you may use.

Generally, at many small papers there are two kinds of documents. You will have ad documents which are the documents used to build ads and newspaper documents which are the documents used to build the actual paper. Often the two types are mixed. This often becomes a problem, especially on deadline.

Many designers will reuse old documents bringing them forward for each edition they work on. This can be problematic in that old content is often shoved off to the pasteboard or relegated to back pages which are never printed. All that unused stuff can collect and over time cause corruption in the document. In addition many designers fail to use the proper filetypes and colorspaces for their medium. RGB jpegs are really not a healthy ingredient in any document meant for print.

Designers further compound the problem when they open EVERY single ad document, copy everything in it for print and then paste it into their main newspaper document. Now you have not only a recipe for document corruption, you are also introducing font reflow, H&J conflicts, image linking issues and runaround problems!

There is an easier way! For your newspaper documents, create a template. Place your most commonly used elements on Master Pages. Then use the template to create a fresh document for every edition you publish. If there are items that are commonly used but not appropriate to store in a template (such as heads, cutlines, jump boxes, etc), store them in a library and pull them out of the library when necessary. Keep your document clean and delete anything off the pasteboard you don't intend to use or are unsure about. If you might use it, stick it in the library. Also, don't add pages just to store stuff. And don't create more than one layout in your project document. The layout should only have as many pages as your publication.

We build different parts of our paper in separate documents. Our Classifieds use a Classified template. Legals have their own template and so does our Business and Service Directory and our Religion Page. Based on where the Publisher wants those pages in the section, I section start those pages. This allows me to build these different parts of the paper in different phases. When we get to production days since all that content is built I can then just merge pages using a thumbnail drag into my main document. It works well and keeps things simple which avoids conflicts. One thing to do here though is to make sure your style sheets/Master Pages (if you use them) are defined. Our differen pages all begin the name of their style sheets and Master Pages with the name of the page. For instance, our Glendale Star City Notices (legals) will have a Master Page specified as GS City Notices and the legal style sheets are Noted as Legal Body, Legal Header, etc. If you get organized it all goes much more smoothly.

Now for ad documents, we work this a little differently. Every ad we do is built at size. If it's a 2 column by 3" ad it's built at 2 columns by 3 inches. When we are finished with the ad we then save out an EPS with embedded fonts. You could also choose to export a PDF if you wish. That EPS is then dropped in to our main newspaper document when we go to production. And that's all I ever have to deal with when it comes to the ads on production days. No opening ad documents, copying and pasting. It's a simple EPS file. You can do the same with PDF (which we have started to do). A PDF can then serve a dual purpose. When done with the ad the PDF is your proof which can be sent out and also imported to your newspaper document on the day you go to production.

All the way around it's just much easier to deal with a single file per ad versus the many boxes and content you have to dance around with the other way. It's fairly bulletproof and has been a good workflow for me at all of my various jobs.

So there you go. Let me know what you think about it!