Out With the Old Production Department ... and in With the New

Today's production department bears little resemblance to the analog world of film and FedEx of not so long ago. As digital and multimedia are layered on top of a print process that is undergoing rapid change, "doing more with less" has become a common refrain among production people—and in their case, it's far more than a tired cliche. The relentless drive toward efficiency required by shrinking budgets, coupled with the need to expand fully into the digital realm even as print products continue to be important, may be as good an illustration as any of the old Chinese proverb about the curse of living in interesting times. On the other hand, the possibilities and prospects of this transitional era are, for many production executives, tremendously exciting.Digital DomainsThe rise of digital products has, of course, led to many of the momentous changes affecting production departments in the last decade. In the Internet's early years, digital product creation could be folded neatly into print workflows by uploading content to the Web at some fixed point in the process. With the focus now on flexibility and efficiency, and digital no longer considered a mere adjunct of print, production departments have had to rethink the workflow entirely. "The new requirements for being able to sell content in mixed-media mode have created new strains on the production group where they've brought in new workflows around that," notes Todd Eckler, vice president of printing and publishing at North Plains Systems, a digital asset management (DAM) solutions provider. "[Add to this] the state of the economy, with ad dollars down and all the competing sources for reading entertainment, and it's created an environment for publishers to say, 'Enough with the old; now it's time for change.'"With the rise of customized covers and targeted editions, even the print realm has been upended by the possibility of sending different product versions to thousands of individual subscribers. In every aspect of production, a new level of planning and coordination is required. "I think the biggest thing is [that] we have to look at how we handle content from the get-go, instead of everyone being geared toward print from the beginning," says Shawn Larson, vice president of enterprise systems at Bonnier Corp., publisher of approximately 50 special-interest magazines, including Popular Science, Working Mother and Outdoor Life. "How do we create, store and utilize it? It's not just getting it into InDesign documents [anymore]; it's asking, … 'How do we make good content portable?'""There are two big evolutions that I'm seeing in the industry," says Bruce Jensen, group vice president of sales at Transcontinental Printing, which prints about 300 magazine titles for Canadian, U.S. and Mexican publishers. "One is the drive toward automation technology and the adaptation of it in the workflow process, and the [other is the] increasing demand for technology for personalization, [such as] targeted publications for certain audiences."Perhaps nowhere has the drive for efficiency been coupled with digital technology more effectively than in the development of ad portals that enable ads to be submitted by clients online, at which point software automatically does preflighting and trapping. With the addition of virtual press-side proofing, colors can be checked on-screen by the printer, eliminating the need for hard-copy proofs. Jensen predicted two years ago that this proofing method would be common in five years. He now admits he was wrong: "It's happened sooner. Two years ago, about 10 percent of our magazines' workflow was in virtual press-side proofing. Today we're at over 70 percent." Virtual proofing has had implications for production responsibilities and workflows, as well as for printers' role in the process. "Today, we do more training of customers to talk about how the workflow works, how the process works—on-site and on the Web," Jensen says. "It's almost a requirement. … Production departments used to keep us at arm's length. Now they welcome us."Jensen believes the next leap in workflow automation is an XML-based platform—job definition format (JDF)—which he says promises to tie print and digital processes together in a more fluid production workflow. "It allows publishers to put everything in one file and manage the whole process with one format." Bonnier has realized efficiencies through the adoption of a workflow-management system, Dalim Twist, which brings previously outsourced aspects of page production in-house. Prepress operations, including preflighting and file conversion, are automated. The system is database-driven and, therefore, connected to the production system, though the people overseeing premedia production are not part of the production department. The two teams are "tightly woven," Larson says, but require different skills—prepress is now under the direction of tech people, who need not be as client-oriented as production traditionally has been.No amount of automation, however, will eliminate the need for production teams to keep a close, expert eye on work streams, says Glenn Filippone, vice president of production at Incisive Media, which publishes magazines and other products in finance, law, real estate and IT, such as The American Lawyer and Real Estate Forum. Filippone rejects any notion that production teams will soon do little more than move files and require next-to-no knowledge about inks and presses. "I don't think we can just hand everything over to the computer," he says. "Just because it's a PDF doesn't mean, still to this day, that it's made properly or that it will print properly, and now you have multi-use PDFs, so you have to make sure they're going to work both digitally and traditionally. "There are certain traps [where] even if the computer says it's right or it's been set up to overprint, it won't look right on press or colors will come through …," he notes. "Little nuances like that, the production people know what to look for."Jensen agrees that production will never be just about pushing files. "Print is still print," he says. "You still need to understand it. It's still the driving force of our business. … Publishers need to know it even better today because of the technology changes, and [they] need to understand the limits and abilities of print."Less Production Management, More Strategic CollaborationProduction is no longer a simple, linear process, and the reality of multiple workflows has forced a new level of communication and collaboration among various departments."Traditionally, art and production and edit and production really banged heads a lot," Filippone says. "I think you're seeing a lot less of that. We've cut the production cycle down to only a few days, so we try to provide as much information to get the different folks in editorial, art, finance, IT, circulation going by having a map [and] putting together pagination as early as possible with as much information as possible. We want to enable everybody to do what they do, give them the dates to hit and then work with them to assure that we get everything on time."The situation has changed the job of a production manager, who in some sense has become less of a traditional manager and more of a strategic collaborator. "A production manager now has to have access to the business decisions that are being made," Eckler points out. The role is no longer simply about successfully executing a plan, as fluid strategies require constant input from production managers about what can and should be done. "It's almost similar to having an IT person who helps drive business decisions," he says. "In the CIO's role, [an IT person] is saying, 'We can support that.' The production manager's role is now to say, 'Yes, we can support the creation of that content in this fashion or the updates of the Web site.'"Digital editions' multimedia features such as sound and animation require new processes for vetting and correcting content. "Before, when an advertiser provided us with a print ad, it went through preflight, and, if it was rejected, we went back to the advertiser and told them it was rejected because the fonts weren't embedded or because it wasn't CMYK, and they knew how to fix it," says Jane Chero, vice president of production at North American Publishing Co. (NAPCO), which publishes Publishing Executive and Printing Impressions, among nearly 20 magazines. "Now [with digital editions], if an advertiser sends us an ad with streaming video, or Flash animation that doesn't perform properly, sometimes the advertisers aren't able to fix it themselves and ask for our assistance, but the production person may not be able to troubleshoot it either. If the production staff is going to try to help, we need to be able to expand our skills and collaborate more closely with IT and the Web developers, as well as art directors, to better understand the technology.""The industry is not quite ready to build in those kind of interactive, highly graphic, intensive ads we do in digital advertising," says Larson. "You have to get those ads in earlier to build in interactivity for digital editions. It takes time to do that [and] a different skill set."Bonnier's response to the challenge of multimedia has been to hire people for production with Flash skills—"not necessarily developers, but designers"—who specialize in building in interactive features. Adding to the complexity is what Diane Burley, an industry specialist at digital content management solutions provider Nstein, calls the "multidirectionality" of content creation. Referring to user-generated content, she notes that production workflows are still adjusting to content moving upstream as well as down. Media companies, she says, are challenged to figure out how to package user-generated content into a publishable story or other form.This level of content management requires sophisticated search and tagging tools, and coordination between multiple departments, she says. Production, in some cases, must take on editorial roles and consult with IT in order to facilitate timely repurposing of content into new formats, or (as with multimedia ads) work closely with IT and art to solve problems. Conversely, production managers are developing skills and specializations that can fill gaps in other departments' knowledge. "We troubleshoot in other areas that are not necessarily our responsibility," Filippone says. At Incisive, as the last group to touch a file, production often ends up being the de facto archivists of digital photos and files, and finds itself providing digital tear sheets for accounting or images for the art department. It all adds up to a new set of responsibilities and relationships, with all departments needing each other if the entire process is to go smoothly. "It is a shared, collaborative effort," notes Traci Lucien, vice president of publications operations at AARP. "I don't see any barriers. We each have our own expertise, and it is about respecting and complementing each other to get to the desired end state."Managing AssetsEspecially for large companies with multiple vertical products, the ability to manage information for maximum advantage has become a central production concern."You want to give access to a large number of people," Filippone says. "You also want to be able to search and categorize. If you assign someone to a photo shoot and they take … 30 beautiful photos, you may only use five, so there is a whole other area of material you can use that must be housed properly, tagged properly, guarded against unauthorized access." Incisive Media's recent acquisitions, which led to the existence of nine regional offices, in addition to its significant New York-based operations, has made the need for a standard DAM system across divisions acute. Like Incisive, Bonnier has acquired and consolidated a wide range of media brands in recent years. It invested in a storage system (from Nstein) that facilitates content/image use across brands. "We're getting a history available to all our brands to utilize," Larson says, noting that brands as disparate as Caribbean Travel & Life and TransWorld Surf can easily draw content from a single photo shoot.A good DAM system can facilitate the addition of ads and editorial content up to a few hours before a digital edition goes live. This level of flexibility increases the range of quick-response strategies available for the use of content, whether for marketing purposes, trade shows, promotional teasers or in rich data applications. It also is helping to gradually make the old idea of the deadline obsolete. "Closing? What is that anymore?" asks Chero. "You literally can add a new page to a digital edition the night before it is supposed to go live, as long as … you can put it at the end of an edition."In a "post-deadline" world, production departments realize there is more riding on their abilities than adherence to fixed schedules. "What companies are generating in terms of revenue for digital editions is less than print editions, so we have to be more flexible," Chero says. "If it means getting another advertiser in there and additional revenue, yeah, we're going to jump through hoops to make that happen."We really have to turn on a dime—that is the reality," she notes. "It is a very exciting time, and a challenging time."

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Out With the Old Production Department ... and in With the New

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