Technology working for us

Newspapers, as one group of researchers puts it, have gone from seeing technology as a rival to embracing it as a companion. This is the key to survival in this digital age, and it’s against this reality that Newsday has been pursuing the innovations and the opportunities that modern technology offers.

At start up Newsday did not have its own press, so we had to outsource printing at the TnT Mirror Printing Plant. But the Mirror press had limitations when we considered the product we were proposing to introduce to TT, in essence a daily newspaper which had to compete with two seasoned establishments with assets that far outstripped ours. Using the TnT Mirror Press, we were only able to run 40 pages per print with eight colour pages and 32 black and white pages. This meant we had to do a number of print runs to get the colour capacity required by our advertising department. We were also limited on how long it took to do a print run .

We got our New DGM press line installed in early 2002 and commissioned our new printing facilities in April of that year. Configuration of the press line took into consideration the advertising department’s daily colour requirements, to fulfil the clients request as well as reduce the number of print runs required per edition. The press line started out with 48 pages maximum per print run which included 24 pages full color and 24 pages black and white. We are now at 64 pages maximum per print run with 32 pages full color and 32 pages black and white. Over the years, we modified our press, automating its inking and registration to enhance the quality of our printed products and reduce the volume of waste that attends this type of operation.

Our journalists originally used a DOS based Word Perfect application for writing their stories. We then moved to windows OS workstations and migrated to Corel Word Perfect for writing articles and saving articles into each reporter’s network shared folder.

We have now introduced NEO content management software which allows our staff up and down the chain to work seamlessly from a common data base, facilitating also the vital linkage between editorial, advertising and press. We have embraced the digital age and are vigorously employing what is required to operate on any platform, from the simplest tweet to the most complicated internet post.

Immediacy is at the very heart of what we are undertaking, against the reality that “the competition between old and new is becoming obsolete and newspapers and technology are unifying. Technology may be changing how news is delivered, but newspapers are still as focussed as ever on delivering quality journalism that readers trust.”