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Case Study: Taking Care of Business
May 2004A decade ago, traditional print publishers were discovering they needed methods for replicating their print products in the online world. Initially that meant post-processing published content: somehow converting files from page-makeup formats into HTML, or perhaps just serving up composed pages as PDFs.
Although those methods can be effective, many publishers now require more efficient, flexible, and timely online publication. Those needs are often served best by single-source content management; that is, creating and maintaining content in a format-neutral repository (e.g., a database, or XML), which can then feed multiple products across different media.
But publishers need to be careful not to short-change their print publications. They often remain the most important source of revenue, and may represent an incalculable value in terms of reputation and name-recognition. Here are some lessons in ensuring that re-engineered content management won't make your flagship print products harder to publish.
Background
Morrow Publications Group, a non-profit scholarly publisher, has been producing journals and books on the subject of urban folklore for more than 15 years. Its journal Studies in Urban Marvels and Myths is a highly regarded bi-monthly peer-reviewed journal that is international and multidisciplinary in orientation.
In 1998 Morrow added print-plus-online and online-only subscriptions to its journal line. The online versions consisted of PDFs of each article. The decision to use PDFs was a matter of expediency: the compositor who typeset the print publication offered PDF conversion post publication for an additional cost. The compositors converted articles from the existing page-makeup format into PDFs. But the Morrow production department and editorial group quickly realized that they were paying to have the same content output two times.
Enter Structured Mark-up
In an effort to serve content to the Web, Morrow Publications Group produced three versions of final content:
- final Word files
- compositor files
- PDF files
This presented a number of problems for production and editorial staff, including:
- content synchronicity—reprint corrections had to be maintained in three different files
- content ownership—at the time, only the compositor could generate PDF files from their own composition files
- increasing costs—as more titles were added to its online repository costs were increasing for multiple outputs
It was at this time that SGML (XML's antecedent) was entering publishers' vocabulary. Morrow worked with the compositor to test transformation of articles by first converting articles from the existing page-makeup format into SGML. The idea was to eventually use SGML as the source for both the print and online versions. The SGML transformation provided an indexable version of each article, also enabling sophisticated searching of the online article base.
The next step involved bringing the SGML editing in-house and training staff to edit content once for multiple outputs. At this time, the trend in publishing shifted from using SGML to using XML.
Protecting Print
How would a re-engineered XML-based production system affect the print publications? Speed and fidelity were primary concerns. The old system involved sending styled Word documents to a third-party composition system; from there all subsequent editing was handled by changes in the compositor files. Thus, the compositor managed the most up-to-date versions of content.
Morrow found that not only could XML be converted more easily into the required import format, but also the consistency imposed by XML meant that newly imported articles required less massaging to meet style requirements. As a consequence, the in-house editing staff could be retrained as XML experts.
Now all article corrections are made upstream in the XML. Although schedules and print quality remain essentially the same for Morrow's hard-copy journals, they have achieved a significant breakthough in their ability to publish simultaneous print and online issues, with all articles in HTML and PDF.
Conclusions
It's confession time: There is no Morrow Publishing Group. But the situations and solutions are based on real experiences and real technologies. The point of this fictional case study is to emphasize asking the right questions.
Here are some questions we'd ask about print publication prior to implementing a single-source publishing platform.
- How will you integrate print publication into your new system?
- How will a new system impact staff dedicated to print production?
- Are you prepared to retrain print-production staff to handle new technologies and new roles?
- Will print quality and timeliness at least remain the same, if not improve?
Taking the time to think through these scenarios and detailing both the business and functional requirements your staff and systems require can help your organization successfully implement single-source publishing.
