You might imagine that working for AARP, the premier advocacy organization for Americans over 50, would offer an occasional opportunity to stop and smell the roses. But that assumption brings a wry smile to the face of Mel Baughman, AARP’s quality manager. “We print 22.5 million full-colour magazines, bi-monthly. Production is staggered into three 7-million segments, so it’s like closing three issues every two months. During that time, we’ll also produce a 32- to 40-page monthly newspaper, the Bulletin, that has a circulation of 22.5 million.

“Essentially,” he says, “during a two-month period we’ll be closing five AARP publications.” It’s a schedule that would test the stamina of even an overeager 20-year-old. And with the advent of mobile technology and digital photography, the availability of information and news happens at a much more frequent and rapid pace, Baughman points out, which adds to the time crunch.

He Drives by Night

“Say we’re covering a crucial vote on Capitol Hill. We’ve got a photographer shooting a Senate subcommittee. At the last minute, he’s transmitting his images to our RR Donnelley prepress centre in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And I’m driving up to Lancaster from our Washington, D.C. offices that same night, to do colour corrections on contract proofs and make sure everything gets on press, on time.”

While this meant that AARP’s news coverage could be consistently fresh, it also made Baughman’s work life a welter of deadlines and last-minute travel. With publication closings coming relentlessly, he says, “the main obstacle we face with each issue is lack of time.”

“Essentially, during a two-month period we’ll be closing five AARP publications. The main obstacle we face with each issue is lack of time.”

Then he heard some intriguing rumblings from the grapevine. “The advent of soft proofing, virtual colour proofing — making fine judgments on the colour of images and calling for colour corrections based only on what we see on a computer monitor — seemed a wonderful potential solution to our problems.” Then Donnelley, his longtime printing partner, began offering a web-based virtual colour proofing solution called ShareStream.

Building Trust

“Donnelley always does their homework,” he says of the world’s largest full-service global print provider. “I knew they were going to great lengths to make certain that this new workflow was SWOP-certified.” [SWOP, Specifications for Web Offset Publications, provides specific data for printers and prepress facilities to use when matching colours and ink densities from proofs to printed pages.]

And Donnelley’s hardware specs — a Power Mac G5 computer running Mac OS X Panther and a 20-inch Apple Cinema Display — were, Baughman knew, the state of the art for dead-accurate colour reproduction.

Next page: Eyes on the Prize