Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
A Publishing Workflow Pushes the Envelope
“We needed to inject some industrial-strength stability and integrity into the process,” says manager of publishing technology Don Morris, regarding the Xserve-based workflow for archiving the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s content as PDF files.
Producing a daily metropolitan newspaper has never been a simple task. Just ask Don Morris, manager of publishing technology at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He’s been doing it for 33 years. “The workload is more than we ever like to think about,” he says. “But somehow we make it happen every day.”
The AJC’s production task used to center on the creation of three daily print editions — a process now ably handled by 850 Mac computers and 38 Apple Xserve G5 servers, running Adobe InDesign and InCopy as part of a DTI editorial pagination system.
The Demands of Digital Delivery
But these days, getting ink on paper is just the beginning. The AJC’s content is just as likely to have multiple lives in a range of digital formats. Typically, 2500 print pages per week must be archived as PDF files. And there’s a growing demand for delivery of customized PDF content to various constituencies: website visitors, broadcast TV channels like CNN and ABC News, and satellite publishers like Newspapers Direct and Satellite Newspapers, who produce print editions of newspapers for cruise ships and hotels.
Each of these outlets needs a different version of the pages created for the print editions. That means processing many gigabytes of Postscript and PDF data nightly, after the print editions have gone to bed. “We knew the solution was a server-based workflow,” says Morris. “We needed to inject some industrial-strength stability and integrity into the process, so that it ran pretty much hands-free overnight.
“We’re a Mac shop here, from editorial to advertising,” he continues. “We chose Mac in the early ’90s, and we’ve been very happy with it ever since. So we wanted to stay in a Mac OS X Server environment for our PDF creation process.” But Adobe didn’t make a Mac OS X version of PDF Distiller Server and the desktop version couldn’t reliably handle the load. Could anyone help?
Neighborhood Rescue
After doing his homework, Morris found the partner he needed, less than 20 miles from his downtown Atlanta office. Founded in 1991 by president Dwight Kelly, Apago, Inc. specializes in software tools and custom development projects for the office document and graphic arts industries. The company is highly respected in the industry, with installations at Time Inc., The Washington Post, and The New Yorker.
“We’re a Mac shop here, from editorial to advertising. We chose Mac in the early ’90s, and we’ve been very happy with it ever since.”
“We explained everything we were up against, and Apago delivered a solution in a remarkably short time,” recalls Morris. Combining Apago’s off-the-shelf products and some custom integration based on components the company had already developed — its own server-ready version of PDF Distiller, a sophisticated PDF manipulation application called PDF Enhancer and the recently released Cluster Workflow, which harnesses the computing power of a collection of servers — the solution “automates much of the digital content creation that the AJC does today, yet it’s also highly customizable for future applications,” says Apago’s Kelly. The system also takes advantage of the UNIX foundation of Mac OS X to squeeze every iota of processing power from the AJC’s Xserves.
“The new system has met every single one of our needs,” says Morris. “It’s easily able to keep up with our heavy page flow demand. It’s very fast, very reliable, with minimal if any manual intervention. Our error rates are so low they’re almost negligible. We’re now pretty much on target every morning with everything we’re expected to deliver.
“And best of all, it does it all in our existing Mac and Xserve environment.”
