Making the impossible happen

The pressure on production departments in publishing was intense even before recession came to be a reality. Conflict is very often internal, with the role of production and the value it can bring to a publisher being little understood within the wider organisation, while the financial cost of the production department’s headcount is all too easily understood by those counting beans. Put most starkly, it has become a fight for survival.

If this is a worst case scenario, then shades of it will still be familiar to many in production departments, and certainly the issues were recognised by those taking part in a PMM roundtable, held at the premises of PMM’s partner, the cross-media production agency FMG.

Richard Mason, production director at consumer magazine publisher Future Publishing, articulated the common scenario: “The expectation is absolutely that we do more with less. We are overhead. The biggest challenge the production department faces is continuing to demonstrate value for money. I don’t want to create a siege mentality for the team, but unfortunately, production is not really core to a
publisher’s business and therein lies the problem.

“Very few senior managers understand the function of production, because it’s dirty, it’s non-creative, it’s non-core, and therefore it’s an easy target in times of hardship like we have now. For me it’s all about survival, and being able to demonstrate that we are adding value at every stage of the process. That’s my biggest challenge going forward.”

Stephen Irving, head of advertising production at Mirror Group, told a similar tale, saying: “We’ve all suffered with having to justify ourselves for a long period of time, and we are a cost to the business but we need to educate the sales teams more. They turn over fairly quickly, sales teams, and they don’t understand the value we bring, because we make what they sell actually work; we make sure that it’s right and that it meets their expectations, and it’s education of those people that is going to make us an asset to the business, because we are continually striving to accommodate some of the wierd and wonderful things they come up with, and it’s not easy.

“I’m not sure that people are aware that’s happening. An ad was sold and then it’s there in the newspaper. But there’s a huge chunk in between that person selling it, and then seeing it in the newspaper and saying ‘isn’t this good?’. That’s the kind of education we are continually fighting for.”

Matt Jolly, production director at contract publisher John Brown, gave a rueful shake of the head, and mused: “That’s the tragedy of production. You do a hundred great things that are completely ignored. Make one mistake and...”

The sentence didn’t need to be finished. It goes without saying however, that for production departments to fall into the siege mentality that Mason mentions would be a mistake. Engagement with publishing colleagues is a critical aspect of demonstrating the worth of production.

Peter Davies, production director at contract publisher Forward Publishing explained that within his organisation, service is the key word. He said: “We are a service department. We’re continually looking at formats, where we can save money, and working with creative departments to make sure that their wonderful ideas are possible.”

Saving money is the crucial aspect, but can only go so far, warned Michelle Thomas, head of Creative & Content Technology at book publisher Penguin UK. “We’re trying to save costs, and we’ve possibly cut as much as we can without damaging the product itself, so what I’m doing now is more about adding value. Whatever we create will not just be for that single purpose in print. We’ve got to get more value from it, make it as reusable as possible.”

However, where production also has a procurement role, for example in purchasing volumes of paper, there is still often an expectation that price reductions can be found year after year, observed Matt Jolly:

“The interesting thing at the moment is that publishing is in a perfect storm of recession, a bad advertising market, and at the same time paper prices have gone up 20%. That hasn’t really happened as far as I can remember in the past. Whereas before, when publishing directors were looking at budgets and thinking ‘we’re not going to make the target’, they’ve always had a bail out by the production department reducing paper and print costs. Paper prices have never gone up.

“In the last two years though, suddenly paper prices have gone up. Then it’s: ‘well, you’re in production, prices don’t go up, you make them come down.’ I think that’s why production departments have been under a lot of pressure for the last two years, because it’s seen as an inability to control these costs. There’s nothing that you can particularly do if the entire world paper market goes up, but what other added value can you give once you’re unable to control those costs?”

Mason agreed, and said he had felt compelled to introduce unwelcome measures on the production department specifically so that he could justify its existence.

“We’ve seen paper prices rise, covermount costs affected by exchange rates, prices fluctuating for all the Far Eastern gifts and plastic bags. The business sees that as an inability to control the supply chain and the cost, but they are all factors outside of our control, and they are now asking: ‘well, what else do you do?’ It is very difficult. As Stephen said, his team has a wealth of experience and they make the impossible happen. That’s what we all do. That’s our USP.

“What they don’t understand is that just to make one thing happen in the magazine, one individual could spend a whole day trying to get that problem solved. It’s being able to capture that and quantify it. I’ve resisted the temptation for years but we’ve implemented time sheets. It’s not about being Big Brother; it’s about an insurance policy. But I’ve faced huge resistance from production staff. I don’t like them and no-one else does. The cynical view is ‘you want to know what we’re doing’. Yes, I do, but
not for the reasons they think. I want it as an insurance policy.”

Workflow efficiency
Aside from these significant issues around the expectations placed upon production departments, the roundtable participants also discussed workflow efficiency matters within their publishing organisations. The conversation covered a broad number of areas, which might be summarised as follows: difficulties in locating the source of needed content (such as ad copy); controlling the flow of content; current practice in terms of proofing and ISO print standards; and areas where further efficiencies might yet be found.

The copy chase, so beloved of production staff the world over remains a problem. Stephen Irving of Mirror Group pointed out that quite often the biggest obstacle is finding out where the advert is coming from in the first place, with communication patchy and sources of advertising supply being akin to a game of musical chairs.

“Finding content is the issue. A lot of man hours go into chasing down where an advert is coming from. Repro companies are fighting for business, and offering enhanced services to attract clients from other repro companies. You’re chasing one agency one week, and the following week the contract has moved. So you start the search again. And once you’ve located content, then it’s making sure it’s fit for use. It needs to be delivered in a managed way,” said Irving.

Given the nature of the publishing organisations they work for, not every participant was affected to the same degree as Irving in regard to tracking down copy, though Richard Mason of Future agreed that “the ad production/support team of the future is very much faced with the problem of where the copy is coming from – with every issue of the magazine you do need to start again”. Mason continued: “It really is very labour orientated and it’s a big cost to us because we have quite a big department. People ask why we have 20 people, and the simple answer is, we are faced with this dilemma every month.”

Copy supply
There was mutual recognition of the variance in technical quality of content supplied. In the main, this springs from the availability and ease of use of desktop software tools that can allow potentially anyone to create an advert, though not necessarily to the correct standard and specification.

“The problem is caused by technology as much as anything,” said Matt Jolly. “With the accessibility of technology, rather than go to an ad agency you feel like your marketing assistant can knock an ad up for you.”

Various methods might be used to try and gain better control of this situation, with managed advertising supply technology, preflighting software and proofing all discussed. The essential need for a publisher’s production department is ultimately to be in control of content workflows.

Proofing was an area in which every organisation had different requirements, it seemed. Mirror Group hasn’t used hard copy proofs for two years, since the master file is created to standards that are trusted. Penguin has in recent years implemented a widespread project to equip design staff with greater prepress skills and tools, and this is seeing a steady reduction in the number of hard copy proofs being produced internally, because staff are becoming increasingly accustomed to trusting what they see on screen. However, proofs are still produced for print suppliers to work from.

On the magazine side, Mason said that proofs were being run down on editorial because with the onset of ISO printing standards, the publisher and print supplier were much better able to manage colour output. In fact, removing the hard copy proof was removing many of the print problems, because the provenance of any given proof might be uncertain. For the contract publishers, even with editorial pages, the risks are higher.

Peter Davies of Forward remarked that “there’s never an opportunity to say, that’s not quite right this month, let’s do it better next month”. He added: “You’re facing reprints and compensation if anything is wrong, and with the relatively small cost of proofing, it’s well worth it.”

Jolly explained: “It is actually slightly more important on the editorial side than the advertising, because the whole thing is a branding exercise for that client. Trying to match the brand colours throughout the book is hard to do sometimes without a proof. We get fewer and fewer hard copy proofs for ads. We ask for them, but we don’t not print it if they haven’t sent us one. ISO standards have made a big difference. My team press-pass pretty much every section of every job that we print, so I get a lot of feedback about how close our proofs are to the finished article. Generally in the last two years it’s been a massive improvement.”

Davies agreed: “I don’t think you get the big surprises on press any more that you used to before standards came out. That’s a big difference.”

Preflighting was another area where it was possible to accrue considerable costs, but there are ways for publishers to circumvent these, it seems. Michelle Thomas told the panel: “At Penguin we’ve spent a huge amount of money in the past in preflight checking and fixing things at the production end of the creative process. We took all that money and resource out of checking it at the end and started educating the designers to make sure its correct.

“So we are pushing a lot back on our designers and editors to make sure that whatever they are creating, they create to our standards, rather than create what they like and we’ll make it happen in production. We are putting the support and training in right at the beginning.”

These tools don’t even require separate investment, Mason observed. “I think its interesting that with CS4 you’ve got a real-time flight checking facility. I don’t think Adobe have shouted about that enough. You can spend a lot of money on preflight checking software, when you’ve already got that facility within the application that creates the page. It’s a godsend from a manufacturing point of view, because we’ve always banged on about flight checking being as far up the creative street as possible. Now you’ve got it at source, which I think is a huge step forward.”

A missed trick
The workflow efficiencies to come are going to come from the editorial area, Mason believes, and he says a trick was missed when investments were orginally made in Creative Suite. “There was another product going out at the same time, which was InCopy, that allows dual collaboration on pages: the wordsmith can do the editorial and the designer can do the creative work. We missed a trick there. We put in a great bit of software that gave the creatives more opportunities, but we didnt really pick up on the efficiencies of having a dual workflow and working off a central server.”

Thomas stressed that it was important that workflow automation didn’t come at the cost of creativity in content origination. “There’s a danger of creating really quick processes, where editors and authors write into an XML template, the picture comes in, and the pages are created. What’s your core business though? We want to allow our editors and designers more time to be more creative, to check the text, to re-write it; for the pictures to be improved or designed in a better way. We want more time for that, and less time for things that aren’t adding value. It’s not about automating to the point where you’ve just lost your core value.”

Mason accepted this but said that maintaining control of origination was still important, and instilling certain disciplines in editorial departments would have to be traded off against diluting creativity. Jolly mentioned the trend for publishers to take more responsibility for repro functions, often only using a repro company for its flatplanning system. “I don’t know how successful they’ve been but it’s certainly allowing lower prepress costs. It’s moving that work up the chain to designers though,” he said.

Obstacles to control
Davies perceived a further obstacle to instilling discipline and control on creative areas: the rise of the freelancer. “Having these specific systems is great when you have a core team working on the same magazine every month, but as soon as you’ve only got a very small core team and the rest is freelance it’s quite difficult. Every time someone comes in they need to be trained to that specific role, especially when you’re talking about getting a designer to do the prepress function; some will and some wont, and you’re probably employing that designer for their creative ability, not for their artworking skills.”

Having direct experience of an environment in which designers now have such control, Thomas was able to report that those designers she has spoken to “say the control they have now got, they would want to give away again”. Instead of briefing a repro technician about colour, and iterations of proofs consequently circulating, the designer knows what they want in their own mind, and can get it right first time.

Content management systems will help here, said Stephen Irving, presenting creative teams with different versions of an image. “There will be a warm one, a cool one, a sharp one; you’re given a choice and a good starting point that you can take out of the content database. We have software now that means we can calibrate it, we can modify it, we can apply curves to it, we can pump out various options. So we can have maybe six versions, and the starting point will be there to pull down, available to everybody. We are looking at that quite seriously now – a content database that will be used by editorial teams to make their life a lot easier than it is.”

Making life easier – if production departments should ever require an epitaph, perhaps those words say it better than most.