The PPA Magazine Production Conference 2008 illuminated the issues facing the magazine production community, with the rise of digital media and the need for smoother workflows prominent.

Production professionals therefore stand at a crossroads. Their expertise is in print, but online looms large as both a threat and a potential opportunity for career advancement. The imperative is to prove production’s worth by helping to generate revenue, but too much of production’s time is still being consumed with chasing copy, fixing poor files, fighting fires.

Even the largest publishing companies in the land are grappling with the issue of having separate teams for print production and online production. Both Mal Skelton, production director of BBC Magazines, and Jasper Scott, manufacturing director of IPC Media, admitted as much in a session titled ‘Road Map to Production Success’.

“At the BBC we are successfully doing repro in house but the process does not end there,” said Skelton. “I’m very keen that we get closer to our online activites. At the moment we have a separate group of people looking after online. We have complementary skills; people skills, commercial skills, but the online team has a clear advantage in web skills and I want our people to have that too. We may sit separately right now but we won’t always, and the creative agencies are already working in this way.”
Both men concurred that the road map they had been tasked to describe was in fact non-existent, but offered some thoughts for progress, including this question of whether production teams must “change their spots” to add online production skills. Training will certainly be critical.

Skelton urged production professionals to take more initiative within their own businesses, saying: “I have found that success comes to those in the vanguard of change. We must be prepared to take risks but people don’t like to do that. Leading change gives you control over your destiny.”

That the way in which content is managed is subject to radical change became abundantly clear in listening to Karl Schneider, the editorial development director of Reed Business Information. He is engaged in implementing a content management system, and while currently content is created with print authoring tools, such as Adobe InCopy and InDesign, and goes through a workflow that prepares it for print first, then repurposes it online, in the future, he said, Reed will create the content in web native authoring tools, which will give editors huge flexibility in publishing online, through giving them “a bucket of bricks” to build with. Only after that will the print workflow kick in.

To make these systems really sing, publishers will require a higher degree of automation, and to facilitate this, metadata must play a more active role than it currently does, according to Sarah Saunders of image consultancy Electric Lane. Standard metadata fields for digital images have been extended of late by the IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council), including more Exif information being captured by the camera itself. She added that a US initiative called PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) seems likely to gain traction in Europe also.

Three major publishers (McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson) have just announced adoption of the PLUS metadata standards (closely linked to IPTC) in the US, and henceforth all suppliers of imagery to them will be expected to embed the correct metadata within a year.

Apply this kind of initiative to the supply of advertising files, and the benefits for production could become very clear. Andy Psarianos of FE Burman estimates that less than 10% of ads supplied are fit for purpose, despite the development of Pass4press standards.

“We have inherited processes from 400 years of history,” said Psarianos. “The supply chain needs to be re-thought out and re-engineered. Publishers have to rise to the occasion and take the initiative to manage the supply chain.”

The time to do this is clearly right now. Production teams need to clear their schedules of manual copy chasing and fire-fighting, and find new ways to add value to the publishing business.