In a time of shrinking newsrooms, says Miles 33, editorial staff are often faced with an increased burden of preparing content for multiple channels. If some of the time spent doing standard pages can be automated, valuable time can be made available to grow a digital, multi-channel presence.
This is the main thrust behind the development of the auto publishing features in GN4.
The process is governed by a series of rules that are fine-tuned and managed by editorial staff. The principle is simple: pre-build a series of templates, shapes, assign category labels to pages, tag individual articles and define a variety of rules that guide the auto-fitting procedure.
To perform the auto pagination, some conditions must be satisfied. For example, individual articles must already exist and have elements (such as images, captions, by lines, headlines and body text) associated. The articles must also be assigned to the edition or placed in a specific folder.
The pages must also already exist in the database. In a typical workflow, these pages are created after the import of layouts from an ROP ad planning system such as Beacon.
When the auto pagination process starts (typically a category at a time), it collects all available pages tagged with the required category, analyzes the available space on each page (so it knows how big the task is), identifies all the articles that have been assigned to the edition, match the category, and have been flagged for use in the auto process and starts fitting content using pre-defined layouts and shapes. This is an iterative process and the more layouts and shapes that exist in the library, the better the end result will be.
According to Miles 33, the auto process is blisteringly fast and can paginate as many as 30 pages in less than a minute! When complete, pages can be scrutinized by newsroom staff prior to releasing.
Peter Meek, Director of Operations and Content Management at Miles 33 said: “The future of content publishing lies in mobile and online and many newsrooms want to put more emphasis on that side of their business, but get bogged down by print pagination. If we can free up, even a little of their time by automating some part of that task, then the newsroom will benefit greatly.”
