I had the good fortune to recently hear from two news publishers, Bonnier News and Medienholding Süd (which I wrote about here), who are very happy with the way their automated print production process is working for them. 

What are some of the steps they took to ensure its success? And, as one news leader asked me, what are the red flags? Today’s edition of the newsletter features key insights into the work required to ensure the print automation process is smooth and worthwhile.

If you’re prepared to make hard choices and do the work, as they did, you, too, can reap the rewards.

Benjamin Petree, senior print developer at Bonnier News Local, says the publisher creates fully automated pages for about 40 newspapers without any manual handling at all. 

Key learnings

• Manage expectations: “When you speak to people at an executive level about print automation, they envision an empty office with just one desk and one big button and you only have to push the button once a day and all the papers will be produced. It’s not that easy … . You still need to have a lot of professionals to control automation. We call them print planners” — the editorial staff members that evaluate the content. “There is a lot of editorial work behind it, even if the finishing of the pages is automated.”
• Simplify: Bonnier made a new common design for all the newspapers. “We changed the design to make it easier for the robot to make nice pages,” he said. “It’s very easy to change things and to take on more new newspapers as well.”
• Minimise the number of templates you need to maintain. 
• Separate print production and digital production completely: Reporters write only for digital, not with a print word count in mind. “One of the most difficult things to do is to get the reporters to not think that their article will end up in print.” 
• Have a discussion within the organisation to establish what qualities are needed to make up a good page. “And that can be quite a difficult discussion because if you talk to the layout people, the old print people, they will see every little flaw that the robot does. If they were doing it by hand, they would have changed all these small details. So, we have talked a lot about what we will need to change on a page and what we don’t need to change before sending it to print,” Petree said.
• “If you just have your old organisation and put in new technology in the middle of it, you won’t get that much out of the automation process. I think if you make adaptations to the organisation without automation, you can get a lot of efficiency improvements, but if you do both organisation and print automation, you get much more out of it,” he said.
• Consider resource reallocation: “Our organisation has become smaller,” Petree said, but some of Bonnier’s most skilled print staff are now doing more work on the visualisation of news for its online publications.

How does print automation work at Bonnier?

• Published articles are exported from the CMS to Naviga’s Flow system.

• A print planner looks at the publication plan and puts together a list of articles published online that can be used for the next day’s print edition. They work in the Naviga dashboard, where ads have already been placed and edit articles as needed. 

• Editors decide which articles are more important and less important. The machine chooses the optimal page layout for each page after calculating all the different layout versions that each article could have. It selects articles, images, and quotes that fit on pages. It does not touch the text of the body or the headline. (Bonnier uses a different AI tool to come up with different versions of headlines earlier in the process.)

• The print planner runs the automation and reviews the results and tweaks them as needed. “Most of the time, we have headlines that are too long to fit in print pages, and often we have too many photographs for each article,” Petree said.

• The print planner sends pages to the printing press.

“This is how we thought it would work, and it works almost exactly like this,” Petree said.

How well is it working? Readers don’t seem to have noticed. There has been no feedback at all, Petree said. And after one week, an editor-in-chief of one of the newspapers could not tell which pages were done by hand and which ones were made by the robot.

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