Print automation is a topic that is top of mind for many CEOs of media companies, as I discovered at the recent INMA Napa CEO Roundtable.

Even as we talked about a future with AI agents and an AI-driven news ecosystem where Google sends no traffic to publishers, the heads of 40 media companies wanted to know more about how to automate the print production process, with one pointing out that it had been tried unsuccessfully at their organisation.

In June I spoke to Gregor Zoller, director of IT at Medienholding Süd, on the topic. He says automating print laydown provides “a faster ROI than you would expect.”

Key insights

• Print automation is a journey. You are not going to flip a switch and achieve this overnight. Your newsroom team will need to work closely with your tech team and software provider for months on end.
• Prepare an extensive style book with very clear rules on what is acceptable in print and what is not. 
• The most important aspect is culture change.
  • MHS put “quite a bit of energy” into explaining why they were undertaking print automation — economic pressure, declining print circulation, market trends. “We just wanted to make it very tangible as to what are the reasons behind our efforts.”
  • Print efficiency enables digital growth. “We want to focus on excelling in the digital field,” said Zoller. “Efficient print production is a key enabler. It really does give us that room for digital growth, that free space in our head to focus on the competitive advantage that we can create around digital.”
• There is a very clear separation of roles into print and digital in the newsroom. A very small team oversees print production; everyone else focuses entirely on digital work.
• “We had to be very precise and very strict in sticking to defined digital-first workflows,” Zoller said. “There has to be a clean cut when it comes to changing processes and production flow. There have to be strict rules. There cannot be a lot of discussion about whether or not we do it or how we do it. Is it mandatory or not? Yes, it is mandatory. It has to be like that because it just gives people that clarity.”
• MHS provided “quite a bit of training” to the tech teams. “The whole thing is new for the tech teams as well.”  
• Create an automated feedback loop so “whenever there are changes, those changes would be fed back into the model so that the next time the model runs, the results should be a bit better.”
• Simpler is better than complex. “We chose to simplify our print layouts. That is an active choice that we make in order to get a more efficient print production. We are not passively sticking to whatever is possible. We choose to make it simpler.”
• The new role of the print producer is a high-performance role. “This is not something for whoever’s still there. They have to be highly trained, stress resistant, and have to know their way around the software and processes.”
• Pick an editorial ambassador. This power user will understand the processes better than others and can field questions instead of having all of them flow back to the tech team.

Zoller is optimistic about the future. “We intend to have full automation with reducing the teams by half or even to one-third by the end of the year,” he said. MHS has reallocated half of their print production resources to content creation and reduced the rest.

How does print automation work at MHS?

• A human creates a curated list by setting priorities, choosing the types of articles required from the pool of digital content. This person has a sense of how many articles are needed to create the pages. Blocks for ads are placed on the pages.

• Then the print producer runs the actual print laydown process. This creates a “blueprint for the actual print pages, and those pages are then created in our editorial system.” The result is overall very good, Zoller said.

• Automation does not touch the text of the article. If it does not fit, an editor manually needs to trim it. “This is intentionally so,” Zoller said.

• The AI chooses which page the articles appear on, but an editor can override it.

MHS is producing about 500 pages per month through this process, which uses the Sophi.io engine through Eidomedia’s Methode CMS. “We intend to double this number by the end of the year,” Zoller said.

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