The German regional daily adopts an AI-driven pagination process that cuts print edition production time from hours to minutes.
Nordwest Zeitung is a regional news daily based in the city of Oldenburg in Lower Saxony. As well as the online and mobile editions, the paper publishes 10 local print editions, each containing up to a dozen dedicated local pages, in addition to common pages of national and international news.
Although NWZ produces a range of digital editions from e-paper to mobile app, the print editions are an important sources of revenue both for advertising and subscriptions.
At the same time, the labor-intensive page layout process accounts for a large proportion of the paper’s staff costs. In each 24-hour period the paper publishes a total of about 120 - 150 unique print pages. The preparation of these pages involves 17 print channel managers who typically take several hours each afternoon to create the layout for each local edition.
The Eidosmedia edition-management system that NWZ has been using since 2010 already incorporated a high degree of automation. Page layouts are created from templates that contain much of the routine pagination elements and page furniture. Stories reformat automatically to fit both digital and print editions.
Nevertheless, the process of filling a page with story content still involved a significant amount of manual work by the channel managers. Multiplied by the number of pages published in a typical daily multi-edition, this represents a significant workload.
For its online editions NWZ was already using high-productivity solutions to curate an extensive selection of local news. It was a long-term objective of the paper’s management to bring a similar level of productivity to the creation of the print editions.
The page automation system created by Eidosmedia uses an AI engine provided by Canadian developer Sophi.io. This has been completely integrated into the existing edition-management workspace.
During the initial phase of the project, the page automation system was used to create the local pages in each of seven local editions, building up from an initial total of 20-30 pages per day.
The stories to be included in the automated pages are prepared in the usual way. In addition to the tags applied by the author to guide online publication (priority, section etc.) the print channel manager also assigns a reference template for the story. This is not used for the layout (unlike in the manual process) but serves the pagination engine as a guide to headline size and other parameters.
At the same time, the print channel manager selects which pages of the edition will be filled with the candidate stories. Any stories or ads already present in the pages are ‘pinned’ to prevent them being disturbed by the auto-layout process.
The pagination engine is accessed as a cloud deployment. Before sending the page content to the engine, the Eidosmedia edition management system calculates the needed space for each variant of the article, including subheadings and captions, as well as the dimensions of a selection of headline variants.
These parameters, together with the page text and media content, are then sent to the pagination engine in JSON format.
The pagination engine uses the story parameters and the layout rules it has extracted from its training data to create an optimized layout for each page of the section. These are then returned to the edition management environment, again in JSON format.
After a short interval (under two minutes for a 10-page section) the content is laid out in the selected pages and displayed in the page plan.
Most pages will require no further attention and can be released for printing. If necessary, channel managers can make manual adjustments to the layout using the normal design tools - copyfit, picture resizing etc. (This approach contrasts with some automated layout applications which return PDF pages that staff cannot manually correct).
Following additions or updates to the content of candidate stories, the automated process can be repeated at any time. Pages whose layout is already satisfactory and up to date can be ‘frozen’ to exclude them from the repagination process.
Before the page automation system can be used it must be prepared using data from several sources.
First, the engine is fed with descriptions of a number of model pages in machine-readable format. It also receives analysis of story structure and a classification of story components.
There then follows a period of training in which the model creates layouts and receives corrections and feedback, allowing it to extract the underlying rules that govern the creation of a suitable layout.
How much time is saved by using the page automation process? Direct comparison is difficult, because the adoption of the new tool has been accompanied by a major overhaul of the newsroom workflow.
Initial estimates are that, with around 10-20% of the paper’s print pages automated so far, the time spent on layout by the channel managers has been reduced by about a third, allowing them to work in parallel on several editions.
The automated layout process frees up the channel managers to devote more time to quality control of the finished pages, both in graphical terms, as well as text and picture content. This has blurred the distinction between story editing and page editing in that the channel managers now have time to take an active role in updating and improving the editorial content on the page.
The reduction in page layout times also shifts the deadline for print pages later, allowing them to include more up-to-date story content in ‘breaking news’ situations.
It also allows time to be devoted to the front page and those of special supplements, where creativity is more required.
Creating new print formats or supplements for special occasions or audiences is a labor-intensive process with significant design overheads. The page automation tool has cut the time and cost involved in the design and layout of new formats, allowing the paper to respond more flexibly to the interests and events of the reader community.
Following the initial rollout to the local pages in 7 editions, the next steps will see the extension to all pages in 10 editions and the Sunday edition, and eventually to the other titles published by the NWZ group.