From Sept. 2005 edition of Newspapers & Technology

by Rob Carrigan
Adding dollars by adding technology

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“One has to look out for engineers - they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.”
-Marcol Pagnol, 1949

When Connie Reinert read a recent column of mine about the Colorado Press Association using Color Max technology to convert ink-on-paper copies to searchable PDFs (see Newspapers & Technology, June 2005), she called to my attention to a software feature that many small newspapers should consider.
“Were you aware that you can archive these as searchable PDF files simply by using Adobe Acrobat?” wrote Reinert, who is general manager of Livewire Printing Co. and publisher of the Jackson County (Minn.) Pilot.
To create its PDFs, the CPA takes hard-copy newspapers, shoots a picture of each page, and converts it to digital form via an OCR engine.
But Reinert advocates creating the searchability before that is even necessary. “Acrobat comes with a program called Catalog,” she said in an e-mail. “This tool allows you to build searchable catalogs of your pages.”
In Jackson County, Reinert’s staffers electronically bind pages each week as searchable PDFs. 
“These can be kept by the week, by the month, by the year, etc. etc. This is the easiest and most inexpensive way to create searchable PDF pages.”
Of course, there are different kinds of PDFs. Do you save them for distribution for the Web, CD, or PDA; for low- or high-resolution printing? Reinert suggests using them in the same format as the workflow.
“Around here, most newspapers send their pages to a central plant as PDFs. So the pages are ready for cataloging,” she said. “I’m big on encouraging papers to start making their own electronic catalogs. It is a simple thing, but like many simple things at weeklies, difficult to get around to.”
In an article she wrote for the Minnesota Newspapers Association describing the archiving technique, Reinert said, “Include your newspaper pages every week, and in a short time you will have a searchable bound volume on your desktop. These searchable catalogs can be used by your staff or made available for sale to the public via your Web site.”
Reinert says her company also uses the Catalog feature for commercial printing. “When doing a large parts catalog for one customer, we up-sold the PDF’d version of the same catalog and indexed it. We then burned several copies on CD for their use. This was a great value-added service to offer.”
Switching gears just a bit, I also recently ran into a relatively low-tech way to add dollars in order to keep the newspaper wolves at bay.

New revenue stream
While vacationing in the Black Hills of South Dakota, I came upon a gift store that also housed the Custer County Chronicle.
Upon further investigation, I noticed the relatively modern newspaper equipment, bound volumes, and other publishing evidence in the very back end of the building.
When the gentleman answering a gift customer’s questions at the register counter was free, I asked him about the newspaper business in the back.
“Yes, most of the other papers in the area are owned by a large chain, but we have two weeklies and do a lot of guides and publications centered on tourism,” answered Charley Najacht, president of Southern Hills Publishing Inc. While looking though one of the publications, I noticed that he was also president of the local chamber of commerce - in his spare time.

Rob Carrigan specializes in prepress systems for weekly newspapers. He is the publisher of the Ute Pass Courier in Woodland Park, the Gold Rush in Cripple Creek and the Extra in Teller County, all ASP Westward LP weeklies in Colorado. He can be reached by e-mail at rcarrigan@ccnewspapers.com.