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Engaging concept: The Wall Street Journal's electronic tearsheet system, eTearsheet, was built on technology from Engage Inc. |
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Under the sheets: Left, MerlinOne's eSheets provides Boston Globe advertisers with easy access to pages. Below, Ad Looks' Electronic Tear Sheets is a scanned image rather than a Portable Document Format file. |
Digital alternatives to tearsheets
offer speed, savings and choices
At the Boston Globe, where the latest technology has seeped into just about every major daily process, one of the last vestiges of days gone by may be on the verge of extinction.
Tucked inside the Globe is a department where the instruments used to dissect the newspaper every day aren't high-tech lasers, but scissors and rulers. It is also a department with a distribution method that doesn't rely on high-speed fiber optic cable or fax machines; it depends on people wearing the uniforms of the U.S. Postal Service, an overnight delivery company or a courier service.
A tearsheet, for those of you who have been confined to the newsroom or the computer room too long, is a page from the newspaper that is sent to an advertiser to prove that its ad ran in the paper.
As the world around them has evolved, the tearsheet departments at most newspapers, sometimes hidden away in a back room somewhere, have been immune to modernization, staying a course plotted many decades ago. But as newspapers continue to search for ways to cut costs at a time when they have trimmed beyond the fat and perhaps past the muscle, the light of technology is starting to shine on tearsheet departments.
It may not be long before a cumbersome and costly process becomes widely computerized. Around the United States, a handful of newspapers are quietly moving away from the traditional tearsheet process and instead are making tearsheets accessible to customers electronically.
Want to know if your full-page ad ran in yesterday's Globe? Just log onto a web site, click a few buttons and the next thing you know, you'll be looking at a full page with the ad and all the other information you need to know about it.
Already, at least three companies -- Ad Looks Inc., Engage Inc. and MerlinOne Inc. -- are marketing electronic tearsheet software or services, each with a different process and unique features.
Some are intercepting electronic page images as they wind their way through a newspaper's pre-press process and turning them into Portable Document Format (PDF) files. At least one other is actually scanning thousands of newspaper pages and turning them into JPEG files that can be retrieved on-line.
All three have products in use that make it easier for advertisers to find their ads. If they want, advertisers can use search functions that can help them locate their old ads, and other ads as well. All three suppliers will also tell you they can dramatically reduce the cost of sending tearsheets, and make storage of tearsheets for advertisers a much, much simpler process.
"In many ways, the tearsheet process is still living in the 1950s," said Teresa Martin, chief operating officer of MerlinOne Inc., headquartered in Quincy, Mass.
All will tell you that they are bringing much needed change to an archaic process, but it won't be happening overnight. Even newspapers like the Globe, which introduced electronic tearsheets in September, are not about to do away with their tearsheet departments.
Not yet, at least.
"This isn't something that's going to happen in three to six months," said Irene Mauch, the Globe 's senior manager for ad production, pointing out that advertisers need time to adjust to the new process. "Have I had people say this is cool? You bet."
Service provided at 'no cost'
These days, the Globe is slowly teaching advertisers how to retrieve electronic tearsheets, but it is also continuing to send out paper tearsheets. When an advertiser is ready to convert to electronic tearsheets, the Globe will cut back on the number of pieces of paper it mails.
"We are providing the electronic tearsheets to our customers at no cost," said Mauch, whose newspaper contracts with MerlinOne for electronic tearsheet services.
At the Globe, traditional tearsheets may never go away, but the number of tearsheets a customer gets may be reduced.
"This isn't going to completely replace the traditional tearsheet," Mauch said. "But it will address the majority of issues, and there will be great cost savings."
Right now, the Globe may be sending a couple of tearsheets to an account representative at a major advertising agency, another to the billing department and additional copies to others in the organization. The cost of the newsprint alone adds up, not to mention the price of postage and labor.
And then there's always the possibility of the ads getting lost. "When someone calls up and says, 'I need six copies of the ad' and two weeks later calls to say, 'We didn't get it, send it again,'" Mauch said, "you have no choice" but to repeat the venerable, but costly, paper-based distribution process.
Eventually, according to Mauch, the agency will get only one copy of the ad physically, but then can go on-line to get additional copies for billing and accounting purposes.
At the Wall Street Journal, which converted to electronic tearsheets earlier this year, advertisers get one complimentary hardcopy tearsheet. They can order more through the customer service department.
"Creative directors still want to see that canvas," said Doug Stoughton, deputy director of advertising services at the Journal.
The Journal, Stoughton acknowledges, has an advantage over most other newspapers in that advertisers or agencies can get a copy of the paper no matter where they are in the country. But Stoughton said the Journal wants to make the tearsheet process as easy as possible for its customers, and making them available on-line is doing just that.
One benefit of electronic tearsheets, both Stoughton and the Globe's Mauch say, is that advertisers or agencies may no longer have to keep crates of tearsheets they can't find anyway. Said Mauch: "We had one advertiser say, 'Do you realize that I have to keep a warehouse in order to store the newspapers?'"
Over the long haul, Mauch sees electronic tearsheets as the wave of the future as technology evolves, newspapers become more cost-conscious and advertisers become more comfortable with screen images rather than paper.
"This is the right business decision for us," Mauch said, "and it is for most newspapers."
Quality concerns
Of course, not every newspaper is jumping on the electronic tearsheet train.
For advertisers, tearsheets serve many valuable purposes, including billing information, verification that an ad actually ran and giving an advertiser an idea of the quality of the ad. Not everyone agrees that all of the processes currently available address those concerns.
Chief among the questions is whether an advertiser who relies on an electronic tearsheet really gets both a true representation of quality and proof that the ad actually ran.
At Ad Looks of Rocklin, Calif., whose principals are among the pioneers in the electronic tearsheet business, there is a belief that its system of scanning images from the newspaper, transforming them into JPEG s and making them available on-line, is a more accurate accounting.
"There's a huge difference between a printed version of an ad and a PDF file," said John Ferra, general manager of Ad Looks, which evolved from the longtime industry supplier CE Engineering Publishing Systems. "My version is more accurate. There are no flaws."
The Ad Looks model of an electronic tearsheet has been around since 1998, after Ferra and his colleagues were asked by the California Newspaper Network (CNN) to help solve problems brought on by manual processing of tearsheets. (CNN is no more: It became the Complete Newspaper Network, then the Sacramento office of the Newspaper Association of America's Newspaper Industry Communications Center -- the Nicc -- which was sold last month to the Associated Press.)
"We did tearsheets manually for a year," Ferra said. "That's how we learned so much about them."
Customers using the Ad Looks Electronic Tear Sheets product pay a one-time set-up fee and then a monthly fee based on the number of pages scanned. Most large daily newspapers would pay between $2000 and $2500 per month. Customers include the Ventura County Star in California, the Houston Chronicle and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Like most of the companies providing electronic tearsheets, Ad Looks offers more than just a copy of the ad. Those logging on to the web site get a document that includes the name of the advertiser, the account number, the section and page number, and all other specs of the ad.
In addition, advertisers can look at a menu of all the ads they've run, making it easy to find back ads. "Sometimes they'll need to find an ad from a long time ago," Ferra said.
Another feature offered by Ad Looks is the opportunity to see the page located in front of a given ad as well as the page behind it, but these features are not unique. What sets Ad Looks apart is how the image of the ad gets to a web site.
Every day, Ferra said, a newspaper like the Journal-Constitution will overnight Ad Looks a copy of the paper, which is then scanned in, page by page. The pages are then uploaded onto the web site, and the next day, advertisers or sales reps at the newspaper can look at what he says is a true representation of the ad.
Twice a month, those scanned pages are printed and sent to the advertisers as further verification.
Ferra argues that the Ad Looks process provides advertisers with reproductions of pages that have really run, while his competitors offer PDFs that are created before the paper is printed.
"A lot of advertisers don't want the PDF," he said, in part because there is no guarantee that what appears in a PDF actually appeared in the newspaper. A year ago, Ferra conducted a survey of 500 advertisers; of the 50 who responded, 95 percent said they preferred scanned images over PDFs.
Can digital verify quality?
Competitors say that one of the problems with using scanned images of ads for tearsheets is that the quality of the image isn't always perfect.
"Sometimes the scanned image actually looks worse than the printed one, so you can't use it to verify the quality of the ad," said John Harrison, vice president of sales and marketing for MerlinOne.
Sometimes there is bleed-through in the scans, he said, and images can be muddy. He also argues that just because an image is scanned from the newspaper doesn't mean that the paper was distributed and readers received it.
Although there is an opportunity for Ad Looks to clean up a page before posting it, Ferra said that would never happen. "As a third party, I have nothing to gain by making an ad look better or worse," he said. "I wouldn't compromise my credibility."
MerlinOne's eSheets -- and eTearsheets, a product from Engage Inc., the Andover, Mass.-based company which this year began working with the Wall Street Journal to provide electronic tearsheets for its customers -- is built on its existing technology and know-how in the content management business.
Both Engage and MerlinOne transform ad information from a newspaper's existing system into PDFs that can be retrievable on-line. But perhaps the biggest difference between the two products is that Engage's eTearsheets product is software that is integrated into a newspaper's publishing system, while MerlinOne hosts the service.
Engage's product integrates with a newspaper's network and captures the page as it reaches an output device, such as an imagesetter or platesetter, then transforms it into a low-resolution PDF. The tearsheet then resides on a server at the newspaper that can be accessed by a customer with a user name and password, according to Stewart Woodard, account manager for the central and western region publishing market.
Customers can arrange to have an e-mail sent automatically once a tearsheet reaches the system.
Driving eTearsheets is Engage's ContentServer, the company's core technology for managing content.
Once in the system, customers pull up a full-page tearsheet embedded with a wide array of information about the ad. Tools allow users to search for their tearsheet by a number of variables such as publication date or page number.
Both Engage's and MerlinOne's products can be configured by the newspaper to provide users access to other functions. For example, a newspaper can allow advertisers the opportunity to look at other ads, or they can restrict access, so users can see only their own ads.
Both systems also have internal applications. At the Wall Street Journal, for example, eTearsheets is also being used to help advertising and editorial staff members with real-time digital proofing of pages.
MerlinOne's product works in much the same way as Engage's, capturing an image from an existing network. And like Engage's product, MerlinOne gives users a wide range of search options, including the opportunity to look through editorial content as well as advertising content.
Both Engage and MerlinOne also have a time advantage over Ad Looks -- they can get their e-tearsheets on-line before the advertiser gets to work in the morning. What sets the two apart, however, is that MerlinOne provides a service while Engage is primarily offering a software product.
"It's on your site and you have the license for ownership of the software," Woodard said of Engage's entry. Newspapers would contact Engage if there is a service contract with the company, or if it is offering an upgrade.
With MerlinOne, newspapers subscribe to a continuing relationship.
"It's a hosted service," said MerlinOne's Martin. "There's a setup fee and an ongoing monthly fee. Some newspapers like that because it is not considered a capital expenditure."
Prices, she said, are based on circulation.
Like Engage's product, MerlinOne's eSheets is powered by the company's core asset management technology.
"One of the best things about eSheets is that it is based on Merlin 4, our digital asset management system that has been around since 1994," Martin said. "It's proven technology."
Regardless of what technology is used, it appears that more and more newspapers will be focusing a spotlight on their tearsheet operations and looking at electronic tearsheets for more efficiency.
"Somebody just has to go out there and take the punches," said the Globe's Mauch. "We've got to get started."
-- Rich Pollack, rp@colepapers.net
Ad Looks Inc.,
(916) 660-1501;
Engage Inc.,
(978) 684-3884,
e-mail: info@engage.com;
MerlinOne Inc.,
(617) 328-6645; e-mail: info@merlinone.com
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