E-Paper Production Workflow

This study focuses on production flow for publishing in generic digital newsprint editions, such as e-paper, PDAs or on-line editions, by analyzing and mapping existing production workflow at three Swedish newspaper publishing companies covering the most common organizational types in the newspaper publishing industry today.

Most newspaper publishing companies produce a range of electronic editions, all part of the digital newsprint family. In general, there exists two types of organizational production workflows - the integrated multiple channel workflow, and the separated, where the printed and the electronic workflows are detached, sometimes in totally separate organizations.

Using scenarios, the aim is to propose a model for the production workflow of the electronic paper editions in newspaper publishing. The results indicate several possibilities for automation in the workflow. Furthermore, the study points out stages as challenges in the workflow where changes have to be done in order to introduce epaper as a publishing channel for news publishing. We will as an introduction, along with the workflow scenarios in this paper, also present a brief overview of the existing techniques for displaying content on electronic paper terminals.