Students Kick-start Print Workflow

Our industry has a long tradition of peer-to-peer learning, but an overlooked resource are print students, who are both good innovators and good teachers. This was evident last spring when Rochester Institute of Technology president William Destler declared May 3 a campus-wide “Imagine RIT Festival.” Innovations across all disciplines were presented to the local community.

Students and faculty of the Open Publishing Lab at RIT's School of Print Media showed off two innovations. The first extended online social networking, like LinkedIn and Facebook, into the physical world through variable-data print: 135 players networked by trading VDP stickers with unique 2D barcodes. Thanks to high-speed scanning and software developed by the students, within hours of game play, every player could see all the people they traded stickers with and connect with each other via e-mail and other online accounts.

The second innovation took a fresh approach to publishing as student correspondents issued four live “quad daily” newspaper editions of the aptly named Innovation News within four hours. Each was printed simultaneously on presses from Kodak, Xerox, HP and Canon, then distributed to festival attendees. In the midst of all of this, the iNews Website was constantly updated and a feed from it published at a separate venue where GPS coordinates from each story allowed them to be plotted over an interactive Google Earth model of the campus.

With a focus on automation, they built a production workflow that merged open source with the power tools of publishing production. Text content for the paper and all Web content was handled using custom-built modules open source Drupal publishing platform. Uploading and processing of images was handled by custom-built Xinet and DALiM workflows. Images and stories were synchronized automatically using metadata keywords built into the story/photo submission process, and stories destined for print processed as XML and automatically formatted for the page designer to assemble.

The system was built for portability and speed. News of the day was gathered by WiFi-connected “backpack journalists” sending real-time updates to the iNews Website from locations around campus. Stories and photos were submitted using iPhones, digital cameras and laptops, received and reviewed, text and images edited and released into the publishing workflow. By third and fourth editions of the day, this Web-to-print model enabled a production cycle of only 20 minutes from final story submission to first copy off press.

“The crazy thing about working on the iNews was actually how crazy it really was,” says Micah Stupak, a second year publishing major who served as the student production manager. “Not until it was all said and done did I really think to myself, 'Wait, we're doing what?!' In the planning stages, most of us didn't know whether or not anyone had ever done anything like this before.” In the end, the students got out four attractive, broadsheet tabloid-style color newspapers on schedule—and taught us all something.

ONLINE, see RIT festival coverage at http://inews.cias.rit.edu; OPL is at http://cias.rit.edu