Server: Netscape-Enterprise/2.0a Date: Fri, 19 Dec 1997 04:38:14 GMT Content-type: text/html Feature Story: TV Guide goes digital

Since 1995, TV Guide has worked toward implementing a totally digital workflow to take full advantage of its benefits, including later ad acceptance, improved image quality and consistent color across multiple print sites. To attain this goal, TV Guide has leveraged a bulletin board system that allows its advertisers, suppliers and printers to post and retrieve color digital ad files at the touch of a button. In late August, for example, TV Guide published an 84-page special issue about Princess Diana within seven days, from concept to execution.

The bulletin board, developed in conjunction with TV Guide's prepress supplier, R.R. Donnelley's Preliminary Center in Lancaster, Pa., delivers powerful benefits to TV Guide and its advertisers:

Because the bulletin board allows advertisers to post their digital color ad page files on the board to be pulled down the same day by R.R. Donnelley or other printers, TV Guide's advertisers can submit their ad material closer to the date of publication. Once, color consistency with film input was nearly impossible not only because TV Guide uses different printers at multiple print sites across the country, but also because ads are supplied by many different agencies. With digital input, however, the improvement has been dramatic. Digital data is easier to process and does not have the variables inherent with film.

How does it work? Typically, advertisers put up their color ads on the board, and R.R. Donnelley pulls them down for processing. Advertisers still must send color proofs via courier; TV Guide prefers digital proofs (such as Kodak Approvals) rather than film-generated proofs. Once processed, the file is put back up on the board for TV Guide to make certain it meets with page layout specifications, then to approve and post it for retrieval by the printers for production.

TV Guide is quickly achieving its all-digital goal. In the past year, TV Guide estimates that about half of its color advertisers have submitted digital advertising page files. With the bulletin board, the percentage of advertisers who supply digital data is increasing. "We are getting more and more ad material in digital format. Over 80 percent of our new ads for our September 27, 1997, issue were supplied digitally," estimates Jim Tubay, National Print Quality Manager for TV Guide.

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