Presteligence Introduces Automated Page Building
Software developer Presteligence has an addition to its My News 360 hosted service modules, the company said in a news release. Dynamic Edition automates page building through an online interface, resulting in camera-ready PDFs or editable Adobe InDesign documents, says the company.
Curated content is automatically placed on pages based on category and rank. Without Adobe InDesign experience, users can then edit, swap, move, and remove content on pages as well as manage jumps from the online interface. Publishers can choose to go the fully automated route (straight to digital distribution or print production) or expedite the page building process by fine-tuning the pages in Adobe InDesign after the automated placement. Presteligence is headquartered in Ohio.
Poynter: Gannett Sending Jobs to India
Gannett plans to outsource 485 jobs to India in 2021, Poynter reported. The jobs are going to Hyderabad, India, the company told employees, says Poynter. The jobs are exclusively on the business side of Gannett. The employees being cut will be told by Jan. 15, but can remain with Gannett until spring, says Poynter. New Media Investment Group and its GateHouse chain bought Gannett in 2019. The chain kept the Gannett name. https://www.poynter.org/locally/2020/gannett-will-outsource-485-business-side-jobs-to-india/
News Media Alliance Sounds Alarm on Postal Rates
The News Media Alliance says a new rule from the Postal Regulatory Commission may harm newspapers. https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/new-rule-may-mean-unsustainable-postal-rates-for-newspapers.
Under the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (2006), products that are under the USPS monopoly, such as periodicals and marketing mail (e.g. Total Market Coverage or TMC products), experienced smaller, more predictable rate increases that did not exceed the inflation-based price cap tied to the Consumer Price Index. On Nov. 30, the Postal Regulatory Commission approved a rule, establishing a new rate-setting system that eliminates the previously implemented cap on postage rates for periodicals and marketing mail. Under the final rule, USPS could increase rates sometime in 2021 by as much as 7 percent above the Consumer Price Index (which does not include the approved rate increase effective Jan. 24, 2021), and by similar amounts in each of the next five years, says the News Media Alliance.
The final rule will go into effect upon its publication in the Federal Register, expected in the coming days. The PRC has indicated that the Postal Service could file a notice as early as Dec. 31, in which case the public could see USPS implementing rate changes under this new system as early as late spring of 2021. The Alliance filed comments with the PRC opposing the proposed change.
ABB Wins Contract with Dutch Firm
Global tech company ABB has secured a contract to upgrade specialist printing production software for DPG Media, the largest media house in The Netherlands. Control system upgrades for the Den Haag site include ABB’s Master Printing System (MPS) Production 6 and MPS Inform as well as a new control console application with the latest ABB software.
Based in Amsterdam, the group is responsible for some of the country’s largest newspapers, including Algemeen Dagblad and De Volkskrant, which have a combined print run of more than 600,000 copies. ABB is headquartered in Switzerland.
Union Push at Austin American-Statesman
Journalists at the Gannett-owned Austin American-Statesman and its six community papers announced Dec. 9 that they are moving to unionize through the Austin NewsGuild, a unit of The NewsGuild-CWA. Their action follows recent successful efforts at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (McClatchy) and Dallas Morning News (A. H. Belo), which had the first major newsroom in Texas to unionize. Journalists at the American-Statesman have submitted a letter to newsroom leadership seeking voluntary recognition of the union effort, said a press release. If Gannett decides not to grant voluntary recognition, there will be an election, the release said.
Pew Finds Confusion on Who Does Reporting
A new Pew Research Center analysis explores how best to measure public news consumption — asking which current survey practices work well and where changes might be in order. https://www.journalism.org/2020/12/08/measuring-news-consumption-in-a-digital-era/.
A culmination of a yearlong effort, the analysis looks at the U.S. public’s familiarity with newer concepts related to news and possible ways to improve survey-based measures of news consumption.
Among the findings:
- Only 9% of U.S. adults are “very confident” they can tell if a news organization does its own reporting, though just over half (55%) say they are at least “pretty confident.” When asked whether six sources do their own news reporting (ABC News, Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, Google News, Apple News and Facebook), nearly a quarter of U.S. adults (23%) could not identify correctly whether any of the six sources do so.
- Americans are familiar with newer digital platforms, but few use them for news, limiting the topics researchers can reasonably ask about in surveys. The survey finds that while U.S. adults are broadly familiar with five newer digital technologies asked about in the survey (streaming devices, internet streaming services, push notifications and alerts, smart speakers, smartwatches), few say they use them regularly for news consumption, and results from the cognitive interviews suggest that many don’t even think of these platforms as ways to get news.
- While there is no “silver bullet” for perfect survey measures of news consumption, the split-form survey experiments reveal that a series of refinements could drive marginal improvements, such as around the goal of reducing overreporting of news consumption.
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