By: Lucia Moses Electronic tear sheeting, which has been held back by concerns about clunkiness and its ability to verify print quality, is starting to move into the big time.
In a big endorsement of e-tear sheets, Knight Ridder and the Tribune Co. are about to start testing a process that they plan to use eventually at all their newspapers in an effort to save on postage and labor and to speed their ad-billing processes.
Knight Ridder and Tribune, working with the newspaper space broker Newspaper Services of America, chose MerlinOne Inc.'s E-Sheets technology, which e-mails portable document format (PDF) files to advertisers showing the prepress page containing their ad.
Other methods show advertisers the scanned printed page containing their ad, but Gail Provenzano, director of field systems for Knight Ridder, said the company found many advertisers use tear sheets for purposes other than verifying quality anyway. "The advertisers are smart. They realize that a tear sheet is just a snapshot in time," she said, adding that the company will continue sending paper tear sheets to advertisers who prefer them.
Tribune liked Quincy, Mass.-based MerlinOne's industry experience --
The Boston Globe was its first client -- and felt MerlinOne could handle Tribune's 12 big-market dailies and eventually attach electronic invoices to the e-tear sheet, said Lisa Wiersma, vice president of Tribune Ventures.
Hoping to speed the adoption of e-tear sheeting, the Newspaper Association of America has given its support for a Cooperative Marketing and Sales Federation committee's effort to set up a Web-based search engine to let advertisers view all their e-tear sheets with ease. The Associated Press' digital ad-placement service, AP AdVantage, has agreed to fund the project.
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