Pittsburgh Newsroom Up and Running on DTI

By: E&P Staff The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is now live on a NewsSpeed editorial system from Digital Technology International of Springville, Utah.

The paper's NewsSpeed editorial suite comprises 211 SpeedWriter text-editing seats and 58 PageSpeed design and layout seats. Both applications include full Adobe InCopy and InDesign functionality. With PageSpeed and SpeedWriter using the same hyphenation and justification engine, users instantly see exactly how stories look on pages and can edit them without waiting for copyfitting on a remote server.

NewsSpeed helps the paper streamline workflow and eliminate several time-consuming processes--for example, images and graphics are managed within NewsSpeed, making a separate OPI solution unnecessary. SpeedDriver, DTI's print-management software, saves users time because they don't have to wait for print jobs to be completed before resuming work on their computers. "SpeedDriver saves us money because it handles all typesetting for the DTI system," said Post-Gazette Technology Systems Editor Tim Dunham. "We are able to optimize those few SpeedDriver machines rather than having to upgrade all network connections and all machines to achieve the same effect."

Dunham said NewsSpeed provides staffers more information at their desktops, saving them time by affording access to in-house and wire photos and graphics. He added that "stories and photos have a clearly defined step-by-step workflow that we designed ourselves to accommodate the way our staff works." He said the Post-Gazette further benefits from Adobe-DTI integration that allows work in InDesign that in the past would have been done in Photoshop or Illustrator and then imported into the old CText system.

The Post-Gazette also installed 13 seats of ImageSpeed to handle photos and graphics and five seats of PlanSpeed for planning and pagination. User workstations are PCs running Windows XP Professional. Two Sun Solaris V880 servers host the editorial and media databases.