Desktop questions? No problem, if you work at McGraw-Hill

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 1, 1990 by Liz Horton

Desktop questions? No problem, if you work at McGraw-Hill

New York City--When Cindy Christian Rogers compared notes with other magazine people at a seminar this summer, she was intrigued to find out how relatively far along her publications were on the desktop publishing path. For a year and a half, the staffs of Senior Patient, Postgraduate Medicine, Your Patient and Fitness and The Physician and Sportsmedicine had been writing, editing and laying out the magazines on Macintoshes. Now they are exploring having photos processed electronically.

"One of the reasons we are in this wonderful position of having survived the first round is the help we received from the group in New York," says Rogers, executive editor of Minneapolis-based McDraw-Hill Healthcare Publications.

"The group in New York" is McGraw-Hill's four-person desktop publishing center. Because of it, editors, designers and publishers at McGraw-Hill don't have to navigate the waters of changing technology alone.

The technology center at McGraw-Hill's Avenue of the Americas headquarters is studded with Macintoshes, PCs, Compaqs, scanners, color printers, software--everything you might need to put out a magazine electronically. Headed by Cesare DelVaglio, the staff evaluates equipment and software, advises McGraw-Hill publishers on electronic publishing issues, installs systems, provides training and support, runs educational seminars for editors and designers on changing technology and "stays with the crest of the wave."

"Our policy is not to dictate," explains DelVaglio; it is gently to encourage people at the company to try the technology, and to explore whether it can result in cost reduction and increased efficiency in their particular situations. "In most cases, it can do both," says DelVaglio.

The proof is in the widespread--and varied--use of technology at McGraw-Hill. All of the company's newsletters and magazines are using some form of DTP; many are experimenting with color electronic publishing. Business Week has been doing all its infographics electronically since 1987. In Aviation Week's bound-in marketing supplements, all four-color editorial is designed on the desktop; low-res versions of artwork are cropped and sized and the pages are transmitted to a service bureau for imaging. A/C Flyer, a four-color "classified ad" title for aircraft sellers, does all its page geometry and tints electronically, and is now testing the CyberChrome system for four-color photos.

In the training center, magazines that intend to install equipment can work out the kinks in simulations of their own situation. A magazine intending to have editors on PCs and designers on Macs, for example, can use the four Macs and four PCs, all networked, to try out passing files back and forth before going live.

Keeping up with the technology means that the center often beta tests and even alpha tests software: because of its close connections with magazines, it's become an advocate for publishers. "We can talk to software developers and say, 'This is good--but have you considered adding these features that would make it a hit?" says DelVaglio.

Knowing where the technology is and just what it can do also lets McGraw-Hill pioneer new ways of distributing information, and not just those linked with magazines. Most recently, it introduced on-demand printing and customized textbooks in its college textbook division. The center houses a prototype of the first on-site custom publishing center, which will run at the University of Southern California beginning in January 1991. The database is on a Sun Sparcserver; order entry is done on a linked monitor, and when you press the button that starts it, the Kodak 1392 printer begins to churn out double-sided 8 1/2" x 11" pages at the rate of 92 a minute. The result: a customized textbook, printed on the spot.

For the future, the staff is keeping a close eye on the evolving area of Interactive media. For example, a Radius monitor currently in the center can capture images from the TV screen, creating opportunities to receive live news images without having to wait for photographs. (The problem of getting permissions, however, is not yet resolved.) "Interactive media today is what desktop publishing was in 1985--in a state of turmoil," says DelVaglio. "There's great opportunity to understand what it is and how it might be used."

But for people like Rogers, a firm proponent of electronic publishing, it's a delight just to have a consultant on call to answer questions on updating software, implementing new technology or solving production problems. The four-person computer support staff in Minneapolis often calls on the New York team. The combination "keeps the computers invisible. You don't have to muck around with the machines and spend six hours with a manual to solve a problem."