Desktop survey: publishers are doing it themselves - desktop publishing

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 1, 1994 by Paul McDougal

"If you want it done right, do it yourself," is how the adage goes. And, when it comes to desktop publishing, there is an additional imperative: "If you want to save money, do it yourself."

Small surprise, then, that our annual survey of 110 production executives revealed that more and more magazines are gaining control of their production processes, in some cases doing all but the printing in-house. "The hardware and software are getting cheaper and easier to use every day," says Eve Asbury, a partner in New York City-based consultants Asbury Bristow Communications, whose clients include Reader's Digest and Hachette-Filipacchi's Audio. "And by bringing production tasks inhouse, publishers gain more control of their products and can literally cut their prepress costs by at least half."

Indeed, a plurality of respondents pays between $40 and $60 to an outside vendor for one 5" x 7" color separation, while many of those surveyed who produce separations in-house say the cost of doing so, excluding capital expenditures, is literally nothing. "Even factoring in the hiring of a specialist, your savings will still be significant if you are doing any kind of volume at all," notes Frank Romano, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology's School of Printing and Management Sciences.

And the number of respondents producing their own four-color film in-house has doubled compared with last year, to 27 percent from 13 percent. Concomitantly, the percentage age of those pulling their own four-color proofs has doubled as well, from 17 percent to 34 percent.

On a less ambitious note, the survey, conducted for Folio: by Research USA, Inc., indicates that more magazines are saving money by attacking prepress chores that were once the exclusive domain of the service bureau or prepress shop.

For instance, more than half of the designers interviewed say they are using off-the-shelf software to build their own page traps, an 11 percent jump from last year. Their favorite program for doing so? QuarkXPress, from Denver-based Quark, Inc., which is also the preferred page-building application for 75 percent of our respondents. Aldus PageMaker, its nearest competitor, is used by only 19 percent of the magazines we contacted. "Quark's focus has always been the professional market," says San Francisco-based publishing systems consultant David Cole, explaining why XPress is the program of choice for big-league users. "For a long time, theirs was the only program that allowed you to do fine typography on the desktop. "

For illustration applications, an overwhelming 99 percent of respondents identified either Adobe Illustrator or Aldus FreeHand as the programs they use to create onscreen art. But despite its success, FreeHand will have a new owner soon, given that Adobe has announced plans to acquire Aldus. The companies have agreed to let FreeHand revert to the program's developer, Richardson, Texas-based Altsys Corp., as early as January.

Such issues are not, however, a concern when it comes to image manipulation software: 74 percent of our respondents use Adobe Photoshop, while its closest competitor, Aldus PhotoStyler, was named by only 8 percent of those who answered the survey. "Not too many users are concerned with what happens to PhotoStyler after the merger because not too many people use it," says Asbury Bristow's Christopher Bristow.

That's mostly because PhotoStyler is a PC-based application and, as our numbers show, very few desktop artists are working with IBM-compatibles, preferring instead Apple Computer's Macintosh. "It has a much better interface and is much more cohesive," says Romano. "An artist must work with tools that are intuitive. The Mac is intuitive and PCs are not - no matter what the Windows people try to tell you."

But whether they are selling PCs, Macs or some other platform, the good news for vendors is that many publishers are poised to buy. The majority of those polled say they bought their systems between 1989 and 1991, and therefore may soon need to spend some cash. "If your people are working with what was available in 1991, then I suspect they will want to move quickly to upgrade," says Andy Paparozzi, chief economist with the National Association of Printers and Lithographers in Teaneck, New Jersey. "The difference between a Quadra and what Apple was making back then is night and day."

Hardly surprising then that, on average, publishers surveyed plan to spend more than $30,000 on new hardware in the current fiscal year, and $4,600 on new software. And more than 10 percent plan to spend close to $50,000 on new hardware, while the same percentage plan to spend nearly $5,000 on new software. That might sound like a heavy outlay for an industry that has been on an austerity program, but as Macworld production vice president Anne Foley puts it, "Some of this equipment can pay for itself in a hurry, and you're left with a profit center."