The National: a daily magazine?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1990 by Liz Horton

New York City-Sound farfetched? Not to Tim Lasker, assistant publisher at The National, the all-electronic sports daily that debuted in January. "We did not wan to make it look like an average tabloid: lots of advertising surrounding a little editorial," he says. And, in fact, so magazine-like did top brass envision the publication that they hired as its designer Will Hopkins, who specializes in magazine and book design.

The result was a special production challenge for The National: to produce a magazine look," which demands process color and complex layouts, on a daily's deadlines compounded by late-breaking sports scores.

The solution was to use not one but two electronic layout systems. Scitex was the obvious choice for color work and final page assembly, according to Lasker; it links up with Macs running Scitex Visionary (a proprietary version of Quark XPress), used to lay out color and design-intensive pages.

Not so obvious was Lasker's choice of Cybergraphic Systems for the editorial front end and for heavily formatted black-and-white pages, auch as those that handle late sports cores. While Cybergraphic had provided systems for newspapers in Australia and New Zealand, as well as for Murdoch Magazines, it had never had a U.S. installation before. That didn't bother Lasker, who says he is a renegade "and proud of that fact. "

Editors on networked Cybergraphic terminals can work with text galleys on the left side of the screen linked to page layouts--from Cyberagrahic or Quark--on the right. When a page is done, the editor RIPs it to the Scitex system for final placement of art-work. Eight Macs, used for graphics in programs such as Adobe Illustrator, are also on the network, and can transfer TIFF and EPS files into the Scitex system.

Eighty percent of the color manipulation is handled on the two Scitex Publisher workstations in the afternoon and early evening, when the pace allows for color corrections, says operations director Alex Parnes; later in the day, as deadlines approach and laid-out pages begin to come in, the color correction terminals become page assembly workstations, joining two Prisma terminals.

Since it can take as long as half an hour for the presses to print the color right, color deadlines fall at about 11 PM; black-and-white pages can go in as late as 45 minutes before the presses start (at about 1:30 Am). Five printing plants receive all the information via satellite and then output film on Raystar plotters. The sixth, in Long Island City, receives film output from 7be National's Manhattan offices-the only exception to the paper's all-digital system.

So far, says Lasker, the arrangement is working well. "It's not like we don't have our burps and glitches, but so far nothing has prevented us from putting the paper out."-L. Horton