The Indian Country Today Media Network (ICTMN) is an online venture to revolutionize media for all Native Americans and indigenous peoples. The Website, www.indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com showcases talented Native American writers, reporters and artists throughout the world and serves as a one-stop destination and social network for people interested in Native American news, culture, ideals and businesses. The company also publishes an award-winning weekly national newspaper called Indian Country Today.
The Challenge
Management at ICTMN wanted to launch a new weekly magazine, This Week from Indian Country Today, to bring each week’s top news stories and features from the Indian Country Website to the print world. The company’s goal was to launch the magazine in a tight timeframe of 1-2 months. The idea was for the editorial staff to take content from the WordPress Website on a weekly basis and expand on it. Then the design staff would create pages in Adobe InDesign. This was difficult to achieve on a weekly basis without a system that allowed the ICTMN editorial and design groups to collaborate effectively. ICTMN management decided to find a solution to help the editorial and design staff work together to produce the magazine quickly and efficiently.
The Process
ICTMN hired DPCI to implement the K4 Publishing System, an editorial workflow management system used by editors, designers, and production professionals to collaborate more effectively. DPCI met with editorial, design and production staff to elicit functional requirements for the configuration of K4, then present to the ICTMN team how K4 features could be leveraged to maximize their work efforts.
Once the workflow and configuration requirements were complete, DPCI installed and configured the K4 Publishing System Version 6 integrated with a MS SQL Server 2008, Apache Tomcat 6, and Adobe InDesign and InCopy CS5 in conformance with ICTMN’s requirements.
Following the installation and configuration of the K4 Publishing System v6, DPCI conducted collaborative sessions with the editorial, design and production staff to review and adjust the K4 system configuration prior to training. This review process ensured the ICTMN team could hit the ground running with the new K4 Publishing System after training.
DPCI next provided training to ICTMN system administrators on K4 Publishing System Version 6 Administration and Maintenance. DPCI’s Adobe-certified Field Engineers trained editorial, design and production staff on InDesign, InCopy and K4, and provided ongoing support to the end users and system administrators as they produced the first issues of This Week from Indian Country Today in the new K4 Publishing System.
The Results
DPCI's workflow management experience and the K4 Publishing System implementation brought the ICTMN editorial and design staff the tools they needed to work in parallel on the production of the magazine within a compressed timeframe. DPCI began the project in December and the first issue was published just one month later in January. A future ICTMN goal is to automate the weekly delivery of content from WordPress to K4 to eliminate manual steps in the workflow. DPCI will help the ICTMN team along the way as they look to further streamline their Web-to-print workflow.
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DPCI helped us get up and running with our core donation processing system, built on Drupal technology. They set us up with not only a sound framework but also a sound process/workflow that has served us well to this day. They have been a key partner in our success.
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