Roxen

Print Production Made Easy

We provide a print production platform that integrates with your choice of story writer. We connect to a range of systems such as Arc XP, Aptoma DrPublish, Labrador CMS by Publish Lab and Sourcefabric Superdesk.
Our solution is delivered via the Amazon cloud so we can scale on demand and let your employees access from anywhere in the world.
We cover our installations with 24/7 support so you can be confident that help is available when you need it the most.

Automation and Integration

We strive to automate as many tasks as possible to help you focus on the important parts. For instance, the way we handle page layout gives you best-in-class automation regardless if you use Adobe InDesign or not.
We are experts in integrating our products in your existing environment.
No matter if you are a small regional newspaper or a national publisher we would be happy to help you implementing a modern and efficient print workflow.

Roxen has delivered software and know-how to newsrooms world-wide for over a decade, and our web experience extends more than 25 years back. We integrate print and online products with tools from world-leading vendors.

With our heritage comes unrivaled efficiency and excellent cost benefits paired with class-leading support. We call it Scandinavian Newsroom Solutions.

Ole-Jacob Mosvold

Mentor Medier AS

J Tom Shaw

Shaw Media

Auto-Layout

Technology Spotlight

Writer Integration

Technology Spotlight

Arc and Roxen working together

Arc XP is the publishing platform from Washington Post that some of the world’s largest media organizations use, Washington Post itself included. Mentor Medier in Norway is their first customer in Scandinavia.

Ole-Jacob Mosvold, director of technology and digital transformation at Mentor Medier, calls Arc XP a perfect choice for their corporate group with many publications and channels in need of a modern web publishing system.

“When we got acquainted with Arc they recommended Roxen for our print production and we have not regretted that for a second. We are very satisfied with their teamwork and the solution is impressive,” he says.

Matt Monahan, VP of Products at Arc, is no stranger to Roxen. In 2018 Roxen delivered Roxen Editorial Portal as a print solution for Arc to our joint customer Grupo Nación in Costa Rica.

“It’s like with people, sometimes you click! Since then, we’ve had good cooperation and made our customers very happy,” says Matt Monahan and describes the relationship between the two systems as “super-seamless”.

Arc recommended Roxen for our print production and we have not regretted that for a second.
Ole-Jacob Mosvold, Mentor Medier

By partnering with Roxen, we’re ensuring that these customers have a sensible path to produce that channel in an easy-to-use, cost-efficient way.
Matt Monahan, Arc

Aside from the merits of being a modern web-based system with a preference for automation, he believes that Roxen is a good fit for how Arc views editorial work in general.

“Roxen is a very user-friendly system, and they see print as a channel among others which agrees very well with the logic of Arc XP. When a user in Arc finishes a text, they choose a channel, like web, social media, or print. Roxen fits very well in that story.”

Even if the long-term viability of print news is open for debate, Matt Monahan considers that to be a distant future.

“We recognize that print will play an important part in legacy publishers’ revenue streams for the foreseeable future. By partnering with Roxen, we’re ensuring that these customers have a sensible path to produce that channel in an easy-to-use, cost-efficient way.”

Automated layout

At Vårt Land, the biggest of Mentor Medier’s publications, the change of systems has improved their editorial workflow, facilitated hiring of new staff (now that Adobe InDesign skills aren’t as essential), and contributed to a reduction in production cost. The focus now lies on journalism.

Managing editor Veslemøy Østrem speaks of totally new work routines:

“Previously your day might have started with an e-mail and an assignment, then writing until 3 PM and perhaps completing a web version before you left the office. Now we have web publishing as our top priority along with excellent journalism,” she says.

The newsroom now includes a news desk with a news director and a print manager. Three people take turns at the helm.

“We want everyone to agree on the digital-centric approach. And everyone needs to be familiar with and understand all our channels.”

Print production is headed by a print manager and a print editor that together put the final touches on page layouts that are created automatically in Roxen. They are the only users working in Roxen while reporters stay in Arc.

“Neither print manager nor page designers need to be Adobe InDesign masters. They can complete almost all tasks in Roxen, only occasionally applying minor edits directly in Adobe InDesign. The days of requiring expert knowledge in Adobe InDesign lie in the past, and that has simplified our task of finding employees for these roles,” Veslemøy Østrem continues.

We have not compromised one bit on our quality standards.
Veslemøy Østrem, Vårt Land

Vårt Land saves at least 15-20 man-hours daily through the move to Arc and Roxen.
Ståle Bjerke, TikkTakk

Through the years Vårt Land has been awarded many newspaper design prizes, and while some feature pages are still manually designed, practically everything else benefits from Roxen’s automated layout.

“For example, we run a profile story in every issue, a spread that includes beautiful pictures, and those pages are now ready in half a minute after all story elements are made available in Roxen.”

“Despite the efficiency gains through automation we have not compromised one bit on our quality standards. I’m sure we can win new design prizes going forward,” says Veslemøy Østrem.

Remodeled workflow

The project implementation was overseen by Norwegian workflow consultants TikkTakk AS who took part in redesigning the newsroom workflow and conducted staff training. Putting workflow up for scrutiny also brought along a healthy discussion on content, according to Veslemøy Østrem.

“They are amazing project managers! It’s been very rewarding to analyze our products and how we work,” she adds.

Ståle Bjerke at TikkTakk agrees that substantial advantages come from having Vårt Land’s reporters only work in Arc.

“Story lengths are not as important as they used to be. Roxen’s automation adjusts photos and pull quotes to ensure the body text fits perfectly in the page design. The system also removes web-only elements such as links and videos that don’t serve a purpose in print. Recurring sections with crosswords and similar are built without any manual interaction.”

“Vårt Land saves at least 15-20 man-hours daily through the move to Arc and Roxen,” he concludes.

Shaw Media moving to Arc XP to boost digital business

Shaw Media, a regional newspaper group in Illinois, US, has been running Roxen Editorial Portal for all print products since 2009. In 2020 they sought to reinvigorate their digital business and selected Arc XP as their new content platform. Roxen was a key part in the implementation project and helped ensure a smooth transition for the approx. 60 publications involved.

The Roxen team has always stepped up for us whenever we’ve needed help, and we are satisfied with their solutions.
J Tom Shaw, Shaw Media

Shaw Media was one of our first print customers, and now they are one of the first for the integration with Arc.
Per Östlund, Roxen

In addition to the new content-centric workflow, the new installation also represents a major shift in IT infrastructure for Shaw Media. Servers in a datacenter have been traded for scalable services in the Amazon cloud, and all users have upgraded to Apple’s next-generation laptops running the latest Adobe InDesign software. Any IT restructuring of this complexity must be planned carefully, and in this case Roxen designed a setup where old and new systems ran in parallel during the transition period to safeguard for any unexpected events.

Roxen and Shaw Media relationship continues

“Roxen has been a solid partner of ours for years. They were able to connect our new digital CMS with their print CMS on schedule with minimal friction. The Roxen team has always stepped up for us whenever we’ve needed help, and we are satisfied with their solutions”, says Tom Shaw, VP and Chief Product Officer at Shaw Media.

Per Östlund, CEO of Roxen, reflects on the long history shared by the two companies:

“When we launched our web-based editorial system some 15 years ago, Shaw Media was one of our first customers. And now they are one of the first customers for the integration of a print module we have developed for Washington Post’s Arc XP,” he says.

And to those who wonder what increased digital focus means for the print business, Tom Shaw predicts no immediate change:

“Print has a long way to go in our markets. The majority of our subscribers and revenue still come from print. As people’s preferences shift to digital over time, we will follow our audiences wherever the demand takes us. Digital is our future, but print will still be a significant part of our business over the next decade,” says Tom Shaw.

Interview with Editor & Publisher

In March 2021, Tom Shaw spoke to Editor & Publisher’s Mike Blinder about their digital ambitions as well as future growth plans, growing advertising revenue and the industry’s relationship with digital giants such as Google and Facebook. Watch the 40-minute video on the E & P web site.

Pros and cons of template-based layout

The design of a newspaper serves many purposes. It welcomes regular readers so they feel right at home, acts as a framework for stories and their parts, calls attention to texts that otherwise might have been glanced over, creates a rhythm so that each page flip brings something new and interesting, and so on. It’s rightfully considered a craft to create a design that can be immediately recognizable yet also functional and robust enough to accomodate all of your content.

But the design must not be so intricate that it takes forever to complete your pages, or make you resist last-minute changes just because the design is already done. Out of this need came template-based publishing software, but that introduced its own set of pitfalls. It’s difficult to capture a dynamic design in templates that can be reused without looking lifeless or repetitive, and stock-piling templates in an ever-growing library adds a long-term burden; when next year’s redesign comes around you face the daunting task of revising a giant catalog.

Template-based solutions go by monikers such as write-to-fit or layout-driven editing. This is also how Roxen Editorial Portal used to work, but it’s not hard to see that the advantage of rapidly laying a page puzzle came with a hidden cost – reporters had to write stories while looking at word counters and real-time print previews and adjust accordingly. A text too long for the given template may have been sent to a co-worker for further editing and clean-up. Web stories had to be rewritten for print, thereby creating more text versions to proofread and approve.

In online-first workflows you don’t want to take on additional cost of editing and formatting for print. But without this effort, is the print edition passing the quality bar? And can you maintain this on a declining budget? A seemingly impossible equation, but one that we hope is solved using a more intelligent templating engine and more automation.

A fundamental question we must ask to guide you onward is whether Adobe InDesign is central to your workflow, and whether you see it as irreplaceable or not. At Roxen we work with our own Roxen Editorial Portal that at its core runs Adobe InDesign Server, but we also implement solutions using our Norwegian partner Aptoma’s new DrEdition platform that eschews Adobe InDesign for a custom layout engine. Regardless of which path you take – or use them together like Schibsted – both Roxen Editorial Portal and Aptoma DrEdition support automated layout, albeit with differences in execution rooted in Adobe InDesign availability. Nevertheless, a common ambition is to substantially reduce time spent on layout as well as avoiding text rewrites specifically for print.

Introducing Auto-Layout

Below we’ll look closer at the new layout automation included in Roxen Editorial Portal. The feature is dubbed Auto-Layout, and when we designed it we had a number of goals in mind:

Customers should be able to adopt automated behavior incrementally instead of replacing an existing template library altogether.
We don’t want to require programming skills. Instead it should be seen as an extension to regular template construction that takes place in Adobe InDesign.
We wanted to explore an idea that a template designer could prepare variations to a single template, say, narrow vs wide fact boxes, and let users try them out through a settings panel in the web interface.
The solution should work both interactively in Adobe InDesign as well as server-side when controlled through Roxen’s Page Composer.

We achieved all of the above, plus a lot more, in the first iteration that was shipped to a Scandinavian customer in summer 2020. Since then we’ve refined and optimized the capabilities and have customers of varying sizes in the US and European markets relying on Auto-Layout. It joins a range of other automation techniques that we have at our disposal in the product.

Adding template intelligence

So just how can a template designer express how a story layout should adapt when the story’s overall dimensions change, when the body text shrinks or grows, or a second or third photo is added? The key part is to tell Roxen more about how things are linked visually in the design – something obvious to the human eye but not to a computer that only keeps track of geometric shapes on a page. In essence the designer adds a set of hints or rules, for example “Align the top of the pull quote to the last line of the intro, with a vertical offset of 4 pt” or “Resize the headline frame to match the width of the main image”. With these directives the system can move specific frames into proper locations, resize them, control visibility and apply styles, whether paragraph styles or object styles, the latter kind being one of the secrets to advanced automation. This template intelligence is crafted using an interface not unlike how you’d set up PowerPoint animations – no programming, just pick settings from menus to create a step-by-step recipe.

The final ingredient is a template rule that knows how to try different photo sizes while checking if a given text overflows or not. This is how we optimize so the body text fits as close as possible into the available space. When this takes place it can optionally hide non-essential story parts, e.g. a pull quote, and it will also take care to avoid overlap with other story parts or ads on the page.

Experience from customer projects clearly show that an Auto-Layout-enabled template library can be a lot smaller than a traditional library. Naturally it also puts a heavier burden on Adobe InDesign Server to find optimal layouts, but that can be countered by running more instances, something that’s extremely easy and cost-efficient when hosting Roxen Editorial Portal in Amazon AWS. Having this new level of flexibility and automation made available through a web interface, while preserving the option to jump into Adobe InDesign if necessary, lets our customers complete their layout tasks quicker than ever before.

Focus on your content

As the digital publishing landscape matures we have seen a new category of software for story production that sheds the baggage of the older systems it replaces, or rather in case of our domain, complements. Loosely labeled “writers”, these systems vie for the spot as channel-agnostic content management systems. The purpose of a writer is to focus on planning, import, authoring, editing and distribution of content in various forms; equally important is that writers almost universally don’t manage the individual output channels directly, but instead act as repositories that deliver “pure” content to other systems that worry about the nitty-gritty details of packaging for web, mobile, tablet, newsletters, and not least print.

This separation of concerns is not only technical but has profound impact on newsroom organization and workflow. In stark contrast to the old all-in-one systems (as Roxen Editorial Portal also has been used), the new model of multiple software platforms from several vendors can easily overwhelm a customer that isn’t fully prepared. On the other hand, the promise of content repurposing, faster publish times, better utilization of newsroom staff etc is compelling and can be the answer to the challenges news publishers face in their digital transition. Still, if your newsroom isn’t reorganized to follow best practices for these new tools, net productivity will likely decrease compared to previous systems, so it’s crucial that you look at writers as more than just an IT project.

No more pixel-proofing

Your users will encounter a fundamental change where they have less control over the final presentation of stories. In previous systems there might have been web, mobile and print previews side by side leading to endless fine-tuning that no longer is possible. The advent of responsive web designs and a multitude of mobile phone and tablet screen sizes sealed the fate for this pixel-oriented approach to digital publishing; for print this model is still heavily used, but innovations such as Roxen’s Auto-Layout take important steps in decoupling text production from print layout.

One can say that reporters have to put more trust in the system that stories will be nicely and consistently presented in all channels and contexts without being able to preview beforehand. And when that trust is established, that also frees the reporter from tinkering too much with the text just to look good in one of many channels. Such optimizations can be performed later in each channel if needed, but the bet you make is that it won’t be needed as often or at all, and that automated layout, whether online or in print, can handle it sufficiently well.

Ready to print

Aside from organizational challenges (that we won’t explore here) there are certainly technical roadblocks that must be overcome. Story photos and graphics are good examples where web and print historically have had very little overlap. Low-res pixel-based RGB images are typical on the web while high-res CMYK images or vector-based artwork is demanded in print. You need to establish a common ground, e.g. high-res RGB images and SVG graphics, that can function, either directly or through conversion, in both worlds. The recent addition of SVG support in Adobe InDesign is certainly noteworthy here.

Our past efforts in integrating Roxen Editorial Portal as a print module to different writers have all followed the same blueprint: let the writer act as the origin for all texts and associated media assets, and set up a one-way content export from the writer to the print system. But surely a two-way integration would be even better? No, aside from serious technical obstacles in having content from one system survive a roundtrip through the other and back, there would also be issues involving ownership and locking. From an outside perspective it’s rarely so that channel-specific changes belong in the channel-agnostic copy, so the one-way sync is simpler and more predictable for both software and users. Aside from text and assets we make sure relevant metadata – tags, categories, location, byline etc – carry over with the story and is routed to corresponding fields in the Roxen story.

Improved control via writer plug-ins

Now that we’ve established that content flow is one-way, there is however value in having other kinds of information flow back from the print world to the writer. For some writers we have developed plug-ins that open a door to peek inside Roxen Editorial Portal, allowing us to display a real-time print preview and present controls like a template selector and a way to communicate which page the story should go to. Since we already stated that too much detail from a single channel can distract reporters it’s important to use judgement when enabling these features, potentially limiting them to specific roles, but there are workflows where it’s called for.

Practically all writers lack sufficient typographic awareness to prepare print-quality text content. They don’t bother with paragraph indents, hyphenation, column breaks, five different bold font weights etc. Roxen Editorial Portal is an excellent mediator between channel-agnostic writers and Adobe InDesign where these details are front and center. Following the normal Roxen philosophy we prefer to automatically convert content upon import instead of leaving it to a user to manually clean up. This plays well with the idea of allowing story updates to flow in as late as possible, something that early manual edits would preclude. Another cornerstone in this strategy is the aforementioned Auto-Layout feature which solves the corresponding problem from the design perspective. In case a story needs additional print-only elements, say a couple of more photos and a fact box, Roxen Editorial Portal will let you mix that into the imported story with a clear separation of ownership between writer-provided data and Roxen data.

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