There are benefits you don't even see yet

Equipment increases opportunities for collaboration, something most newsrooms don't do well

So you're gonna paginate? Notes from folks who've been there:

You'll get through it

Pagination equipment is just a tool, an advanced version of pen and paper, the typewriter, or whatever system you are using now. With a little training and a little effort, you'll soon be making good use of your new tool.

You'll also find that pagination affects the way you work and the ways in which copy and pages move through your newsroom. While these changes can seem as jarring as the new technology itself, they can also be liberating. For instance, pagination can make it easier for various parts of your newsroom to collaborate creatively. Pagination can enable teams to work together more smoothly. It can help your newsroom move away from the assembly-line approach to newspapering and toward a more reader-oriented way of working.

Benefits beyond the bottom line

Pagination offers you greater control over the final product that readers see, and new ways to structure your work.

Pages can come together earlier in the newsroom rather than later in composing. Reporters, editors, photographers and artists who want to can look at how their work plays on a page, look at that element's content, design, weight and position relative to other elements on the page, and fine-tune accordingly. Everyone involved in a story or a package can contribute as the page comes together, rather than merely handing off their work (and responsibility) to the next person on the assembly line.

Editors can see how much a story needs to be trimmed and go about it intelligently by hunting for widows and trims throughout rather than hacking from the bottom because there isn't time to rewrap type in composing. Reporters can even help trim their own copy - and see on the screen if it fits.

Display type such as headlines, cutlines and pullouts can be looked at as a unit rather than as individual elements and can be tweaked.

Photos can be quickly sized and cropped and moved around the page.

Artists can look at how color in an illustration or graphic works with other colors on the page.

Designers can move elements and make pages look the way they want them to rather than having to tell someone else and lose something in the translation. More pages of your paper can be "designed" by creating templates for standing pages, spreading the talents of your designers more widely.

When news breaks, stories can be swapped in quickly. The power to make changes is in your hands, not composing's.

Readers will benefit from a newspaper that's conceived and executed more as a whole - as a product, not a process. Think of all those stories you've seen about auto workers who are empowered to stop the line and fix a bad bumper - and then think about how much the way most newspapers are still produced resembles the "before" scenes in those quality lessons.

How to best use the system

It's not too early to start examining how your newsroom does business now and how you want it to be doing business in the future. Remember: You're trying to make a better newspaper for your readers. To do that, you need to keep your employees' needs in mind also.

How do you ensure quality in editing, in design, in the overall final product?

How can you improve planning, both planning earlier and involving more newsroom players in the process? How can you involve copy editors and designers in planning so they're not still stuck at the end of the assembly line?

How do you guarantee a workflow that keeps people working at an even pace rather than sitting around some of the time and sprinting the rest?

What production problems does your newsroom face? Are copy flow and page flow problems, and are deadlines missed? Pagination can magnify those problems; they need to be addressed now rather than later.

Who will be paginating? Will designers put the copy on the pages, or copy editors, or some sort of paginator-technicians? Or a mix? Will covers be handled differently from inside pages (and what about jump pages)?

How will responsibilities be divided among designers and copy editors? How do you get the best out of each - letting designers design and copy editors work with copy, rather than making bad copy editors out of good designers and bad designers out of good copy editors as pagination blurs the lines between their work?

Who will scan and manipulate images?

How do you build enough variety into their jobs to keep people - and more important, the final product - fresh?

Do you need additional employees to handle work brought in from composing? (Or can you build in enough efficiencies to make this unnecessary?)

Some advice

If you are just now looking for a pagination system, make sure to involve people from all parts of your operation in the search. The system must serve many people and perform many tasks, and early involvement will help ensure that you get a better system and better buy-in of that system later on.

If your system is on the way, it's time for serious self-examination in the newsroom. Be sure everyone is involved, from the top down. It's not just copy editors and designers who will be affected.

Visit other papers and see what they've done successfully and not so successfully. Steal from them, but realize that what works for them may not work for you and adapt . Make the system fit your newsroom and your paper, your strengths and weaknesses - not vice versa.

Sell people on the potential benefits of the new system, and figure out how to make sure those benefits become reality. Don't just do business the way you've always done it because that's the way you've always done it.

While keeping your plan and goals always in mind, push as much of the implementation details as possible down to the people who will be doing the work. The more they can help invent the new system, the more they'll buy in to it - and the better it will work.

Recognize that change is not optional. Get ahead of it, ride it and make it work for you instead of hoping it will just go away. It won't (but you might).

Train, train, train. Think of training as a just-in-time process - if you train people in new technology too long before they can get their hands on the technology and put their training to work, you've wasted the training.

After completing the initial training, build in time for people to talk about how they do things and to observe how others do things; you'll be surprised how many tricks people have learned. Keep evaluating your training needs, and see that it's a continuing process.

Be flexible. The plan you go in with won't be perfect. Be prepared to respond.

Build in some safety nets. At first, it's going to take more time for people to do their jobs, and they're going to make some mistakes, big and little. Think about small ways to make daily production run smoothly early on, and think about worst-case scenarios also so that you are prepared should they occur.

The transition will be tough, but there's no reason you can't have fun and put out a paper that your readers will enjoy and that your employees will feel good about creating. Good luck.

Fryxell is executive producer for Microsoft's CityScape project in the Twin Cities. Until recently, he was senior editor/business of the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press.

Rush is news editor of the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press. Until recently, he was news editor of the Wichita (Kan.) Eagle.