September 7, 2007 

Nothing is more exciting than a boring go-live : )  That's certainly what we experienced this week at the Gazette of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Thanks to excellent preparation by the Gazette superuser team, the 70,000-circulation paper in Iowa's second-largest city has produced its first sections to near-perfection. The system has performed wonderfully, and other than an occasion “learning curve” user error, it has been a very quiet week.

The Gazette has been live on SAXOTECH Online for several months, and is making great progress in bringing its content together on one publishing platform.

In the newsroom, Editorial users are paginating with InDesign and writing in InCopy on Windows. Pages are transmitted to the offsite press facility using the SAXOTECH Editorial AutoPrint function and pre-flighted through Asura.

The go-live process here will continue in three weeks with the daily features sections. Two more sections will start using the system in October, and the Sports department will join in early December.

posted by Ronnie W. 

 [ed. note: PRESSTIME, the magazine of the Newspaper Association of America, featured Gazette Communications' web/print innovations in a July 2007 story. Check it out:  "Connecting the Dots"]