July 15, 1996

Sports Illustrated, Scitex plan Olympic Daily

42 color pages, 300,000 circulation

Sports Illustrated has big plans for the biggest sporting event of the year. The company, using Scitex equipment, will produce a 42-page, four-color daily magazine for the duration of the Olympic Games. Called The Sports Illustrated Olympic Daily, the magazine marks SI's first effort at a daily publication and may be one of the most ambitious editorial and production efforts at the Games in Atlanta.

Sports Illustrated began researching the idea of producing a daily at the Olympics last August. After considering a few other equipment options, the company decided to use Scitex hardware and software in the effort, primarily because Scitex equipment is used to produce the weekly magazine. That eliminated the need for training the SI staff on new equipment.

According to SI, the content of the daily will be event driven, with the exception of some canned feature articles. Each issue will be 42 pages, 26 of which will be editorial, the rest advertising.

Of those 26 editorial pages, about 18 pages on average will be produced on site. The remaining editorial and ad pages will be produced in advance. A staff of about 100 people, including writers, editors, photo editors and production people will be working on the project.

Once completed, the 300,000 - 350,000 copies of the Sports Illustrated Olympic Daily will be distributed around the sports venues and in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Pricing for the magazine has not been finalized.

The digital workflow. Producing a daily means a tight schedule. To be able to distribute the magazine at the venues prior to the start of competition each day at 11 a.m., SI has set up an ambitious schedule.

The staff expects to do most of its production work between 7 p.m. and 1 a.m. The deadline for pages to close and be transferred to the printing site is 2 a.m.

Three Scitex Smart 342 scanners will be used to scan the images (in both low- and high-resolution versions) from the day's events. Scitex expects the scanners to handle about 300 images daily. (Traditional film-based cameras will be used for image capture. For explanation, see below.)

Once scanned, the FPO versions of the photos will be placed with the text on pages created in Xpress. Once the page designs are completed, they will be stored in the Scitex Ripro server.

The imaging department then retrieves the pages from the server and replaces the FPO images with their higher-resolution counterparts on four Blaze 96 workstations. The images are then edited as needed and color correction is done on the pages. The pages are then rasterized using the Scitex VIP RIP and converted to Scitex file formats. Scitex noted that the VIP RIP's ability to create CT and LW file formats that allow for Post-RIP editing, makes last-minute changes to pages feasible. Once pages are rasterized, changes can be made without having to re-rasterize the Quark page.

The next step is to proof the pages, be it for editorial content or design. For proofing, three Iris Realist 5015 printers will be used. The Spontane digital press will also be used for proofing and occasional short-run reprints.

Once the pages have been proofed and approved, they will be converted into bitmaps, compressed and sent via T-1 line to Quad Graphics in The Rock, Georgia where they will be printed by an offset web press. The ads will be stripped in at the printer.

After printing, the magazines will be driven by truck into the Atlanta area for distribution.

No digital cameras. In an interesting note, the SI staff decided not to use digital cameras for photography at the games. Traditional film-based devices are being used instead. SI said the company did test a variety of digital cameras, but concluded that, while many were suitable for studio work, they were not comparable to film-based cameras for sports and action photography.

Ties with SI weekly. A separate staff will be producing weekly issues of the regular Sports Illustrated magazine, but the imaging division used in the daily will be scanning for the weekly issue as well. The weekly's pages will be composed in the press center in Quark, then sent via T-1 lines to New York for composing.

PressPoint. In other Scitex Olympic news, the PressPoint newspaper distribution system will make one of its first official debuts. The complete technological system, including satellite distribution, print-on-demand and newspaper selling will be used.

Ten international newspapers have committed to being involved in the Olympic effort. They include:

• Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, in the UK
• Bild and Die Welt, in Germany
• Tages Anzeiger of Switzerland
• Liberation of France
• Asia Times of Bangkok and Hong-Kong
• Jung-Ah of Korea
• Aftonbladet of Sweden
• The Star of South Africa

Scitex is still having discussions with other papers and may add more prior to the Games.

PressPoint newspapers will be in the Superstore in the Centennial Park and in the Press Center. Copies will also be sold and delivered to hotels. There are also a number of other initiatives under discussion, including supplying airline passengers, leaving from Atlanta on their way to Europe, with that morning's edition of their home paper.