Reducing IT costs with Open Source

Let's get right down to the meat of the issue shall we? No sense in flowering up the subject with pretty words, after all, I'm a newspaper network engineer, not a reporter or editor.

The costs of IT are going to have to come down in the coming years for newspapers. It's that simple. The days of the feast are over, and we have to get leaner to do our jobs.

Yep, that means you won't be getting your new editorial workflow that costs a quarter of a million dollars this year. And you probably won't be getting the 16 core server either. Nor all the software upgrades you'd like.

Oh how will we ever survive?

The answer is simple, creativity and open source.

We have begun deploying a Drupal based editorial workflow solution to our newspaper group. Not only does it do a pretty solid job of an eds for pressitorial workflow, it has some pretty cool advantages. Like what you ask?

The first clear advantage is that it acts as a central repository of information for all of our papers, and the stories and be sorted and filtered in a multitude of ways. This means we can begin reducing the cost of the Associated Press by providing our own regional coverage.

Second, it outputs a series of feeds which populate our website for us. Stories go through the editorial process on the back end, and when they are in their final state, they feed into our website like magic, ready to be published to the web.

Third, we have created a series of XML export files which get used for pagination. An editor/paginator can download their export file from the workflow, and import it into InDesign. From there they can drag and drop stories on to the page, pre-styled and ready to go. It cuts down on man hours used producing pages for press that could be better used generating content.

Lastly, it is free. It was built on 100% open source software, so it won't cost us five employees to roll out. It's web based, so operating system changes and browser upgrades have minimal to no effect. And one of our reporters is now filing stories from the field on a $250 Chromebook, and it works perfectly. Talk about reducing costs, improving efficiency, and getting more mobile right?

We are also beginning to work towards centralized PDF generation using Linux and the ps2pdf command line functionality. Why you ask? Because with Adobe moving to Creative Cloud, the price tag for Acrobat Pro / Distiller may skyrocket to an annual fee that can be easily reduced with an open source alternative.

For a group of more than 20 newspapers, that $800 a year savings can add up to a part time employee.

I can't recommend more robust publishing software to be replaced by open source just yet. Scribus is just not a viable alternative to InDesign for print heavy newspapers, especially dailies, but it's come a long way in the last three years, and it's another open source alternative worth keeping your eyes on in the next three years.

OpenOffice, for most operations, can be just as effective as a more costly Microsoft Office solution, and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It's helpful to tweak your settings so that files save as Office native formats rather than the default ODF format, but that's an easy fix to apply to save $360 a year on Office 365.

GIMP is not ready to replace Photoshop on the mainstream, but if you give your photographers a chance to get used to it by playing a little bit, you'll find they crop functions, sharp unmask, and most of their basic photo editing functions are very familiar to them. No, I wouldn't design ads in GIMP, but I wouldn't recommend designing them in Photoshop either.

If you are a newspaper IT professional, and you want to see your job last a good long time, then begin looking at ways to reduce IT spending and save your company the money. The days of the big servers and expensive software are over, and now we have to learn to live on tighter budgets, just like every other department in our business.