Satellite Delivers the News: Read All About It - Page 1 of 2

by James Careless

You would think that being one of the largest U.S. suppliers of satellite services would be enough work for any company, however, SES Americom has a second, rather unlikely job. It moonlights as a newspaper carrier.

Every evening, SES Americom delivers USA Today via satellite to 35 printing plants throughout the United States. This adds up to more than 44,600 miles (round trip) each time. This represents much more than the average carriers' "five blocks before breakfast." Actually, SES Americom's daily route is more than 89,200 miles long. In order to provide a fully redundant transmission chain, USA Today actually sends up two feeds each night. One goes to AMC 2, and the other goes to AMC 4. This is why each USA Today printing plant has two antennas: one 5-meter, and one 3.7-meter.

Meanwhile, Loral Skynet "plays paperboy" for USA Today's International edition. It takes the USA Today data feed--uplinked from Hawaii, where it is delivered via landline from USA Today's McLean, VA, headquarters--and distributes it via satellite to Hong Kong. The same data is also uplinked to Loral Skynet Europe from Herndon, VA, and distributed via Telstar 11 to numerous European printing plants.

As an integral part of USA Today's desktop-based publishing system, satellites help keep the publication's news moving and moving fast. "In fact, it takes just five to seven minutes to move from a page being 'set' (approved for printing) to being compiled, transmitted to the remote print site, imaged on the plant's computer-to-plate equipment and installed on the actual printing press," says Stephen Terrillion, USA Today's director of pre-press operations. "This means that USA Today's editors can keep updating stories just minutes before the press run starts, all over the planet." In the United States, USA Today's plants have two press runs. The first takes places at 11:40 p.m. Eastern time, while the second starts two hours later.

Committed To Satellites

Since its 1982 launch, USA Today moved from legacy computer systems such as ATEX--which required designers to cut-and-paste pages together--to complete desktop publishing using the CCI NewsDesk Editorial and Pagination System (CCI). "With CCI, reporters write their stories on [the] PC, then send them to the editors for checking," Terrillion says. "Once their copy has been edited, our design editors can lay out and view completed pages on their computer monitors. This allows us maximum flexibility for changing stories at the last minute."

CCI is also used for editing and adding "fractional" (part-page) ads into USA TODAY pages. For full-page ads, or ad runs meant for certain regions only (copysplit), USA TODAY uses the ProImage Newsway system instead. Newsway delivers the ad directly to the computer-to-plate equipment at the print site, rather than sending files to CCI first for composition.