KnowledgeView RAPID Browser - Wires up new daily newspaper in Washington

When the Washington Post Company decided to launch a giveaway tabloid newspaper for commuters in the US capital, the search was on for an editorial workflow system that could be installed quickly, learned easily and used productively.

By late May the decision was made. The newspaper would be produced using Adobe InCopy to edit articles, Adobe InDesign to lay out pages, the TruEdit system from Managing Editor Inc. to manage the editorial workflow ... and KnowledgeView's RAPID Browser to handle a variety of wire feeds, choose stories to be published and open them automatically into InCopy for editing.

On August 4, barely two months later, the first edition of express hit the streets. In a matter of weeks, the entire system had been installed and the 12-person editorial team had been trained to use it. Before the beginning of June, none of the express editors had ever worked with InDesign, InCopy, TruEdit or RAPID Browser. Since the beginning of August, they have used the combination to produce a 20-24 page tabloid newspaper five days a week, successfully meeting the tight deadlines required to get the paper on and off the presses before the main print run for the Washington Post.

Express aims to give readers a quick and easy read of the latest news. Most of the stories are selected from wire services and edited down to fit the express format. That's where RAPID Browser comes in.

Express editors use RAPID Browser to filter and search incoming wire copy. When they spot stories that they want to use, RAPID Browser lets them convert files to InCopy format and open them for editing with one click of the mouse. Once they have completed their editing, another click checks the story into the TruEdit workflow, ready to be placed on the page.

"This is a great example of how RAPID Browser can be used with TruEdit and with Adobe InDesign and InCopy," said Dubai-based KnowledgeView Managing Director Ali al-Assam. "KnowledgeView is committed to working closely with Adobe, Managing Editor and developers of other workflow systems based on InDesign and InCopy, like the K4 System from SoftCare. The combination of RAPID Browser's simple but powerful news management tools with the editorial and design capabilities of InDesign and InCopy and the workflow control of TruEdit or K4 is hard to beat."