2008-2009 Research Agenda Preview

This month we will be taking a break from our normal research summaries to provide a preview of the upcoming research that is now available and that will be published in early 2009. As the research is made available to the public next year, we will notify you and provide PDFs for download from our website.

Have a very happy holiday season, and we will see you again in 2009!

Test Targets 8.0

Robert Chung, Gravure Research Professor, School of Print Media, RIT
Published by the RIT School of Print Media with funding from the Printing Industry Center at RIT

Test Targets, published annually by the School of Print Media since 2002, is the result of teaching and learning from the SPM curriculum. Students, faculty, and staff work together to create content focusing on process control and color management. In addition to research and content creation, the group also performs pre-media, prepress, and printing tasks using facilities at SPM and PAL. The quality of the publication and its track record have won accolades in the U.S. and worldwide.

Test Targets 8.0 is the latest version of this publication. To purchase your own copy, visit the Cary Graphic Press.

To learn more about Test Targets and download previous versions, visit the Test Targets website.

Download a free PDF of Test Targets 8.0.

Correlates of Job Satisfaction of Early Career Employees in Printing and Publishing

Ashley S. Walker, Marketing Communications Coordinator, Printing Industry Center at RIT
Patricia A. Sorce, Ph.D., Administrative Chair and Fawcett Distinguished Professor, School of Print Media, RIT

This survey-based study examined the overall job satisfaction of graduates in graphic arts programs from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Survey results were used to conduct further analysis to determine which correlates of overall job satisfaction were statistically significant. Personal gratification derived from doing one’s job was found to be the most strongly correlated job facet to overall job satisfaction.

Watch for this study to be released in January!

An Examination of Newspaper Business and Workflow Models

Twyla J. Cummings, Ph.D., Paul & Louise Miller Distinguished Professor, School of Print Media, RIT
Howard Vogl, Visiting Professor, School of Print Media, RIT

The newspaper industry is being redefined by changes of historic proportions. This redefinition has resulted in a disruptive shift within the core audience of newspapers. Thus, many pundits of the industry have commented that the traditional business model is broken. The reason for this declarative is primarily due to the reduction in circulation and the transference of audience attention to non-print media. Subsequently, the printed newspaper is no longer the primary news information source for most people.

The objectives of this research were:

1. To acquire a unified understanding of the traditional and emerging newspaper publishing business models for large, medium, and small newspapers, and to assess what newspapers are doing to change their business strategies.

2. To understand the prepress and production workflows for newspapers, to evaluate how they compliment and interfere with each other, and to determine if there are differences based on size of the newspaper.

3. To review audience analysis for the various print and on-line newspaper products.

To achieve these objectives, an extensive survey of five different newspaper organizations was conducted. In addition, the survey was supported by in-depth secondary research.

Watch for this study to be released in February!

The Open Publishing Guide: Creating a Self-Publishing Website Using Open Source Content Management Tools

Patricia Albanese, Gannett Distinguished Professor, School of Print Media
Matthew H. Bernius, Visiting Assistant Professor, School of Print Media, RIT
Sean Conklin, Alvin Crespo, & Rachael Gootnick, Student Researchers, OPL@RIT

The goal of the RIT Open Publishing Guide project is to create a web-based repository of information about self-publishing, including publishing tutorials. As this was primarily a production-based project as opposed to research, this report will focus on the process taken to develop the final website. It will discuss the steps necessary to produce a website of the scope and scale of the Open Publishing Guide, provide an overview of the production methodology, discuss the process by which content was acquired for the site, explore the web platform used to deliver the content, and, finally, outline the high level production workflow of the site. This report will be of use to those interested in deploying large scale, dynamic, websites and individuals interested in consumer-focused, Internet print-on-demand services.

Further Investigation into the Image Quality Differences Between Digital Print Technologies and Traditional Offset Lithography

Susan Farnand, Staff Scientist, Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, RIT

In recent years the differences in image quality of digital printers relative to offset lithographic presses have been becoming ever subtler. In 2007, experimentation was conducted within the Printing Industry Center at the Rochester Institute of Technology examining this difference. It was found that there were significant differences in the perceived value of prints made on digital versus offset printing equipment. Prints on coated media made on offset equipment were generally preferred, while the prints on uncoated media made on digital printers were frequently assigned higher values. The results of this experiment were possibly compromised by the reality that there were unintended shifts in the color balance of the prints made on some of the digital equipment relative to the offset reference prints that the participants in the study were asked to disregard.

The present study was conducted to examine the effect, if any, of these unintended color shifts and to further probe the effect of the media on the perceived image quality differences between high-end digital presses and offset lithography. The impact of observer image evaluation skill on the perceived image quality differences was also examined. The experimental results suggested that the color balance shift had minimal impact on the perceived image quality differences, though contrast played a significant role. The media also had a strong effect on perceived quality. Unsurprisingly, skilled observers tended to rate images more critically than unskilled participants, though this effect was only statistically significant for photo-based images on uncoated paper.

Upcoming 2009 Publications

These books will be published by the Cary Graphic Arts Press as part of the Printing Industry Center series during 2009.

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New Skill Sets for the Printing Industry—DAM and Variable Imaging Printing Services
Franziska Frey, Ph.D., McGhee Distinguished Professor, School of Print Media, RIT
Nicholas Barzelay, Adjunct Professor, School of Print Media, RIT

The outcome of this research will be a book entitled New Skill Sets for the Printing Industry—DAM and Variable Data Imaging Services. The fields of digital asset management (DAM) and variable data printing (VDP) have become a crucial part of the workflows and business models of many printers, and are considered areas with a lot of growth potential. Over the past several years I have had the opportunity to conduct research through the Printing Industry Center in the areas of DAM and VDP. The outcome of this research has resulted in several research monographs. While the research has provided a great deal of information so far, a full text concentrating on imaging issues in DAM and VDP will be a value-add for the printing and publishing industries and can also be used as a teaching tool. Additionally, work on a CD containing teaching modules for DAM and VDP will be produced.

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Personalization: Data-Driven Print and Internet Communications (Second edition of Data-Driven Print)
Patricia A. Sorce, Ph.D., Administrative Chair and Fawcett Distinguished Professor, School of Print Media, RIT

From the foreword:
In the three years since the publication of the first edition of “Data-Driven Print,” the media world has continued to change. A tangible example of this change occurred in late 2006, when Time magazine announced their Person of the Year – YOU! This event recognized the growth of user-generated content and the enthusiasm of younger media users in having information “my way.” The growth of the media forms are primarily electronic, including social networking sites, music downloads to cell phones, file sharing, and text messaging. This growth in “new media” has left the mainstream media businesses that provided content—such as news organizations, publishers, and record companies—to struggle with how to make money in the new era of individual control and user-created media.

In this context, the mainstream media forms seem archaic. Take newspapers—they printed news that came off the wire services of the Associated Press and Reuters, for example. These same wire services feed the information to Internet news Web sites that distribute it immediately to the world. If the morning newspaper seemed to be outdated by the previous-night’s television news coverage, think how much more outdated it is in comparison to Yahoo!® news. The same is true of television prime-time programs. TiVo® and other time-shifting recorders move the control of when to see a program to the user. These technologies not only provide user control on when to see a program, but also lets the user skip over and fast-forward through commercials. This has thrown the advertising industry for a loop, with mainstream media reaching fewer viewers and with younger media users avoiding these forms all together. The double-digit growth of search advertising, pay-per-click, and key word advertising over the last five years is a testament to where advertisers see the future in reaching prospective customers. These advertisers are also taking part in Web 2.0 by creating their own blogging sites (see Kodak.com for an example), where they invite users to share experiences with the firm’s products, success stories, problem solving tips, etc., on the firm’s Web site. These sites also offer RSS feeds to committed consumers so they can get the latest news on new products, services and other commercial content that advertisers had to pay for in the past. The ability to communicate 1:1 with interested individuals has changed the way businesses advertise and has shifted the focus to customer retention and relationship building more than ever.

The second edition of this book is set within this context. In this edition, the reader will find updated information on media advertising expenditures and the use of personalization as an advertising tactic. It will review the latest thinking on relationship marketing and customer strategy development. It will also add new cases and update ones from past publications. The book also adds new content. The electronic forms of personalization—e-mail and Internet search—will get expanded coverage. We’ll also include a look at corporate communication beyond advertising that has been impacted by database and digital technologies. This will include a chapter on in-plant printing and transactional communications. Finally, we’ll also look at how traditionally print-centric firms are making the transformation to the digital era of communications. We’ll take lessons learned from four of these firms to use as best practices for those in the midst of making these changes.