Reaching more than 200,000 Floridians every week, Hometown News is a family of 15 community newspapers covering the east coast of Florida from Volusia County down to Martin County. Recognized as one of the top three community publishing companies in America by the Association of Community Papers (ACP) for seven straight years, the group has earned its reputation for hyperlocal coverage and reader loyalty. But behind the pages that land in mailboxes each week lies an enormous production challenge: 4 paginators, 15 editions, and immovable printer deadlines.
Faced with these pressures, Hometown News turned to longtime technology partner Software Consulting Services (SCS), whose Community Publishing System (CPS), a/k/a Scoop and Automated News Pagination (ANP) are reshaping how local publishers handle their production workflows.
Mercedes Paquette, production manager at Hometown News, and Phil Curtolo, vice president of sales at SCS, shared with E&P how this partnership helped the newsroom save hours each week, streamline its editorial workflow, and prove that automation can work hand-in-hand with human creativity.
The challenge of producing 15 editions on deadline
The production team at Hometown News is small but mighty: just 4 paginators responsible for 15 weekly newspapers, all published on the same day.
The pre-Scoop editorial workflow at Hometown News was daunting and manually intensive. Correspondents would email articles and photos directly to the editors, who would then organize them into sub-folders categorized by publication date on a local Pagination server.
Pagination would start with blank pages and involved hunting for stories and photos in the folders on the Pagination server. Paginators would manually draw boxes on InDesign pages and then start the arduous process of grabbing stories from the server and dragging them to the pages. It would routinely take more than a full workday – 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM – to paginate all 15 editions. And once pagination was complete, content would be manually copied and pasted into BLOX (the publisher’s website content management system).
“Before, it was much longer,” Paquette explained. “We had a system where all the articles were in one folder, pictures in another. It was just like, okay, let’s find this article and let’s find this picture that goes with this article.”
The goal was to cut down on wasted effort. “We want to take as much of the manual effort that goes into paginating an editorial page off the table,” Curtolo said.
SCOOP brings content under one roof
Step one in transforming Hometown News’s workflow was adopting CPS, SCS’s editorial content management platform. Stories, headlines, photos, captions, infographics, and bylines are bundled together into “story packages” — all the raw ingredients needed to build pages. Automation could not be successfully achieved without this key step.
For Paquette and her team, this was a game-changer. “Once we had Scoop it was taking us about an hour and a half per paper, because everything was in the same place,” she said. “We did not need to go from one folder to another to find stories and photos.”
She also added that Scoop eliminated the extra step of manually publishing content to BLOX. “Scoop lets us identify stories to be posted online and choose a date and time when they go on our website,” Paquette notes. “That saves us even more time.”
By consolidating content in a single workflow, Hometown News cut about three hours from their pagination efforts. But the team wasn’t done yet.
Automated News Pagination: A head start in InDesign
If Scoop eliminated chaos, Automated News Pagination eliminated repetitive grunt work. ANP populates InDesign pages with story packages based on assignments, complete with prioritized photos and captions.
Editors have regular meetings to discuss which stories should go on which pages, and even where on the page some stories should be placed. They will discuss which photos should be used and which should not. Scoop has an interface where these assignments are entered electronically so they can be called upon during pagination with ANP.
“As you might imagine, Automated News Pagination paginates news automatically — or at least that’s the goal,” Curtolo explained. “At its core, we want to give a paginator a head start on their InDesign page.”
Instead of manually drawing text boxes and dropping in photos, designers see a near-complete page layout in just a few minutes. Paquette noted that she’s seen entire pages come together in as little as 30 seconds.
Paquette has seen the difference firsthand. “On the push of a button, all my articles for a specific paper come in. I can paginate an entire paper in 30 to 35 minutes. After that, it’s just fixing — and me being difficult,” she joked.
Time savings that add up
The results are measurable and dramatic. What once took 90 minutes per edition now takes just 30. For a paginator like Paquette, who handles five papers in a single production cycle, the savings add up quickly. “I paginate five papers. I can do a paper between 30 minutes and 35 minutes,” she said. “It literally is a time saver. I’m doing other things on Tuesdays besides paginating now.”
Efficiencies like this matter even more as print deadlines grow tighter. “My deadlines are getting earlier and earlier with the printer,” Paquette said. “ANP helps me a lot with that.”
A partnership, not just software
For Hometown News, adopting automation was not simply a matter of installing new software. It required a close, ongoing partnership with SCS. Training and support became critical, and Paquette points to SCS’s responsiveness as a differentiator.
“Any time I have a question or run into an obstacle, I know SCS is just a phone call away,” Paquette said. “I usually send an email around 7:30 in the morning and I by 8:00 I have what I need.”
Curtolo emphasized that building ANP into a newsroom workflow isn’t an overnight switch. “There is no such thing as an out-of-the-box solution for any newspaper these days,” he said. “It’s a partnership and a relationship. We start by trimming seconds off the process, working our way to minutes and then hopefully to hours. Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither was ANP. It was always going to a collaborative process.”
Managing change in the newsroom
While automation saved time, it also required cultural change. Some newsroom staff were hesitant to adopt new tools after years of doing things manually.
Paquette recalled their rollout on July 4th with a few new publications. “It was a little painful, not because of ANP, but because the paginator was used to doing things a certain way for almost 20 years,” she said. “They were not as open to change but are getting more comfortable with the results. I don’t hear complaints anymore!”
For SCS, that openness to change makes all the difference. “It takes two to tango. Many people aren’t receptive to new workflows, but Mercedes was on board from day one and helped get the rest of her staff on board, too,” according to Curtolo.
The bottom line: Mission-critical efficiency
When asked how essential these tools have become, Paquette didn’t hesitate. “I would not be very happy if my boss cut Scoop and ANP,” she said. “It’s helps us manage deadlines and is a critical part of our workflow.”
The numbers back this up: a 66% reduction in production time per paper, the ability to finish most editions before noon, and integration that pushes content to print and digital channels simultaneously. That time saved translates into more capacity for advertising, classifieds, and other revenue-generating tasks.
Conclusion
For Hometown News Florida, the partnership with SCS has proven that automation can help community publishers do more with less. By cutting production times from 90 minutes to 30 per edition, ANP has freed up staff to focus on higher-value work, kept the presses running on schedule, and positioned the papers to continue serving readers for years to come.
As deadlines tighten and newsroom resources remain scarce, tools like Scoop and ANP are showing publishers that automation isn’t about replacing creativity — it’s about giving it the space to thrive.
“We have 10 papers done at noon now,” Paquette said. “That’s how much time we’re saving.”
For local publishers everywhere, that’s the kind of return no newsroom can ignore.
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