Sweden’s Bonnier News boosts print efficiency by 50 percent with AI

For Bonnier News, two-thirds of its revenue comes from print subscriptions and ad sales, while the rest comes from online subscriptions and ad sales. However, print revenues are declining and online revenues are increasing.

"We are now trying to make print production as efficient as possible to maintain it at a profitable level," Benjamin Peetre, Senior Business Developer - Print at Bonnier News Local, said during our Indian Printers Summit in Delhi.

Today, they use what Peetre calls "AI-assisted robots" to take care of page design and layouts before sending them for printing.

We provide the robot with the articles and photographs, and it generates the final pages and layout. "This is how we now produce 37 newspapers in Sweden and eight Swedish-language newspapers in Finland," Peetre said.

Achieving this feat, however, was not a simple task.

Choosing AI to make print production more efficient

A few years ago, print production for Bonnier News titles was spread across different units throughout Sweden. The company planned to combine all these units to make it more efficient.

To achieve this, they were looking for new technologies. This was before ChatGPT. That's when they came across the Naviga publishing system.

"The advantage of Naviga Publisher was that you didn't have to rely on making detailed plan of every page. Instead, the system would do it for you," Peetre said.

The system produced pages in Adobe InDesign, which the Swedish publisher used for their print production.

"We thought that in 2022 we would be able to start print automation. But the output of the pages was too inconsistent at that time to rely on," Peetre said.

A design overhaul to make pages automation-ready

The Naviga system was unpredictable. Hence, the implementation of print automation was paused.

During the trials, the Bonnier News team learned how automation worked. They believed a unified design for all their newspapers would be a good idea to make the automation work according to their requirements.

"If it's easier for the robot to make the pages, it will also be easier for us to make pages," Peetre said.

In November 2022, Bonnier News rolled out a full redesign of all its newspapers. At the same time, Naviga built a new "AI brain" called Flow, replacing their old AI processing model.

"When we combined Flow with our new automation-ready design, the result was very good from the beginning," he said.

Flow makes millions of calculations daily on every possible layout available for the paper. It also:

• Calculates an optimal layout based on the available space in the newspaper.
• Selects articles, images and quotes that fit on the pages.
• Creates the pages in InDesign using the available information.
• Does not change headlines and body text.
• Does not send the pages to the printing press.

30 'print planners' behind AI prepress workflow

In March 2024, 24 newspapers under Bonnier News moved to an automated prepress workflow.

"It was a few bumpy weeks, but we were up and running," Peetre said.

Before that, the team made significant changes in their organisation to get the most out of automation. The main goal was to create a separation between content production and print production.

Journalists write articles for online publications, where headline and story lengths are not as stringent as in print newspapers. These articles are often read on mobile devices, through the apps.

Once published in the online CMS, called Abbe, the articles are exported to a dashboard, which is controlled by the "print planners".

A print planner makes a list of all the articles that will go into the next day's newspaper in the Naviga dashboard. They make some basic edits to the headlines and content to make them more printer friendly, then send them off to the printing press.

The Naviga system also checks the ad placement and assigns the content to the available spaces. After clicking the run button, the AI takes care of the page design.

These pages can be opened in InDesign if the editor want to adjust the text, images or headlines.

"They [print planners] control the AI system [Naviga dashboard] and monitor content in Abbe. They are dedicated staff who make editorial decisions about the content and give their evaluation to the robots for further production," Peetre said.

"This is actually the fastest growing professional group within Bonnier News today," he added.

There are more than 30 print planners working from their company's two offices in Sweden - in Malmö and Sundsvall.

Complex infographics can be tricky

Processing infographics in articles was initially a challenge. But with recent automation, the AI can now recognise news graphics, avoid cropping or resizing them, and handle smaller visuals within articles effectively.

Larger graphics, such as full-page spreads, are still more difficult to manage, and all graphics still need to be created by humans.

One notable limitation is the use of byline photos - small portraits of the reporters. But the reporters didn't complain, Peetre said.

"The readers have not been able to recognise any change in the layout after we started using the Naviga system - and that's a good sign," he added.

The team is now moving forward with automating more of their newspapers.

Automation cuts workload in half

One of the things that made this project work was agreeing on what a good page looks like. "Everyone had different ideas, so we made some compromises and kept the design simple," Peetre said

The team set up a basic InDesign template, making it easier to adjust the content and keep the process moving. Adapting the design for automation was key to getting it up and running.

"When we calculate the outcome, the result is clear: what used to take two people now takes one," he said.

Aultrin Vijay

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