Final creation of regionalized versions of USA Today, “The Nation's Newspaper,” are now customized and assembled, automatically, using PuzzleFlow Automator.  

PuzzleFlow is pleased to announce that, since its rather quiet implementation in July of 2013, Gannett has been using a PuzzleFlow Automator feature, (built around the powerful PuzzleFlow PDF Library) to automatically locate and place the custom editorial content and regionalized advertisements on each customized/zoned USA Today page. Through the PuzzleFlow system, a USA Today base page is automatically “married” with the appropriate content, stitched into a single PDF page and distributed for final output and printing. 

The process of customizing USA Today pages – creating pages with different editorial and ad content for different regional versions of the paper – was, prior to implementing PuzzleFlow Automator, a more complex process. Locating and placing the different stories and advertisements for the many variable pages in each of the dozens of regional versions of USA Today required multiple software packages and manual, page-by-page intervention. With the PuzzleFlow Solution, one USA Today base page is created and the entire process of customizing and creating the dozens of variations is completely automated using PuzzleFlow's Automator software.

This same PuzzleFlow Automator system also handles the centralized page processing and preflight for all Gannett newsrooms and design studios, as well as commercial print file processing for Gannett Publishing Services (GPS). As mentioned in PuzzleFlow's October 1, 2012 press release, Automator was first implemented to “provide all page normalization, preflight, auto-correction and distribution” including, page fixing (size, colors, rich black, transparencies, etc.), ink optimization, and ancillary file creation.