We had the pleasure of interviewing Dirk Volckaerts, the editor of a small weekly in Belgium, Brussels This Week. They use the SoftCare K4 system for their editorial workflow.

Brussels, This Week is a ± 65.000 circulation weekly newspaper for the Dutch-speaking minority living in the Brussels capital region. Our staff consists of one General Manager, one Editor, six reporters, three copy editors, two designers, three distribution and subscription staff members, one secretary, one accountant, and one advertisement manager.

The editorial staff produces an average of fourteen pages newshole (broadsheet) and a trilingual (dutch-english-french) event listing insert (68 pages) on a weekly basis. We run the K4 database on Mac Xserve, and use G5 Powermacs for lay-out and eMacs for the editorial staff. The non-editorial departments use PC.

IT-Enquirer: Which system were you using prior to K4?

Dirk Volckaerts: We didn’t really have an overall workflow or editorial system. We used Quark Xpress for lay-out and MS Word as a word processor. We designed Visual Basic macros and integrated styles to organise the workflow between copy desk and lay out, but we still had those typical bottleneck and copyfit problems…

IT-Enquirer: Which systems did you take into consideration except for K4?

Dirk Volckaerts: Quark (QPS, Xpress and Copy Desk), Scoop (Wilkenson) and Woodwing.

IT-Enquirer: Why did you ultimately choose K4?

Dirk Volckaerts: We chose K4 because it is a very open application, easy to administer and cross-platform. The price was also very important (we’re a very small company); that is also why we were inclined to go for Indesign/Incopy: one Incopy seat for Mac OSX costs 40% less than MS Office.

IT-Enquirer: What is good about K4?

Dirk Volckaerts: K4 adapts to an existing workflow, and not the other way around. And you don’t have to be a highly trained IT specialist to administer the database. Changing status, publication settings, assignments and so on is actually very easy. Thanks to a seamless integration with Incopy/Indesign, the K4 user interfaces are easy to use.

Journalists, editors and lay-out people have their own personalised to-do lists and, at any time, the editor has a complete overview of the entire publication: workflow problems are detected in an early stage. Only after three weeks with the new system, we managed to increase overall productivity with 25%. And we meet deadlines far more easily.

IT-Enquirer: What is bad about K4?

Dirk Volckaerts: It’s a detail, but the user-friendliness of the K4 File Manager (a separate application, meant for importing files like photos, advertisements, word or other documents into the K4 Database) could be better.

IT-Enquirer: What did you integrate it with—I am assuming that you did integrate it with other systems besides InDesign and InCopy? (back-end? advertising systems?)

Dirk Volckaerts: We’re still working on the integration with our existing archive Filemaker-datatabase, which contains almost everything we published between dec. 2000 and sept. 2004. The interesting thing is that we can integrate it in one environment, so that our text archive stays a consistent whole. We’re currently writing a few procedures to automate the text feed for our web pages as well. Because all the exported K4-files are native XML, this is a relatively easy task.