Making a correction

“[Tansa is] a really efficient tool to make a newspaper better.” Arne Trønnes, Fœdrelandsvennen

KRISTIANSAND, Norway

A cost-cutting decision can sometimes backfire.

Just ask the management at the daily newspaper Fœdrelandsvennen, published in Kristiansand, Norway.

After they replaced a major piece of their information technology (IT) infrastructure in 2001, they quickly realized their overall technology budget had ballooned. They needed to find a way to trim their IT expenditures, so they decided to eliminate some of their other systems that they deemed to be secondary or non-mission critical.

One casualty of this cost cutting was their Tansa Text Proofing System.

“It was one of the hardest decisions we ever had to make,” said Arne Trønnes, Produksjonsredaktør (Production Editor) at the paper.

Even though Fœdrelandsvennen, with an average daily circulation of 42,000 copies, was one of the first publications to adopt the Tansa system over eight years ago, and the editors had always been happy with its results, management decided not to upgrade the system to work with their new infrastructure and the support agreement with Tansa was terminated.

“Unfortunately, [that decision] turned out not as good as we expected,” said Trønnes.

This is the story of how they ended up making that decision — and how they later had to change their minds.

The copy editors of Fœdrelandsvennen use the Tansa Text Proofing System 3 integrated with their CCI NewsDesk editorial system.

The first installation

Founded by, and named after, King Christian IV, Kristiansand is the closest thing to a seaside resort in Norway. Located at the southernmost tip of the country, Kristiansand is Norway’s fifth largest city, with over 75,000 residents. Incorporated as a city in 1641, today it is a capital of southern Norway and houses both state and regional government offices.

Fœdrelandsvennen is the area’s largest daily newspaper, but back in the early 1990s it was a small paper with several local competitors.

When they embarked upon a growth and expansion plan that saw the paper significantly increase the size of its editorial staff, they decided they needed to improve their overall copyediting process and enforce a more consistent use of spelling and style. They wondered if any technology existed that might be able to help them do that.

“We heard about a new system that [one of the largest daily newspapers in Norway] was using,” said Trønnes. “We went to see the solution and were very impressed with the way it was working.”
What they saw was the very first installation of the Tansa Text Proofing System. After some discussions, the editors at Fœdrelandsvennen made a decision to buy Tansa and start using it as soon as possible.

The original implementation of Tansa at Fœdrelandsvennen took place in April 1997. It was installed with the editorial system they had at that time – a Norwegian solution from a company called Reglett.
They thought Tansa was especially useful for designers and other newsroom staff that were not very good with words. It meant that those users “could have a kind of quality check,” said Trønnes. They also used Tansa to manage and control their hyphenation.

But Reglett went bankrupt in 1998, leaving the paper without any support or new development on one of their most important systems.

When they began shopping for a replacement editorial system in 2001, finding a “reliable partner” that they knew “would be there for us” was high on the list of requirements.

After an extensive search, they chose the NewsDesk system from CCI Europe.

Produksjonsredaktør Arne Trønnes stands outside the offices of Fœdrelandsvennen in Kristiansand, Norway.

A new editorial system

Although most of CCI’s customers are large metro papers with hundreds of users, Fœdrelandsvennen is one of their smallest installations in the world, with only 80 seats and a fairly small IT staff.

This created a challenge for Fœdrelandsvennen, because the NewsDesk system is complicated, with many different components and extensive customization options.

“When we chose [the CCI system], it was more expensive for us [to install and maintain],” said Trønnes. “We had to consider – where can we save some money?”

So, after calculating the cost of a Tansa upgrade and ongoing support, they decided to stop using Tansa in their newsroom.

“It was not because of any bad experience with Tansa,” insisted Trønnes. “We were very happy with it.”

CCI’s NewsDesk editorial system uses a customized version of Microsoft Word as the primary text editing application, which means that the users rely on the spelling tools provided by Microsoft. They had hoped that Word would provide spelling and hyphenation tools that were a comparable replacement to Tansa.

What they found, however, was that Tansa provides a unique solution.

“The [Microsoft] Word spelling checker is a help, but it is not good enough,” said Trønnes. “There is a big difference between Tansa and the Word spelling checker.”

For example, according to Trønnes, it is difficult to maintain a standard language policy with Word.
He explained that, in Norwegian (like in English), there are many words that can be spelled in more than one way, and Word does not provide any way to specify a preferred spelling.

“It’s very hard to communicate that type of language policy to users,” Trønnes said. “They often think, ‘For me, I prefer it this way’.”

“Word cannot help us be consistent,” he continued. “This is a problem because the readers should know what to expect from us. Our language policy is part of the company’s identity.”
In addition, without Tansa, hyphenation became a “problem”.

“In Norwegian, it is crucial the way you hyphenate a word,” he said. “If you do it wrong, it can befunny. And sometimes it can be offensive.”

The editors at Fœdrelandsvennen learned the hard way that the default hyphenation rules supplied for the Norwegian language are often inadequate in the desktop editing and layout applications created by companies outside of Norway.

Tansa returns

So, after two years of using CCI’s NewsDesk without Tansa, Fœdrelandsvennen decided that they had made a mistake when they stopped using it.

“We realized we could not live with the situation,” said Trønnes.

They realized they needed to bring back Tansa.

Unlike the spelling checkers found in desktop applications like Microsoft Word, Tansa can proofread content in multi-word phrases. This allows Tansa to check — not only the spelling of individual words — but also the spelling of proper names, as well as the usage of words and the style of your writing. This means that Tansa can catch more errors, and several different types of errors, than is possible with the spelling checker Fœdrelandsvennen was using in Microsoft Word.

In addition, because every installation of Tansa includes a set of dictionaries and style rules custom-tailored to the specifications of each client, Trønnes was aware that Tansa would help Fœdrelandsvennen enforce a consistent use of language and spelling.

And, finally, Trønnes knew that Tansa would solve the paper’s problems with hyphenation. The Tansa Hyphenation Service gives newspapers a centralized way to manage hyphenation exceptions for their editorial system, as well as an easy way to apply those hyphenation rules. In this way, Fœdrelandsvennen would be able to teach their editorial system the way they preferred Norwegian to be hyphenated.

Several managers began lobbying for Tansa’s return and integration with CCI, and at budget time it was a topic of discussion. After seeing a demonstration of the new Tansa System 3 at Ifra Expo in Amsterdam in the fall of 2004, they placed an order.

“I’m very happy to say that everybody listened and we got [Tansa] into the budget for 2005,” Trønnes said.

Fœdrelandsvennen’s second Tansa system was installed and integrated with their CCI NewsDesk system in May 2005. “Now it’s operating, and we’ve started to use it again,” said Trønnes. “We can see that the people on the desk are very happy. They rely on it [Tansa].”

The editors have also reported an improvement in hyphenation as well. “Hyphenation has improved a lot,” emphasized Trønnes.

Currently, Fœdrelandsvennen uses Tansa only on their centralized copyediting desk, but they are considering giving it to other departments and users as well.

Trønnes was a little concerned about how the new editors — those that had never used Tansa before — would react to the very different nature of the Tansa Text Proofing System, but those fears turned out to be unfounded.

“We had some of our users that used Tansa from before, but with the other, new employees, we were afraid they might think it took more time to run Tansa,” said Trønnes. “That has not been the case. It’s a really efficient tool to make a newspaper better.”

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