December scorecard results

Here are the scorecard results for December 2007.

We’ve been at this now since mid-September, and I want to give credit to the scorers – Alan Laskey, Therese SanSoucie, Alana Sullivan and Don Clark – who’ve made the commitment to look at each day’s paper with a critical eye and meet with me each day at 11 a.m. to review and score the paper. Schedules don’t always allow 100 percent attendance but we’ve always had enough information and commentary to score an edition, put the results on-line on our Google Doc, and post the results on the bulletin board in the pressroom.

December was a particularly good month in Post-Press in terms of run times (97.8), finish times (98.9) and overall insertion accuracy (99.6) – congratulations to Martha and her crew.

The daily meetings help us identify quality defects and concerns before they bloom into full-blown problems. Blanket smashes, for example, can affect an image on the page and smashes are identified, scored as a defect, but then corrected by Alan and the press crew. We’ve seen cases where the black type for an ad comes in as process color black; there’s no need for this since the only color you need for black type is black. In these cases Therese has tried to work with an ad rep and his/her client to send black type as black.

Don has been great working with folks in the Editorial department on photo toning when images are flat or have too much of one color or another. He’s also trying to help out on cut-outs on C1 that can look ragged on some days. We’ve seen improvements as we’ve been going through this quality scoring process.