The story of how AI-assisted robots were taught to turn a stream of pictures and news reports into printable pages, was told to delegates at WAN-Ifra’s Indian Printers Summit.

“We provide the robot with the articles and photographs, and it generates the final pages and layout,” Bonnier News Local’s print senior business developer Benjamin Peetre told the Delhi conference this month.

“This is how we now produce 37 newspapers in Sweden and eight Swedish-language newspapers in Finland,” he said.

Two-thirds of Bonnier News’ revenue comes from print subscriptions and ad sales, while the rest comes from online subscriptions and ad sales, although print revenues are declining and online revenues increasing.

Peetre said the aim was to make print production as efficient as possible so that it remained profitable.

A first step had been to combine units, which had been spread throughout Sweden, and take advantage of new technologies including Naviga Publisher. “The advantage was that you didn’t have to rely on making detailed plan of every page,” Peetre said.

“Instead, the system would do it for you, producing pages in Adobe InDesign, which we were already using for print production.”

Hopes of starting print automation in 2022 proved optimistic, but after a pause for a redesign and implementation of Naviga’s new Flow update brought good results from the start.

Peetre told how Flow made millions of calculations daily “on every possible layout available”, creating an optimal layout based on available space and selecting articles, images and quotes that fit.

He emphasised that it does not change headlines or body text, and does not send the pages to the printing press.

Some 24 of Bonnier’s newspapers moved to the automated prepress workflow in March 2024, with “a few bumpy weeks, but we were up and running,” he said.

Before that, the team made significant changes to get the most out of automation, with the main goal a separation between content and print production.

Articles typically written for online publication – where headline and story lengths were not as stringent as in print – were exported from the Abbe CMS to a dashboard controlled by “print planners”. Here articles earmarked for the next day’s newspaper are listed in the Naviga dashboard, and basic edits are made to headlines and content to make them more printer friendly, and then “sent off to the printing press”.

Peetre explained that the Naviga system also checks ad placement, and assigns content to the available spaces. After “clicking the run button”, AI then takes care of page design, with pages openable in InDesign if editors want to adjust the text, images or headlines.

“They control the AI system (Naviga dashboard) and monitor content in Abbe,” he said. “They are dedicated staff who make editorial decisions about the content and give their evaluation to the robots for further production,” Peetre said, explaining that these staff are currently the fastest-growing professional group within the company. More than 30 print planners work from the company’s two offices in Sweden – in Malmö and Sundsvall.

In-article infographics had been a problem but with recent updates, the system 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 difficult to manage, and all graphics still need to be created by humans.

Peetre says readers have not been able to recognise any change in the layout since implementation of the Naviga system, “and that’s a good sign”.

He said one of the things that made the 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.

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

–WAN-Ifra/Aultrin Vijay with thanks

Pictured (from top) ­– one of the AI-designed spreads; Bonnier News Local’s Benjamin Peetre at the Delhi conference; some 37 local newspapers are now designed “automatically” with two more to follow later this year; print planning with the Naviga dashboard; and teams in Malmö and Sundsvall