Tribune - Electronic Tearsheets

The Tribune E-Sheets® White Paper

About the Tribune E-Sheets White Paper:
After 18 months of workflow documentation, requirement analysis, technical and business due diligence, Tribune Publishing announced at Nexpo 2002 that it was going to move all its newspapers to electronic tearsheets and that MerlinOne was selected as the vendor to host the new comprehensive service.

At the time, this was a very bold move. While there was widespread consensus paper tearsheeting was a business process that long needed to be replaced, by 2002 only a handful of newspapers were actually delivering electronic tearsheets of any kind. For some people in the industry, there remained questions. Would advertisers really accept E-Sheets? Were the projected savings real? What is best way to introduce electronic tearsheets to staff and advertisers?

Managers at Tribune Publishing wanted to know too.

So about 3 years into the E-Sheets implementation, Tribune began work on internal white paper to document the results. Managers wanted to know how E-Sheets performed from a business and financial perspective, and how it did against initial assumptions and goals. Read the complete E-Sheets White Paper.

There was a lot of information to draw on. At that point, Tribune already had six papers up on E-Sheets to research along with literally years of paper and electronic tearsheet costs to measure and compare.

Now YOU can read the actual Tribune internal E-Sheet white paper from March of 2005 and see the results for yourself.

Selections:
"One of Tribune Publishing's most successful web-based customer self-service projects has been electronic tearsheets."

"During their pilot test, The Hartford Courant tracked a 33% improvement in collections due to electronic tearsheets."

"...Tribune expects a double-digit return on their investment in E-Sheets."

"Overall response from the advertising community has been positive and Tribune newspapers are saving newsprint, postage and manpower that used to be spent in producing and mailing physical tearsheets to advertisers."

"We were astounded to hear compliment after compliment about the ease to use [E-Sheets]. The compliments never stopped coming."

"...our largest advertiser called personally to say how much they appreciated this [E-Sheet] system and was willing to work with the vendor to be sure the other newspapers used the MerlinOne system."

"MerlinOne has been an excellent partner to work with. They provide a very functional and reliable system at a competitive price with first-rate support."