Timoni, the newsroom web app

In an Italian newsroom the “timone” is the map of an issue: which content goes on which page. Across several weekly magazines this work went through scattered spreadsheets, emails and network folders, and finding photos took many manual steps.

• Visual flatplan: each issue appears as a grid of pages, coloured by section and production status.
• Weeks: an issue is opened, filled in and closed; closed issues stay available in the archive.
• Different roles: editors, photo editors, admins and TV-listings staff see only what they need.
• Photo archive: images are filed by category (films, series, sport, entertainment…) and can be found by title or by name.

I wrote a set of automations that, starting from a simple list of titles or people, search the photo agencies, prepare the images and file them in the right folder. A continuous watch on the network folders keeps the archive up to date on its own.

Closing a magazine means tight deadlines. That is why the interface favours information density, status colours readable at a glance and shortcuts for repeated actions.

60–70% time saved across photo editors and newsroom.

The newsroom has one place to see the status of every issue, and photos arrive already found, prepared and filed: no more chasing information across spreadsheets, emails and network folders.

91% of TV listings columns cut automatically exactly as the layout editor would have cut them.

Timoni gave rise to Colonnini, a prototype that brings the layout and cutting of TV listings columns (the daily schedule of each channel) into the browser. Before, this work could only be done in the desktop publishing software.

• Print-accurate page: measurements, fonts, colours and rules taken from the printed pages, with text wrapping around the photos of featured shows.
• Fitting engine: an indicator shows how many lines overflow or are left over, and whatever doesn’t fit stays visible below the limit.
• Cut and fill: remove or restore shows and single details, merge episodes, group time slots, tighten, undo and redo.
• Automatic suggestions: a model I built by comparing raw schedules with weeks of printed pages learns each channel’s cutting habits and suggests how to make the column fit. In testing, 91% of the time the automatic proposal is exactly what the layout editor would have chosen: cutting, once entirely manual, almost always comes down to checking and confirming.
• Revisions and print: cuts and additions highlighted as in a word processor, and the delivery PDF generated from the same composition shown on screen.

The featured shows entered by editors in Timoni flow straight into the columns.

The method behind the suggestions learns by comparing schedules with the pages actually printed. Every closed issue is one more example: the more the newsroom works with Timoni and Colonnini, the closer the proposals get to its choices. These figures are set to grow.