ProImage Moves Lee Enterprises to Cloud Workflow

May 13, 2025

ProImage demonstrated the speed, expertise, and reliability that set it apart in the print production technology space when it came to the aid of Lee Enterprises earlier this year.

PARSIPPANY, New Jersey – ProImage demonstrated the speed, expertise, and reliability that set it apart in the print production technology space when it came to the aid of Lee Enterprises earlier this year.

When an issue was discovered, Lee Enterprises turned to ProImage for assistance. Within minutes of receiving a call from IT Production at Lee Enterprises, Mike Monter, VP of Operations at ProImage, escalated the matter to the engineering team. ProImage Engineer Mike Rogers responded within five minutes to begin planning the emergency migration of Lee’s print production to ProImage’s existing NewsWayX cloud infrastructure.

What followed was a coordinated overnight effort involving multiple ProImage engineers who worked tirelessly to onboard the first six prioritized print sites to the cloud-based NewsWayX platform that very evening. Thanks to ProImage’s robust backup protocols, engineers were able to utilize the latest available backup from Lee’s local system to replicate workflows and settings with precision.

“The quick response by the ProImage team was crucial to getting our products out to our customers. Their customer service support was incredible in our time of need” stated Bill Masterson VP of Operations/Audience Division.

By the end of Day 2, 10 additional sites were added, bringing the total to 16 print facilities and over 100 publications running successfully on ProImage’s hosted cloud. Every site was up and operating within 2 to 24 hours from the time of the initial call—ensuring continuity of production and distribution during a critical period of disruption.

“ABOVE AND BEYOND”

The extraordinary speed and responsiveness of the ProImage team working around the clock made sure Lee could continue production. Within hours, they were live again on certain print sites and operating reliably from the ProImage cloud.

Lee Enterprises cloud-based editorial front-end system continued to generate and deliver pages to NewsWayX via FTP, allowing ProImage’s cloud workflow to manage production end-to-end.

CLOUD-DRIVEN RESILIENCE FOR THE FUTURE

The success of the migration prompted a long-term decision by Lee Enterprises: to permanently move to a dedicated AWS-hosted NewsWayX cloud environment, built and maintained by ProImage. This private cloud solution provides redundant infrastructure, no single point of failure, and the ability for each print site to operate with full local functionality—despite being cloud-hosted.

Each Lee Enterprises print site now benefits from:

  • Secure login access for soft-proofing, page and plate approvals, and production tracking.
  • Automatic delivery of plate-ready TIFFs to local CTP devices.
  • Ongoing software updates and maintenance by ProImage to keep systems secure and current.

By entrusting ProImage with its print production infrastructure, Lee Enterprises has simplified its operations and improved system reliability.

ABOUT LEE ENTERPRISES  

Lee Enterprises is a major subscription and advertising platform and a leading provider of local news and information, with daily newspapers, rapidly growing digital products and nearly 350 weekly and specialty publications serving 72 markets in 25 states. Our core commitment is to provide valuable, intensely local news and information to the communities we serve. Our markets include St. Louis, Missouri; Buffalo, New York; Omaha, Nebraska; Richmond, Virginia; Lincoln, Nebraska; Madison, Wisconsin; Davenport, Iowa; and Tucson, Arizona. Lee Common Stock is traded on NASDAQ under the symbol LEE. For more information about Lee, please visit www.lee.net.

ABOUT PROIMAGE

New ProImage, an ECO3 Company, is a leading developer of browser-based automated workflow, ink optimization, press registration, color image processing, and production tracking solutions for the commercial and newspaper printing and publishing industries. Using a standard Internet browser, ProImage's advanced workflow technologies offer the printing industry flexible and feature-rich end-to-end automated workflow management.