Profile: Matt Ouellette

By Mark Toner

First Published: December 2007

Personal Data

Date of birth: Nov. 14, 1972.

Grew up in: Andover, Mass.

Personal: Wife, Sheila; sons, Sean, 3½, Kevin, 1.

Hobbies/Diversions: Volleyball, computers, avid Patriots and Red Sox fan, and spending time with family.

Education: 1994, B.A., electrical engineering, Merrimack College, North Andover, Mass.

Career: 1990-present, consultant, IT administrator and developer, software engineer, director of research and development for operations, IT director of research and development, Eagle-Tribune Publishing Co., North Andover, Mass.

Connections: Eagle-Tribune Publishing Co., 100 Turnpike St., North Andover, Mass. 01845, (978) 946-2399, mouellette@eagletribune.com

An all-nighter experimenting with his father's Macintosh desktop-publishing software sparked Matt Ouellette's teenage interest in solving problems. Soon afterward, he introduced pagination to his high school newspaper—a feat that drew off-campus attention in the form of a part-time job kick-starting pagination at a weekly owned by the Eagle-Tribune Publishing Co. in North Andover, Mass. Nearly two decades later, the company has grown to include four dailies and five nondailies, and Ouellette is still working to streamline every facet of its operations.

"Every position I've held here, no one's held before," says Ouellette, 35, who was named IT director of research and development in 2006. "That offered me the freedom to observe what people were doing and see how we could do things more easily."

Early tinkering with AppleScript led to the creation of TIPS (The Intuitive Pagination System), a time-saving homegrown workflow solution that integrated ad production, photo systems, editorial and pagination.

That work was followed by consolidating production operations across publications and Ad Central, which merged and automated ad production and billing operations—"another button-pusher," as Ouellette calls his time-saving tools.

Earlier this year, he took on the disparate Web sites offered by the company's publications, developing tools to speed the production of news content and slideshows, as well as new database-driven sites targeted at schools and sports, including playgrounds.eagletribune.com, which rates more than 100 local playgrounds on safety and cleanliness, and rallynorth.net, which focuses on all aspects of high school sports, including cheerleading and marching bands.

Five Questions
 

1. What's the most challenging aspect of your job?

The constant change and keeping up with technology. The world of computers and programming is ever-changing. There are always new languages, frameworks, development tools and techniques. It is difficult to keep up and stay focused. A year ago, we were standardizing our development on Java, but now that I am more involved with the Web, we are moving toward Ruby on Rails. At the same time, it is incredibly exciting to see so much development and progress being made on the Web. There is so much being done to engage people, sites like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, digg, del.icio.us. It is a prime opportunity for our industry to embrace these technologies and concepts to build local communities where people can share and interact with each other.

2. What's the most rewarding part of your job?

Seeing a product to completion and how that product helps people do their jobs better or get information that was previously unavailable or difficult to find. My first 16 years with The Eagle-Tribune, I built tools and systems that were used in-house to help people do their jobs more efficiently. Now being involved with the Web, I get to be a part of building sites that deliver information to our readers in ways that were not available before. Then when you get their feedback about how much they like your site, that is truly rewarding.

3. In what ways do you think your current position will change over the next five years?

I think the better question would be: In what way won't it change? Change is constant. It never ends. Five years ago, I was building a [storage area network], redesigning our pagination system, building a Central Desk and 1TB of storage cost between $60,000 and $100,000. Today, I am building Web sites, working on increasing our Web presence and 1TB of storage costs as little as $400. In five years, we will probably be reading our papers on flexible LCD panels, we will be providing daily/hourly video newscasts and everyone will have 1TB DVRs in their living room that cost them less than $100.

4. What's the best career advice anyone ever gave you?

When I was in college and having a hard time keeping up with everyone else, my father told me — and I am paraphrasing here — "There will always be someone smarter than you and willing to work harder than you, but no one will have the same experiences as you, and that experience is what gives you wisdom and allows you to succeed."

5. What three things would you change about the newspaper industry?

• Hire more programmers—if I can quote Adrian Holovaty of lawrence.com and django fame, "Hire programmers! ... If you want innovation, hire people who are capable of it. Hire people who know what's possible." (http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/060605niles). The Web and new media are our future, and we need to hire people who understand it and can manipulate it to do whatever is needed. We need to make them a part of all departments from Advertising to Marketing. For it is these students of technology who will be able to bridge the gap between how things are done in print to how they need to be done in the future.
• Reinvest in products and people. I don't know much about finances and am not the most business savvy individual, but I do know that if you want to grow, you need to reinvest profits into the company. The gut reaction when profits are down always seems to be cut costs or increase rates. We should innovate, find new ways (not necessarily print) to reach readers and get them in the doors of our advertisers. Will everything succeed? Of course not. But for every failure, we will learn something and gain the wisdom to succeed the next time. The investment does not have to be huge. You will be amazed how much can be accomplished by a small group of talented people in a short period of time. The key is to make the investment and to challenge your people to innovate.
• Be nimble. That is our current challenge. Take an idea and turn it into a product quickly. Don't get bogged down in all the little things, just do it. This philosophy allowed us to release our high school sports Web site, RallyNorth.net, in six weeks, something that we had been talking about doing for seven years. It is amazing what can be accomplished in a short period of time by a small group of people given the opportunity and the resources to succeed.