Cyberbook Ensures Print Delivery
by Supriya Nayalkar
Newspapering in 2000 brings with it ironies great and small. To wit, The Arizona Republic now ensures its printed products get where they’re supposed to by using one of their possible successors.
"It
was all pretty much science fiction three years ago when we first had
the idea," says Joe Coleman, who coordinated the effort. But today,
the Phoenix paper supplies its 1,650 home-delivery carriers with electronic
tablets they take home and plug into their telephone jacks at night. The
tablets then download information automatically, so that when carriers
wake up, they display the day’s routes and special delivery instructions,
including starts and stops.
Known as the SoftBook Reader, the tablet weighs about three pounds, resembles an 8.5-by-11-inch hardcover book and requires no special computer skills. Armed with the tablet, carriers now deliver the Republic and four national newspapers–The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today and Investors Business Daily–using a single route list, sequenced by address. The system also lets carriers monitor delivery changes and customer complaints.
What makes the process possible is the database-driven Circ2000 circulation system that Central Newspapers’ IT arm, Central Newspapers Technologies, developed to create the master route list. CNT partnered with SoftBook’s developer, Menlo Park, Calif.-based SoftBook Press Inc., to write the code networking the Reader and Circ2000.
The solution paves the way for new revenue streams. "It gives us a completely new and different way to compete," says Chris Christian, the Republic’s circulation director. "Long-term, this gives us the ability to do some things that newspapers have talked about but never really believed were possible." Specifically, that means "address-specific content, with enhanced editorial content and advertising messages."
CNI expects to offer targeted advertising and editorial content by spring. In the meantime, the switch to electronic route-listing has rolled out successfully.
"It’s all seamless now," Christian says. "There have been no changes in how to enter transactions, and the process for that information flowing electronically has all been part of our daily batch processing. It adds another step in terms of downloading with SoftBook, but that’s all automated."
The biggest obstacle was changing the corporate mindset, Christian says. "To make the leap of faith to doing everything electronically requires a real culture shift."
And while Coleman, CNT’s product manager, won’t provide specifics, he says the total system cost the company "in excess of a million dollars." But the return on investment has been well worth it, he says.
So now, CNT is marketing the solution to other newspapers. By the end of the year, Central Newspapers will give SoftBook Readers to carriers at another one of its papers, The Indianapolis News, and the Omaha World-Herald should go live by mid-summer. In fact, interest has been so strong that CNT recently created a sales-and-marketing division.
CNT’s application of the Reader is unique. SoftBook Press typically markets to businesses that handle large documents, such as training and policy handbooks, price lists and legislative material–in short, things that would otherwise be copied, distributed, bound and finally FedExed to a distribution list, says spokesman Tom Morrow.
"Most customers have used this for proj-ects involving thousands of pages of corporate documents. What’s amazing about this application is that CNT is using it for only a handful of pages," he says.
Nayalkar is a McLean, Va., free-lancer. E-mail, SupriyaN@aol.com.
Enter the Microzone
To say Jack Stanley believes in microzoning may be a bit of an understatement.
"Full-run is dead," the Houston Chronicle senior vice president of operations and technology declared during a SuperConference session. "Truck zones are useless–a way of kidding yourself that you’re doing something that isn’t full-run. ZIP codes don’t cut it. Partial or split ZIPs are for amateurs. Carrier routes are a stopgap."
While the microzone push once was driven largely in hope of winning business from direct-mail operations, even newspapers’ best customers now are joining the cry for more targeted distribution.
Anthony M. Gasparro, vice president of advertising for The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. of Montvale, N.J., told attendees that readership of the company’s 5 million inserts "has never been higher." Just the same, he rattled off a long list of demands.
"You must version not only geographically, but also demographically," he said, "and you have to figure out address-specific delivery. There is a tremendous amount of money going to direct mail because of your inability to do this."
To help meet advertisers’ demands, some publishers earmark money and mortar. Dick Malone, the Chicago Trib-une’s vice president for operations, outlined a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project at its Freedom Center facility, calling the largely microzone-driven expansion a way "to maintain rate integrity."
In the early 1990s, the Tribune had about 100 zones, according to Malone. Today, it offers about 350, with plans to increase that number to 1,050 by 2005.
Production executives also looked to their suppliers. Kenneth Shelby, vice president of operations for Thomson Ohio, urged vendors to consider the adoption of pagination as a model. Buyers and sellers–even competing sellers–worked cooperatively to make the elusive technology a reality, a process that could be repeated in the mailroom, he argued.
For their part, mailroom suppliers laid some of the blame back. Doug Gibson, regional vice president of newspaper sales for Heidelberg Web Systems Inc. of Dayton, Ohio, noted that all too often, post-press departments "get what’s left" in capital budgets–meaning new facilities with 80,000 copy-per-hour presses, and mailrooms capable of handling less than half that amount.