Many Sites, One Platform

by Tom Di Nome

Mergers are no longer limited to the brick-and-mortar business world. Many companies–including newspapers–are realizing the benefits of consolidating multiple World Wide Web sites.

The latest entry in this arena is Knight-Ridder.com of San Jose, now in the initial stages of merging its Real Cities network of newspaper and regional sites onto a single content-management platform.

"The economics of [operating] an individual site and developing complex, sophisticated and reliable technology for the Web are untenable," says Rohn Jay Miller, senior vice president of product and technology. "Unless you take advantage of every opportunity to centralize your technology where it’s appropriate, you just can’t be competitive."

The transition began in October, when the San Jose Mercury News’ site became part of BayArea.com. A December reorganization resulting in a net loss of 34 positions placed even greater emphasis on systems consolidation, and KnightRidder.com expects to benefit from a more cost-effective operating structure.

Real Cities now is consolidating its sites into a single content repository, a single content-management system and a single customer database. The first phase focuses on building the platform’s foundations.

For the content-management system layer, KnightRidder.com chose Cofax, an open-standards, Java 2 Enterprise Edition-compliant Web-based text and multimedia publication system developed by its Philadelphia data center.

For the application-server layer, the company is implementing Dynamo 5 from Art Technology Group. In addition to featuring a J2EE-compliant application server, Dynamo 5 is designed to support personalized customer interaction and e-commerce. "We know we can use [Dynamo 5] as a platform for building the higher-order content-management systems services that we need," including tools to assemble, publish and customize sites, Miller says.

KnightRidder.com’s needs also extend back into print newsrooms, where it has to take feeds from 15 or 20 proprietary editorial systems–while giving newspaper editors tools to have a significant say in how their paper will look online. That final piece of the foundation is another homegrown KnightRidder.com solution that’s being used for the data-formatting layer: XMULTRA, a Java-based program that standardizes editorial-system feeds into a single, usable format compatible with Extensible Markup Language. XMULTRA will also capture metadata, "which is already being entered in the newsrooms," Miller says. Like Cofax, "[it’s] another piece where we just couldn’t find products in the marketplace that would handle that specific problem."

KnightRidder.com is preparing for wireless communications platforms and working to integrate upstream services initiated by consumers, such as classified-ad submissions and circulation starts and stops. It also is developing a program that will publish print display ads on the Web.

"In the beginning, everyone was operating on a one-by-one basis, so they had to create their own tools and build their own platforms. What you had was a wide variety in terms of quality," says Rob Runett, NAA manager of electronic media analysis. "What I’ve seen with KnightRidder.com is an effort is to combine their knowledge and leverage the power of their corporation, instead of letting everybody free-lance."

As Miller puts it, "An individual TV station doesn’t have enough money or talent to put together a series like ‘The West Wing,’ but NBC does. That’s really the power of a network."  

Di Nome is a Mamaroneck, N.Y., free-lancer. E-mail, tdinome@earthlink.net.

While other providers offer image support, PictureReady (see www.kodak.com/go/pictureready for a demo) has a consumer-friendly approach and the Kodak brand’s clout on its side, officials argue.

PictureReady affiliates give users the option to add a photo when they place ads. The co-branded service allows users to upload images from their hard drive, Kodak’s PhotoNet Online or another Internet site. More than 50 image-file formats are automatically converted to bandwidth-friendly JPEG images, and users can then preview and enhance them using simple photo-editing tools.

That ability to edit images online, Kodak officials argue, is especially important to people placing advertising. "Allowing them to improve the picture...makes them think their [ad] is going to be successful," explains William E. Granville, kodak.com’s marketing manager.

PictureReady also allows publishers to set fixed dimensions that users then zoom or crop their digital photos to fit. (Translation: no ponderous 800-by-1,500-pixel renditions of blurry Beanie Babies.) The images can be stored on a newspaper’s site or on Kodak’s; the company will develop the needed interfaces.

Kodak officials envision a world in which every roll of film they process comes back with a CD-ROM or URL to a site full of digital images. Equally ambitious, they picture a print newspaper-classified section full of URLs linking users to those images on the Web. As the online-classified marketplace continues maturing, we’ll just have to wait and see what develops.  

Toner is TechNews editor. E-mail, tonem@naa.org.

TechNews Volume 7, Number 1: January/February 2001

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