New Systems,
Sophomore Separation

by Pete Wetmore

It’s been nearly two years since three potentially groundbreaking newsroom systems entered the newspaper school of hard knocks. Their sophomore year is proving to be a time of separation.

At NEXPO®99 in Las Vegas, three suppliers unveiled new–yet very different–concepts for next-generation publishing systems. Each embraced multimedia publishing while advancing established pagination routines and adding tools for the production planning vital to the digital newsroom.

Only two systems survived, but all three have helped set the course each supplier plans to follow for years to come. Each system put software layers over or around applications from other companies in a blend of off-the-shelf and proprietary solutions. And the survivors also included the then-new layout program, Adobe InDesign from Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose.

Here’s how the three suppliers envisioned the future in 1999:

• Digital Technology International of Springville, Utah, presented a new generation of its ’Speed products in which InDesign replaced the company’s own composition engine and layout program. Company President Joann Froelich was quoted as saying she’d “bet the company” on InDesign.
• Once home to muscular proprietary systems, System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento introduced Insiight, featuring a different kind of system design called Universal NewsGram Architecture. In-siight relies on Lotus Notes for its text editor, communications and edition- planning tools, but customers can ask SII to integrate virtually any application.
• Atex Media Solutions Inc. of Bedford, Mass., introduced Omnex, an ambitious Extensible Markup Language-based environment for storing and channeling files containing text, images or graphics, audio and video. Atex had invested two years in creating proprietary tools for designing and implementing medium-independent workflow, positioning Omnex to serve not only the publishing industry, but broadcasters as well.

Unlike its competitors, Atex also developed a proprietary pagination engine called Page Manager, which used a new hyphenation algorithm from Bitstream Inc. of Cambridge, Mass.

Atex, however, put Omnex to rest last year to devote more resources to its existing Prestige editorial and Enterprise advertising systems. “I don’t think Omnex was taking on too much,” says Marcel E. Badowski, Atex’s director of new market opportunities. The issue was timing within the company, he says, as well as economic conditions that made it hard to keep a development team in place.

With workflow management a now-mandatory feature, “we still believe a good content-management solution with the ability to handle print and other electronic media is a big requirement,” he says.

The Omnex project has given Atex a new composition engine, which it plans to add to Enterprise. And over time, Prestige will benefit from the knowledge gained in developing a comprehensive workflow solution for Omnex.

Atex will also draw on Omnex’s architecture as it develops systems that expedite “how documents will be transferred between systems and how they’re read,” Badowski says. Omnex sped data interchange by including a middle tier of software that managed traffic between applications and the server.

Although Atex has integrated Adobe’s InDesign and QuarkXPress from Quark Inc. of Denver into Prestige, Badowski expects proprietary layout solutions will be tailored to the needs of newspapers and other publishers around the world.

Meanwhile, DTI believes the future is bright for its InDesign-based NewsSpeed, AdSpeed and other ’Speed products. The editorial product is completing beta testing while producing pages at the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News, says Alyson Oldham, DTI’s marketing manager. The full line of ’Speed products will be installed at seven other newspapers also owned by Morris Communications Corp. of Augusta, Ga.

XML facilitates publishing in print and on the World Wide Web within DTI’s multimedia database, which received “quite a bit of work” as the company brought InDesign into its systems. A standard interface greets users whether they are using Adobe applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator, or DTI’s own tools for page planning and production tracking.

Oldham’s view of the future mirrors the past. “I could pull up sales literature from five years ago about managing information independently of whatever presentation you’re going to put it in,” she says, and make exactly the same arguments for future multimedia publishing. “It has served us well for print and the Internet, it will serve well for wireless.”

Last year, SII became part of net-linx Publishing Solutions, a German company that continues to nurture Insiight. “The original concept is the same,” says Albert P. de Bruijn, net-linx’s vice president of marketing. “The way it has been achieved is subtly different.”

The difference is CORBA–Common Object Request Broker Architecture. Like Omnex, which included a traffic-cop layer of middleware between applications and servers, CORBA finds the most efficient way to accomplish a given task. The user sees what he or she needs to get the job done, with NewsGram accessing the right application and data transparently. “To the user, it looks as if he or she is dealing with one system,” de Bruijn says.

Under the Insiight banner, net-linx has created “connectors” to link applications to the NewsGram architecture. Once one kind of application has been “connected,” similar ones can be added quickly. In fact, one customer is using both InDesign and ’XPress in its Insiight configuration.

Down the road, De Bruijn sees Insiight serving more than one industry and expanding its capabilities beyond multimedia publishing–much as Atex had hoped for Omnex. “At the moment, we have an editorial slant on our implementation of this architecture,” de Bruijn says, “but there’s no reason it can’t be extended to other disciplines in a publishing organization.”

Wetmore is an Urbana, Ill., writer and editor. E-mail, pete@teamprairie.net.

Digitizing Two Centuries of Clips

by Aimee Beck

Faded newspaper clips, cumbersome rolls of microfilm and scratched microfiche may soon be tossed aside as five North American newspapers–The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, New York Post and The Toronto Star–begin digitizing issues dating back to the 19th century. Once the project is complete, millions upon millions of historic newspaper pages will be available as both images and searchable text.

Bell & Howell’s technology scans entire pages, converting each article and any accompanying illustration into a discrete “image zone.” Each zone is then cleaned and scanned using optical-character-recognition software, creating accompanying searchable text the company claims is 80-to-90 percent accurate.

Two companies–Bell & Howell of Skokie, Ill., and Cold North Wind Inc. of Ottawa, Ontario–are independently creating massive historical archives. A similar project at the Chicago Tribune began in 1999 (TechNews, January/February 2000, p. 30).

Bell & Howell announced in January plans to archive The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and The Wall Street Journal as part of its ProQuest Historical Newspapers Project. The archive will include stories and editorials, plus photos, graphics and advertisements, all linked to full-page images. Although all three papers already have digital archives, they generally only date back about 20 years to when they first started using electronic production systems.

“The scanning of newspapers is more complex than other printed materials, due to their size and layout,” says Tina Creguer, director of communications and public relations at Bell & Howell. And, she says, scanning microfilm isn’t any easier because it requires specially designed equipment.

Bell & Howell is scanning at 300-plus dots per inch–the highest possible resolution, given the newspapers’ physical dimensions, according to Creguer. The company also will use image-enhancing software to improve quality.

Once pages are scanned and cleaned up, Bell & Howell will digitize each article and any accompanying illustrations into a discrete “image zone.” Each article is then scanned using optical-character-recognition software to create searchable text associated with the image zone. The company predicts the result will be 80 to 90 percent accurate–"an exceptionally high rate within the industry,” it says.

The first section of the B&H archive is expected to be complete in 15 months, with sections released in 10-year increments.

Meanwhile, Cold North Wind is digitizing The Toronto Star’s microfilm archives, dating back to 1892. Torstar Corp., the Star’s publisher, has invested more than $2 million (Canadian) in a 10 percent equity stake in the company. Plans call for digitizing Torstar’s other four daily newspapers and 69 community newspapers, and Cold North Wind recently signed its first U.S. customer, the New York Post.

The Canadian company plans to scan the original records from second-generation silver-halide negatives to create high-quality digital page images. Cold North Wind uses the resulting TIFF and GIF files to clip, zone and thread articles, so that the appropriate headlines and bylines can be tacked on top of each document.

Both companies expect to offer subscription services based on the archives to the educational and research markets. But Robert Huggins of Cold North Wind sees a less institutional appeal as well.

“The number-one leisure activity in North America is genealogy,” he says. “For the first time, individuals can look at birth and death notices.”

Beck is an Ontario, Canada, free-lancer. E-mail, abeck@wordassociates.net.

Tools in the Palm
of Your Hand

Dubbed a “complete mobile newsroom in a travel case,” Ifra’s NewsGear suite has shrunk to Palm size.

“Portable digital assistants such as the Palm V-series have grown to the point that they now contain sufficient processing power and memory to satisfy basic news-gathering functions,” explains the 2001 NewsGear report.

The Palm Vx handheld is at the heart of the NewsGear 2001 collection.

Intended to cost less than $10,000, the collection of multimedia tools is part of Ifra’s Advanced Journalist Technology Project.

While the inaugural NewsGear collection included a Palm III (TechNews, March/April 1999, p. 22), the 2001 edition is heavily focused around the handheld computer and accessories that transform it from personal organizer to portable newsroom, including:

• The Palm portable keyboard, which unfolds to the size of a PC laptop keyboard
• Kodak’s PalmPix, which snaps onto the handheld, transforming it into a digital camera (TechNews, March/April 2001, p. 22)
• The Novatel Minstrel V and Palm modem, offering wireless and telephone connectivity
• MultiMail Pro e-mail and file-viewing software
• The thumb-sized, 8-megabyte FlashPlug memory card
• Seiko Instruments’ SmartPad, a portfolio connected to the Palm that captures handwritten notes as digital images
• Magellan’s GPS Companion, which provides the Palm with global-positioning system capabilities
• Landware Battpac, a supplementary power supply and recharger.

NewsGear 2001 also includes such multimedia tools as:

• Sony’s ICD-MS1 IC Recorder, a digital voice recorder whose notes can be converted to text or posted online as streaming audio
• Canon’s Elura2MC, a “prosumer” -quality digital-video camera envisioned as a multimedia tool for non-video journalists
• Sony’s Mavica MVC-CD1000, a two-megapixel still-image digital camera that records directly onto writable CD-ROM disks
• IBM’s ThinkPad T20, featuring an internal CD/DVD drive and a port for a mountable video camera.

For a complete list of tools, visit www.ifra.com.

TechNews Volume 7, Number 3: May/June 2001

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