NEXPO symposium and workshop attendees were treated to a wide range of pre-press topics, from electronic archiving to system integration.
During a Tuesday workshop on electronic archiving, Moderator David M. Cole, president of The Cole Papers in San Francisco, cast himself as the publisher of a hypothetical newspaper. Why, he asked a panel of vendors, shouldn't he bypass them and put together his own system?
Some argued that they could fight through a rat's nest of potential problems for the newspaper and support the system. Others said that if Cole wanted to go that route, more power to him. The discussion illustrated the industry's wide-open attitude toward electronic archives, which could play a crucial role in tomorrow's business model.
Dan Woods, applications editor for Time Inc.'s Pathfinder and former database editor for The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., discussed the benefits he found when Raleigh "rolled its own":
Raleigh uses the Wide Area Information Server, an archive of newspaper stories with a package of source codes that can be turned into a text-search engine. A free version of WAIS is in the public domain and costs nothing. The newspaper also pulls stories from an archive provider, DataTimes Corp. of Oklahoma City.
Raleigh is now beta testing an image archive that links text to JPEG photo files. The archive has a World Wide Web-searchable interface that displays thumbnail sketches of the photo files. Its WWW applications: tracking bills in North Carolina's General Assembly and allowing parents to pull up information about their child's school by entering their home address.
There are pitfalls to doing it yourself, Woods cautioned. You might have trouble finding the right people and developing a strong technical culture, and key people might leave. Still, "changes and enhancements to your system occur on your schedule and are not controlled by a vendor."
Should you choose to purchase a system, M.J. Crowley, library manager for Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., recommends asking yourself a series of questions:
Crowley also suggested creating a system-design plan for archiving, including a map of your current photograph workflow. The plan should detail how different people will access the system and how the equipment will be configured.
Sunday was race day in Atlanta, but the Presstime Fun Run merely kicked off the festivities. Later that morning attendees ran an entirely different kind of race at a symposium called Photoshop for Newspapers.
The session focused on using Adobe Photoshop in the newspaper environment. The highlight was Dueling Platforms, a head-to-head competition between a 110-megahertz, 40-megabyte Macintosh Power PC-8100 running under Mac OS 7.5; and a 100-MHz, 32-MB Pentium PC running under Windows for Workgroup. Both computers were restricted to 24-MB of random-access memory for the race.
Debi Rapson, president of Desktop Training Professionals, Bedford, N.H., was behind the wheel of the Mac; and Tom Croteau, NAA manager of training and pre-press, drove the Pentium. The challenge: Which computer could blast through three Photoshop tasks the fastest?
First, Rapson and Croteau rotated the same photo three degrees. The Macintosh won, its little gray bar racing across the screen just ahead of the Pentium's sand-sifting hourglass.
Next came the conversion of a file from the RGB (red, green, blue) to CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black). The Mac won again.
The final chore was unsharp masking: An electronic filter blurred an image; and then the blurred settings are subtracted from the image's other settings, leaving the image more finely sharpened. Once more, Macintosh won.
Rapson and Croteau tried another photo, but while the Pentium was faster in some cases, the Mac still outperformed it overall.
Both said that no matter which platform is used, the more RAM, the better. Croteau noted that a comparable Pentium system can be less expensive to purchase, and some of the saved money can be used to buy additional RAM.
Advertising departments increasingly plug into new technologies, yet digital-ad transmission remains a "quagmire," said Grover D. Livingston, vice president of information systems for The Dallas Morning News, at a Monday morning symposium. Papers regularly receive ads that they can't output or that lack insertion orders, said Livingston, who also heads NAA's Digital Advertising Task Force.
As vendors refine portable document formats that retain layouts across different computer platforms, NAA's task force is developing a voluntary EDI-Lite standard that tacks on tracking and ad-order information. The standard will include a handful of required data fields, such as newspaper- and advertiser- identification codes, purchase-order information, file type and scheduled date of insertion.
Some papers already accept digital ads. Gannett Media Technology Inc.'s Ad/Link system allows papers to distribute digital ad-transmission software to real-estate and automobile dealers in their markets. The Boston Globe provides training and discounts to clients who use Mission Critical's digital-ad software. The Associated Press' AdSend system now delivers ads electronically to more than 800 papers.
These, however, are the exceptions. "I was shocked to realize that ad departments are the least automated of any newspaper department," noted GMTI President and CEO Daniel D. Zito. "No wonder advertisers are frustrated."
With computer prices falling as quickly as their power increases, newspapers and vendors are thinking small as they focus on the future, agreed panelists at Tuesday's The World of Desktop symposium. Today's newspaper systems are too often designed for separate departments, though, and remain about as accessible to each other as the "black hole of Calcutta," said Peter Ickes, media-industry business-development manager for Integrated Systems Solutions Corp.
At some newspapers, system integrators build the bridges. Instead of focusing on technology, integrators "force you to look inward, [creating] a catalyst for change based on a business model," noted Larry L. Hoffman, Ottaway Newspapers Inc.'s vice president of production.
Other papers go it alone. Marc M. Wilson, Morris Newspaper Corp.'s systems-integration director, oversaw the transition to desktop pagination at 14 of the group's 40 publications. He recommended the KISS concept: "Keep it simple, stupid." Wilson said Morris buys off-the-shelf software and hardware, often by mail order.
TechNews Volume 1, Number 4: July/August 1995
©1997 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.