by Alan S. Kay
During her kickoff talk at Connections X, NAA's then-Vice President of Industry Development Kathleen Criner offered a sobering lesson in history.
When the very first Connections conference was being planned, Criner said, the giants of the information industry were IBM, AT&T, ABC, NBC and CBS, and there was no such thing as the Internet. Today's information megaliths are Microsoft, MCI, CNN and Time Warner, and the Internet is among the largest and fastest-growing things on the planet.
Who could have predicted those changes? No one, and that was the point.
Predicting the future is always fraught with peril, but, alas, it must be done. The best strategies are always based not only on extensive research but also educated guesses about what the future will bring.
So how should you play your hand to avoid getting lost in the shuffle? Attending conferences like Connections and trade shows like NEXPO, with the theme of "putting the future in focus," can help. Those who went to Atlanta got to see the newest technologies in action and to rub shoulders with industry experts and visionaries.
What they saw was a technological future in which two central trends are likely to dominate:
One way to visualize the future is to predict how the standard elements of a newspaper will flow through the production process. One common view is that practically everything will be digital:
Of course some elements will not begin life in a digital form, but will be digitized prior to entering the production process.
The first stop for all of those bits and bytes may well be a central database or archive.
"We've begun working with major media companies on the management of their information assets," reports Peter O'Sullivan, client executive for publishing in IBM's Telecommunications and Media Industry Unit. "Each typically has content in many formats and it's a challenge to be able to capture all of that and get it so customers can easily access it, manipulate it, repurpose it, create new derivative products and then distribute them through the new channels, including electronic channels."
Knight-Ridder Inc.'s Vice President for New Media Robert D. Ingle adds, "Unless you can think through this, you're going to make some decisions that turn out not to be quite right because you were only considering part of the equation. For example, if one were buying a new almost anything in the pre-press area, you'd want to have one eye on electronic publishing, and you'd want to understand that you're very shortly going to be in the database-publishing business--so you'd better be buying systems that have those capabilities."
The proliferation of archiving-system vendors at NEXPO is a sign that many newspapers are already looking at this technology seriously, even though its ability to handle multiple media is still limited.
Paul Trevithick is president of Archetype Inc., a 10-year-old newspaper-systems software-development company based in Waltham, Mass. "There's a need for standards," he says, "a need for media-independent content repositories. People should have databases that are malleable, repurposable. Sure, ASCII text is repurposable. But once you take it and drop it into QuarkXPress or one of the other proprietary systems, you suddenly find yourself with form and context inextricably bound together in a print-centric way."
Newspaper consultant Bill Solimeno agrees. "If you don't get generic about your stored data and your storage database, you're dead. When we went into the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) world, the concept was to bring the final form as close to the originating point as possible--for example, to let the writer see as early in the production cycle what the final product will be." Today, that approach looks to be backwards: "What we really want is content in a form-independent way, so I can at the last minute burst it out to print, or on-line, or onto a CD-ROM, or as voice output."
Which means, as we continue our journey through the production system of the future, that there are multiple paths we can take when leaving the archive. As a start, let's stick with the familiar: ink on paper.
Most publishers believe that pagination is definitely in the cards. Although statistics are notoriously difficult to come by, the American Society of Newspaper Editors/Society of Newspaper Design Technology Survey of 245 member papers conducted in December 1994 revealed that 61, or almost 25 percent, said they had completed pagination, and another 60 percent reported they were well on their way.
C.E. Steuart Dewar, a veteran newspaper systems vendor who is chief executive officer of Dewar Information Systems Corp. in Westmont, Ill., says, "Pagination is definitely here for the midrange newspaper." Dewar reports that every pre-press system his company has sold in the last five or six years has included pagination.
The fully paginated newspaper will feed images to new generations of presses that will load images faster, require no manual adjustments, and, ultimately, change the contents electronically for each copy.
The first step in this migration will probably involve the elimination of chemical film processing. A number of imagesetter makers like ECRM of Tewksbury, Mass., Information International Inc. of Culver City, Calif., and Scitex Corp. of Bedford, Mass., have recently announced their ability to handle dry-imaging film.
The next step will be to eliminate film altogether. A fully digitized page will go directly through a raster-image processor to a platesetter. No papers are currently using computer-to-plate for regular daily runs, reports Dan Baker, president of St. Paul-based Printware Inc., but evaluations are underway.
The evolutionary path in web printing will continue toward single-fluid lithography and direct image loading onto presses, says Lawrence Bain, director of printing technology for Rockwell Graphic Systems. "As the production of the newspaper does become a true modern manufacturing process, then doing all the things that involve the direct link between the digital front-end information and the press itself will be practically feasible."
Direct-to-press, or automatic image make-ready based on ink-jet or other digital printing technologies, will eventually eliminate the handling of films, plates and other intermediaries that can degrade the final images. It will allow the printing system to manipulate that image to suit that particular press, and since the image in each copy is software-controlled, it will enable tailoring the newspaper to as fine a degree as business concerns dictate.
We can also expect next-generation press controls that allow finer color and registration adjustments, as well as keyless inking. And look for computer-directed press-management systems that use standard platforms incorporating automatic imposition, which identifies optimum plate positions, and cutoff controls for establishing web alignments without ink use.
Bain suggests viewing the transition occurring in newspapers as analogous to what has occurred over the past decade in manufacturing. "It used to be we needed to make a lot of things the same to get the economics to work; now we don't. Newspapers have the same issue: They need to make fewer things alike, and find ways to do that without waste and without a lot of time and manpower effort."
This will involve not only tailoring the newspaper for individual readers, but also targeting it so that advertisers reach only those readers they want to reach. In other words, newspapers will engage in microzoning--delivering more and more zoned editions, each to fewer and fewer customers.
But microzoning requires more than increasing the number of editions you can print. You need to deliver to a specific doorstep as well. That will require a sophisticated circulation database that will drive single-gripper conveyors and sorting equipment that will assemble route bundles in delivery order.
The technology is available today for address-specific zoning, and some newspapers are doing it on a limited basis. The problem is that it is often not profitable. And that leads some experts to predict that the ultimate future of microzoning lies not in the mailroom, but in cyberspace.
As executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News, Ingle oversaw one of Knight-Ridder's most successful dailies and the development of Mercury Center, the Merc's electronic presence on America Online. "The trend in information is clearly toward tailoring toward the individual, and the trend in advertising is clearly toward targeting," he says. "In both cases, electronic systems lend themselves better than do physical publications. So I'd guess there will be a progression of narrow interest information and advertising out of print products into electronic products."
So, there you have the probable future of ink-on-paper production: fewer steps, more integration and automation, faster, higher quality and at least somewhat finer levels of microzoning.
The various new-media services--telephone-information services, local bulletin boards, fax on demand, CD-ROM publishing, conferences on one or another of the major on-line services, interactive video, and most recently "home pages" on the Internet's World Wide Web--have been the subject of an unending series of conferences, symposia and meetings. Perhaps the most visible of the efforts is the New Century Network, the nine-company consortium headed for the moment by Cox Newspaper Inc.'s Vice President of Market Development Peter Winter, that will try to assist local newspapers in going on-line.
These new-media ventures are perplexing because they seem to be a way to leverage a newspaper's strengths--its information and its local identity--into a medium that will compete with those other providers who are threatening to eat newspaper companies' lunch. Yet no one knows which direction will work. No one knows how to make money on-line.
Solimeno agrees with most experts that non-ink-on-paper newspaper products will be an alternative, not a replacement, for print. But he warns that the endeavor is fraught with more questions today than answers. "Profitability is extremely questionable--we don't have clear answers to that." Even with all the question marks, though, "You have to be insane to ignore it."
Gary Arlen, who heads Arlen Communications Inc., a Bethesda, Md., company that tracks interactive media, agrees. "Newspapers should be experimenting right now. Get a Web site up, develop your current news database so it is going to be adaptable to whatever electronic format. So do what most newspapers should be doing--put in place an electronic morgue system, put yourselves on news-gathering services like Nexis or DataTimes, and develop personnel who understand what these technologies are.
"Thus, you need to accommodate the on-line future in your plans, but no one knows what form that future will take or what business model will work. "If you listen to all the hype," says Archetype's Trevithick, "anyone can throw together a home page and be up--you can do it in your garage. But you'll quickly find that either you can't scale it up because the costs are so high, or you end up gaining no efficiencies of content reuse whatsoever.
"The passwords into this new, digital-information environment are open, off-the-shelf, and distributed.
There is broad agreement that to be positioned for the future, a newspaper will have to shift from proprietary systems to an open computing environment that at least has the potential to access a set of common databases.
The old, large proprietary systems were based on hardware and software designed specifically for the newspaper industry. The fourth wave that Solimeno says we're in uses an infrastructure of generic hardware--PCs, Macintoshes, Sun terminals, and the like--and off-the-shelf operating environments. But once those industry standard computing platforms are in place, further updating of your systems will be a more subtle, ongoing process.
As San Francisco-based newspaper consultant David Cole puts it, "When you move to open systems and a client/server architecture, you are thereafter consistently refreshing the technology, on a day in/day out basis. The system that you put in now will never change radically the way it will change when you put in this system.
"On a day-to-day basis," adds Cole, "every paper will need to have a group of individuals who understand client/server technology well enough to determine when it's time to refresh a component."
But in-house resources may prove to be inadequate when the issue is re-engineering for changing marketplaces. Here, another lesson from the corporate world is worth considering: a systems integrator can smooth the path to tomorrow's technology. Several of the companies mentioned here can provide integration services; so can the larger corporate integration consultants, such as giant Electronic Data Systems Corp. of Plano, Texas.
From her Manchester, N.H., office, Linda Bruning manages EDS' effort as director of business development for publishing systems. "When we go into a site, we analyze the whole newspaper in terms of size, market, where do they need to go, their current technology. Then we try to put together a plan that analyzes their business and helps them make that transition."
Bruning is involved in a number of projects that involve migrating newspaper companies from proprietary to integrated, off-the-shelf systems.
"People coming from third-generation systems are used to working with one product. In this new world, they've got all this stuff that greatly enhances their capabilities, but they're working with lots of different applications. If you're working with a good integrator, it can make it relatively seamless--but it'll never be as seamless as in the old days."
It is clear that the newspaper business is in the midst of radical change. Many outlets for newspaper information will not even involve paper, and pre-press will become known as pre-media. Never in recent memory have there been so many different technologies to evaluate, and never has predicting the future been so daunting.
"Change is the most difficult thing for everyone, particularly a conservative institution like newspapers in the U.S.," observes Solimeno. "Change is not only in technology--it's a mindset change, a comfort change. They feel they have so much time invested in understanding the old, and they still don't believe in the new."
No doubt about it, you've been dealt a tough hand. But it is useful to remember that change involves not only risk but also opportunity. And remember, it's not the cards you hold, but how you play them that matters.
Alan S. Kay, formerly executive editor of OS/2 Professional and Corporate Computing, covers business technology from Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. He can be reached at (202) 232-4909 or akay@bix.com.
Gary Arlen, Arlen Communications Inc., 7315 Wisconsin Ave., Suite 600E, Bethesda, Md. 20814. E-mail, gaha@aol.com, (301) 656-7940.
Lawrence Bain, Rockwell Graphic Systems, 700 Oakmont Lane, Westmont, Ill. 60559-5546, (708) 850-6440; fax, (708) 850-6415.
Dan Baker, Printware Inc., 1270 Eagan Industrial Road, St. Paul, Minn. 55121, (800) 456-1400; fax, (612) 454-3684.
Linda Bruning, Electronic Data Systems, Manchester, N.H., (603) 669-3575.
David Cole, The Cole Group, 2590 Greenwich, Suite 9, San Francisco, Calif. 94123. E-mail, dmc@colegroup.com; phone, (415) 673-2424; fax, (415) 673-2449.
C.E. Steuart Dewar, Dewar Information Systems Corp., Woodlands Court, 3050 Finley Road, Downers Grove, Ill. 60615. E-mail, sdewar@dewar.mhs.compuserv.com ; phone, (708) 850-4350; fax, (708) 241-3503.
Robert D. Ingle, Knight-Ridder Inc., 981 Ridder Park Dr., Suite 220, San Jose, Calif. 95131. E-mail, bobingle@aol.com ; phone, (408) 467-1401; fax, (408) 467-1426.
Peter O'Sullivan, IBM Telecommunications and Media Industry Unit, 590 Madison Ave., 13th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10022. E-mail, pro@vnet.ibm.com; phone, (914) 642-5455; fax, (212) 745-6222.
Bill Solimeno, Publishing Decisions, P.O. Box 276, Sandbornville, N.H. 03872. Phone/fax, (603) 522-6611.
Paul Trevithick, Archetype Inc., 100 Fifth Ave., Waltham, Mass. 02154. E-mail, paul@atype.com; phone, (617) 890-7544; fax, (617) 890-3661.
TechNews Volume 1, Number 4: July/August 1995
©1997 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.