Bobbing With Apples

by David M. Cole

The relationship between Apple Computer and the newspaper industry has run along the lines of The Taming of the Shrew: love-hate. Unfortunately, for almost a decade, love flowed in one direction, hate in the other.

Executives from the Cupertino, Calif.-based company said for many years that "desktop publishing ends with the church newsletter" and refused to acknowledge the huge influence their flagship product, Macintosh, had upon professional publishing.

Then, more recently, a new generation of Apple management had an epiphany.

"In a sense, we have strayed away from our focus in publishing," then-Chief Executive Officer Michael Spindler told a crowd at Seybold San Francisco '93. "We were told that publishing was a niche. We estimate that publishing is a $13 billion market. I'd like to find a few more of those niches."

Apple had made its way into the newspaper industry in a subversive manner: Artists and editors, compelled by fashion to emulate the splashy, colorful graphics of USA Today, found that a Mac running a drawing program could create informational graphics quicker and easier than traditional methods with art board, type and overlays. A Mac and a LaserWriter (the resolution of this new-fangled printer wasn't much worse than the reproduction capabilities of most presses) were squeezed into the editorial capital-expenditures budget, frequently bypassing the corporate information-systems bureaucracy.

With the advent of digital-photo delivery in the early '90s, newspapers moved Macs out of the art department and into the photo department. Photoshop, the image-manipulation program from Adobe Systems Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., was much more flexible and useful than the proprietary software delivered with picture desks. The reproduction of photographs was not quite as forgiving as the reproduction of informational graphics though, and newspapers felt compelled to hook their network of Macs into a true, high-resolution output device.

And then someone bought a copy of QuarkXPress.

By 1993, the thoroughly modern 35,000-circulation newspaper probably had a dozen Macs, handling chores ranging from infographics to photos to promotional work to display-ad makeup to full-page makeup. (At about the same time I was commissioned by a 35,000-circulation paper to bring in its first Mac. Not everyone was on the bandwagon.)

As early as 1985, providers of traditional newspaper systems began to either build all-Macintosh solutions or attempted (some better than others) to integrate Macintosh into their proprietary systems. In addition, new companies sprung up to build and support Mac solutions.

So it was not with a little wonder that I listened to a voice mail that came in during the height of January's "Apple is about to die" hysteria: "I've got some money in the budget to buy a couple of Macs this year," said the publishing-systems director of an 80,000-circulation paper. "If Apple's going out of business, should I buy something else?"

The irony of the hysteria is that it was promulgated by an industry that had become massively dependent upon Macintosh: the publishing business. Newspapers large and small felt compelled to comment on Apple's $69 million loss in the fourth quarter of 1995 as well as the company's possible acquisition by Sun Microsystems Corp. of Mountain View.

As with everything associated with Wall Street, the fear was calmed by some layoffs, and one in particular: Chief Executive Spindler.

It didn't take long for the company's new chairman and chief executive, Gilbert F. Amelio, to assert the company's independence and intent to focus on its long-term strengths: education and graphics.

Graphics--as in the reason newspapers use Macintosh.

Regardless of whether Apple continues to stand as an independent business or as a division of a company like Sun, the brand name is priceless and the installed base certainly outstrips that of any other branded personal computer (obviously, if you take all those clones and put them together, there are more of them).

Though the times with Apple have been rocky (Remember the coup that threw out founder Steve Jobs? What about the Apple III, or the Lisa?), it would be foolish for newspaper executives to abandon the Mac because of the missteps that caused the most recent brouhaha.

For newspapers wavering between a Mac-based solution and a Wintel (the Microsoft Windows operating system running on machines with Intel CPUs) solution, I would be more concerned about Apple's historic indifference to publishing than I would be about losses, layoffs and leadership. (On the other hand, Microsoft hasn't embraced publishing either, so maybe that's a wash.)

But, as Hortensio, a suitor to the Shrew's sister says, "There's small choice in rotten apples."

We picked our Apple in the last decade and, unless you want to throw them all out, we should stick with it, rotten or not.

Cole is a San Francisco-based newspaper consultant and is editor of The Cole Papers, a monthly newsletter on technology, journalism and publishing. E-mail, cole@plink.geis.com; phone, (415) 673-2424; fax, (415) 673-2449. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily TechNews or NAA.