Starting with a Clean Slate

by David M. Cole

Almost seven years ago--at the very beginning of my consulting career--I was asked to assist an entrepreneur in the development of a new five-day-a-week industry trade paper with a projected circulation of 50,000. I was responsible for writing the technology portion of the business plan and for providing all the numbers for the purchase of pre-press and business-systems equipment.

If you can remember back that far, we were then just on the cusp of moving from the world of proprietary solutions to the world of open systems. With a clean slate, a technology consultant could have gone either way. I picked the proprietary route and the resulting cost ($1.7 million) was part of the reason that the entrepreneur didn't get the paper off the ground. Today, the choice would obviously be "open systems."

These days, I periodically get phone calls from businessmen who are fed up with their local papers and would like to start a daily to compete.

After suggesting they'd have better return on investment if they'd just bury $20 million in a hole in the backyard for five years (at least they'd still have the principal), I have begun to wonder what I might specify if I had another clean-slate operation to build.

Here are some of those thoughts:

Editorial System: Because a small newspaper can't afford a full-time newsroom computer geek, I'd probably suggest a Macintosh-based editorial system.

Now you Windows bigots can pitch a fit here, but as recently as Halloween, I observed a week-long process to get a Windows-based machine to work in a networked environment. First, the machine wouldn't send anything to the printer. Then it would send to some mystery printer somewhere, but not in the user's building. After three visits from the Windows gurus, they finally got it to print, but then it would "fall asleep" (this is a technical term, I believe) and you had to slam the mouse down on the desk to wake it up.

It took only four hours for the Windows guys to get this fixed.

This environment didn't even attempt to support things like fonts, graphics and PostScript--just e-mail and word processing. Windows seems to be completely brain-dead when having to deal with graphics.

There are plenty of problems with Macs, but by-and-large, you plug them in, turn them on and the user is productive--especially if that user is involved with any type of graphics.

And the issue of Apple's long-term life I believe is bogus--Apple is here to stay and Macintosh will continue to evolve.

So, no question: Macs for the newsroom.

Now, I'm open to the issue of what software I might recommend--Baseview, Digital Technology, Freedom Systems Integrators, Quark Publishing System--because I think I'd need to know more about what kind of tech gurus there would be in-house.

Advertising System: Again, Macintosh, though it's a harder call here because much of the best classified software is coming out on Windows right now.

I've been impressed with the work being done by Cybergraphic with its Cyber$ell application and I like Sysdeco's Enterprise. Also, many installed customers are quite happy with Harris' CASH system.

The call would be whether the impressive Windows-based software would justify a full-time Windows support person for the classified department. That would be tough.

File Servers: The conservative approach would be Unix; the liberal approach would be Microsoft Windows NT. The people with Unix chops are happy to vilify NT machines, but the momentum certainly seems to be with the Microsofties. Another consideration would be the brand of editorial and advertising software purchased; some just don't run on both platforms.

Again, I would base the pick on the technical skills of the publishing team.

Networking: I would probably recommend to skip over Ethernet and move beyond Fast Ethernet--all the way to some type of fiber-optic network.

Actually, there would be four or five different networks: text in the newsroom, text in advertising, images in the newsroom, images in advertising and a network devoted only to full pages.

I believe this would eliminate the need for an open pre-press interface server, simplifying the hardware support issues and probably speeding up the whole process of making full pages.

Sitting here with a calculator, I've estimated that a system similar to the one I specified for that entrepreneur seven years ago would cost less than half of what we built into the ill-fated business plan.

Which proves that the open-systems approach has benefited the newspaper industry.

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