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Danish firm CCI Europe's Electronic Media Server, which will ultimately aggregate multimedia objects into a content-neutral database and allow non-technical editors to drag and drop stories and images for automated online publishing.
"You have to use similar tools because you can't expect people to work in text and also with fancy HTML tools," said Christian Ratenburg, CCI's technology and research manager.
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Computer-assisted pagination, as demonstrated by Australian Cybergraphic Inc.'s NAILS product. Residing in its own database, NAILS automatically serves up design elements deemed stylistically acceptable for specific sections, newshole sizes and positions.
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Editorial budgeting, now available in at least a half-dozen systems, allows editors to assign stories and photos to staffers, track their progress and automatically flow them into assigned page positions once complete.
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Page and element tracking, which have moved down the hall from the advertising department as newspapers begin using ad-tracking systems like Andover, Mass.-based Cascade System Inc.'s DataFlow or Scandinavian NEXPO newcomer Mactive's system to handle news work flow. Also, newly renamed Linopress Publishing Systems announced an integration agreement with German production-management and page-tracking system developer Pape+Partner Media GMBH.
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Platform independence. As Microsoft makes its first NEXPO appearance, even such traditionally Macintosh-based publishers as Denver-based Quark Inc. and Digital Technology International, Orem, Utah, now develop Windows clients. And Sacramento-based System Integrators Inc. entered an integration agreement with Associated Information Systems International of Auburn, Calif., which will build interfaces linking SII's Coyote products with a wide range of hardware.
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At the same time, some systems now move away from such desktop standards as QuarkXPress. Consider Software Consulting Services, one of the first vendors to encourage integration with Quark. The Nazareth, Pa., company's GoodNews editorial system now includes its own, more tightly integrated pagination solution--"the next step," said SCS' Bob Cole.
Tried and True Make News
As the cynics say, nothing's ever truly new. But in the case of critical editorial systems, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
After all, it's comforting to know that the three new systems shown at NEXPO this year have some time under their belts--not to mention an installed base. The show's incontrovertible buzzword, SQL, or structured-query-language databases, also boasts its own quarter-century history.
"It used to be called squirrelly," quipped Jack Stanley, vice president of operations for the Houston Chronicle, in a post-show wrap-up. Now, replied consultant David M. Cole, "it's a checkoff on the RFP list."
Repeating a theme in recent years, two of the new systems--SAXoTECH A/S' SAXoPRESS Publishing System and Wilkenson Scoop AS' Scoop--come from Scandinavia. Each features tightly integrated editing, wire-desk, image-handling and pagination modules. The third, CKP Newspaper Systems Inc.'s Millennium, traces its roots to the Whirlwind project, left in limbo after DuPont's newspaper-systems exit some years back.
While not new, databases drive incremental innovation, including:
Mark Toner, Presstime staff writer. E-mail, tonem@naa.org; phone, (703) 902-1684; fax, (703) 902-1690.