The Circuit View of the Future
by David M. Cole
A couple of glimpses of the future, courtesy of the seminar circuit:
I was particularly taken with a presentation given at Harris Publishing Systems Corp.'s annual integration seminar, held in January in Melbourne, Fla.
Steven S. Westphal, the advertising director of The Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press, came to the session with a message for suppliers: I have a need and you should build it for me.
Westphal's (and the industry's) need is for what he calls a "unified advertising system." Calling the current environment "integrated models," Westphal said that in "the big picture," newspapers lack a comprehensive publishing system that works across all information and distribution lines-advertising, editorial, new media, operations and production, finance, circulation and distribution.
In Westphal's situation, there are 18 discrete functions-and it takes 13 system suppliers to support those functions. The ad director's point is that a lot of time and productivity are wasted as workers handle much of the interfacing among those 18 functional systems.
"Sales people only spend 13.9 hours face-to-face with customers or prospects in an average week," Westphal said. A unified advertising system, he suggested, might allow them to spend more time with the people who give newspapers money.
"Effective information-management practices are the key to success," Westphal said.
The 18 functions that concern Westphal include sales-force automation, ad-scheduling systems, an Internet gateway, an advertising-employee interface, the phone system, database marketing, subscriber and non-subscriber files, the insert-management system, the voice system, financial reports, the advertising-billing system, the classified front-end, the display front-end, the display-ad-dummying system, display-ad production, e-mail, presentation software and contact management.
At The Grand Rapids Press-and certainly at virtually every other paper in North America-workers often provide the "interface" between these systems, transferring data either manually or by unsophisticated means (such as using diskettes and a sneaker net).
In Westphal's vision, customer users, employee users and management users would all work with a universal database that would carry the information from those 18 areas. Different user interfaces and security would determine what each level of user could see.
Westphal's idea is strikingly similar to one I've been preaching for almost exactly four years.
In a speech I delivered to the America-East conference in March 1994, I called for a unified publishing database-actually, a series of databases that could be viewed from the same user interface, showing the proper data depending upon the user's department and his or her security level.
On this topic, I've switched from being a solo act to being in a duet. Soon maybe we'll have a trio, but I'm hoping for a chorus.
In another instance of being in a duet, I'd like to relate a personal experience with some new and exciting technology. My friend, colleague and longtime associate Christopher J. Feola, director of the American Press Institute's Media Center and a contributor to TechNews, gave two presentations recently in which he employed his avatar Merlin.
Merlin is an application of some experimental technology developed by Microsoft. Feola has adapted the software to display a cartoon character (he has both Merlin-who looks like a wizard-and Genie-who looks like he came from a lamp) to handle three tasks: voice synthesis, voice recognition and a small amount of artificial intelligence.
Feola's stock demo of Merlin-which I saw him give at February's Interactive Newspapers Conference in Seattle-has him asking the avatar aloud what the weather is at home in Reston, Va. The computer program then goes to The Washington Post's Web page, looks up the weather and reads it aloud.
In January, at NAA's Newspaper Operations SuperConference in Miami Beach, we moved slightly off the stock demo and conducted a mock debate. Merlin and I talked about various aspects of the technologies that Merlin himself (itself?) represented.
It wasn't really a debate, because Feola and I agree on so many of the basic issues of these technologies. Feola's point is that if you can interface with a computer via voice and sound, then your horizons for using information are greatly expanded.
Merlin (or was it Feola?) pointed out that with a hand-held device and these technologies, a user could get newspaper information while in the shower or in the car driving to work. Feola said that the latest Lincoln automobiles have a socket for a palmtop computer, which could be supplemented with wireless Internet access.
And this was all important stuff. But the striking thing was that when people talked to Feola or me about Merlin, they treated the program like a sentient being. One industry publication wrote, "the consultant and the cartoon did agree, however..."
In the future, not only will avatars read your newspaper, they'll debate with your consultants, too.
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, (650) 994-2100; fax, (650) 994-2108. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily TechNews or NAA.