High-Tech NewsGear
We have seen the future of news-gathering technology, and it can fit into a suitcase.
IFRA's Center for Advanced News Operations selected a basket of cutting-edge tools intended to make the reporter in the field less dependent on the newsroom and more capable of producing news for print, online and broadcast operations.
The international newspaper-operations consortium selected the tools as part of discussions on evolving newsroom responsibilities. With the 21st century a few short months away and multiple-media demands already here for many newsrooms, IFRA named names, selecting what it calls the NewsGear suite of tools from a field of more than 1,000 portable products.
Built around a lightweight, high-end Toshiba Portégé 7000CT laptop computer, the equipment includes:
- Hitachi's MP-EG10W MPEG Cam, allowing digital video, audio and stills of marginal broadcast quality, spot-news photos and streaming Web content. In the interest of breaking-news coverage, the camera was selected over higher-quality digital cameras requiring more specialized training.
- Cross Pen Computer Group's CrossPad, a portable digital notepad allowing reporters to take handwritten notes, which are automatically scanned as they are written.
- A Palm III personal digital assistant from 3Com Palm Computing for access to source lists, newsroom schedules and e-mail.
- Page Scan USB color scanner from Storm Technologies, allowing reporters to scan photos or documents without leaving a news event.
- Cannon Computer Systems' BJC-50 printer.
- Nokia Mobile Phones' Card Phone to wire the laptop with a cellular-modem connection.
- Bay Networks' BayStack 660 wireless local-area network, allowing the laptop to connect to newsroom networks without a docking station.
- A continuous-speech, voice-recognition system from Dragon Systems for dictation.
- DeLorme's Earthmate global-positioning system, allowing editors to track reporters' location and progress.
- For the newsroom, the NewsEngin intranet-based editorial system from NewsEngin Inc. and Cumulus intranet-accessible digital-asset-management system from Canto Software. Both systems offer full functionality from remote locations.
Supplemental "support equipment" includes a fingerprint-verification system from Digital Persona, a PC Imaging Camera from Intel, a notebook television receiver and PC tuner card from Nogatech, a digital-video disk drive from Microtech, a laptop-theft alarm from Targus—and a computer case from A2Z Solutions to carry it all.
The tools reflect the increasing multimedia roles of print journalists, as well as the ongoing push to digitize the entire production process. They also reflect the assumption that future reporters will spend more time in the field, yet simultaneously need even better communication with other newsroom employees, the IFRA working group says.
The entire suite of tools costs less than $10,000—"a reasonable amount to spend on what essentially turns a properly trained journalist into a one-person mobile multimedia newsroom," IFRA's report asserts—and can fit into an airline carry-on suitcase.
New News Language
by Anna America
Newspapers must present information in a wide variety of media. But the sheer workload involved can be daunting.
"For many newspapers, it means either shoveling content online indiscriminately or re-editing everything by hand," says Christopher J. Feola, director of The Media Center at the American Press Institute. Feola and a group of industry representatives think they may have come up with a solution: a set of tags that would form an industrywide structure for defining newspaper content, dubbed News Markup Language.
Technically, NML is a "document type" defined in eXtensible Markup Language. Unlike the Web-standard HyperText Markup Language, which codes content based on specific formatting, XML tags are based on content or function(see TechNews, March/ April 1998, p. 21).
Once a newspaper has built the structure into its system, in theory an NML-tagged story could flow seamlessly from print to a Web page to a PalmPilot and all the way to archiving, with little hands-on intervention.
The concept has already been proven at several papers. Dow Jones has been using its own markup language, DJML, for several years, says Alan Karben, associate director for The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition. With DJML, automated processes translate content into eight diverse media, including screen savers, personal digital assistants (see Handheld News on the Go) and electronic books. Although the company probably will stick with DJML, Karben is an avid supporter of an industry-wide standard and says XML-tagged wire feeds would "save our editors a great deal of time."
The NML working group, consisting of representatives from a number of U.S. newspaper groups, universities and API, has identified 40 tags in three categories: process, content and archiving.
The proposal was initially seen as unnecessary by some due to the ongoing work of NAA's Wire Service Committee and other groups to create a similar News Industry Text Format (NITF). NML backers countered that NITF, some seven years in the making, is focused on wire services—and with 200 tags is too complex without addressing some specific newsroom needs. But in recent weeks, the two sides appear to have agreed that NML tags can be incorporated into the NITF set. "I don't see it as competition at all," Feola says. "I think the two efforts will enhance each other."
John W. Iobst, NAA's vice president for technical research, agrees it makes sense to merge NML into NITF. "NITF is more established and will be used by wire services, so it is logical to work within that framework. But we will do our best to accommodate most of what has been raised in NML."
America is a Tulsa, Okla., free-lance writer. E-mail, aamerica@webzone.net; phone, (918) 596-2426.