Detroit's Invisible Upgrade
One of the biggest technological advances in recent memory at Detroit Newspapers Inc. took place without anyone noticing.
A new remote-printing network was installed so transparently that little retraining or reconfiguration was needed. What's more, the PostFax system connecting The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press newsrooms to their Riverfront and North Plant production facilities integrated a slew of pre-press equipment in all the facilities.
The network serves as an electronic liaison and routing system, for the first time allowing finished pages to be sent from any transmission unit to any output device. Previously, individual transmitters were linked to specific recorders at the two plants; any reconfiguration often meant physically re-patching connections and recalibrating the machines. PostFax also automatically routes pages to the least-busy receiving unit and bypasses ones that have broken down or have too many jobs awaiting output.
During tests, operators were able to send 80 pages in a half-hour period. Net transmission time has decreased by 10 seconds per page, and with more than 100 pages sent daily, those time savings add up at deadline.
"This design emphasized automation with a simple operator interface to accommodate heavy workloads," says Erza Gershon, president of Integrated Technologies Solutions Inc., the Farmingdale, N.Y., company that developed the system. Standard workstations, networking equipment, file formats and protocols ensure an open-system architecture.
PostFax integrates the downtown facility's Autologic Information International raster-image processors, Konica scanners, Scitex pre-press equipment and ProImage page-pairing systems. Now each RIP and the transmission devices can all be used simultaneously to send pages to the Konica and AII recorders located at the two production facilities.
The PostFax project is just one part of a companywide effort to create high-speed data communications throughout the editorial and production areas. Other components include a new System Integrators Inc. system, new DS3/T3 high-speed data lines and an updated open pre-press interface.
The Little Asset Manager That Could
by John Bryan
The thing they don't always tell you about electronic photo storage (or, ahem, digital-asset management, and smile when you say that, son!) is that electronic photos take up a huge amount of hard-drive space, and you'll have to figure out someplace to store them.
Emphasis on "you," unless you inhabit some lesser ring of hell where the newspaper's library staff still does all photo filing.
Ed Hille, the systems editor for photos at The Philadelphia Inquirer, graduated from 25 years of photography only to face that onslaught.
"We have our own staff downtown, plus two bureaus outside the city," Hille says. "That amounts to about 50,000 images a year."
Sheesh. Who ya gonna call?
After some experimentation, Hille settled on Cumulus, a seemingly low-level cataloging program sold by Canto of Germany. The program had been around for a while, particularly in the Macintosh world.
What attracted Hille were Cumulus' scripting and cross-platform abilities. Together they gave Hille a solution to the Inquirer's image glut.
So three years and a fair amount of scripting later, the surprisingly muscular photo-storage solution that has evolved at the Inquirer looks like this:
1. Photographers scan in their pictures, which slide into a Novell server where Hille keeps about four months worth of live, on-line storage.
2. Cumulus processes the photos, storing thumbnails and location information in its catalog on a Macintosh 9500.
3. Hille's users, who are scattered on Macs (and increasingly PCs) throughout the Inquirer, have Cumulus client software and can call up the catalog, select thumb-nails and fetch any of the photos off the Novell server.
With new images flooding into Hille's system every day, obviously the Novell server is going to cry "uncle" at some point, so Hille uses a CD-ROM recorder to pull the old images off after about four months and make room for new ones.
The catalog, which changes annually, still lists the thumbnails, so when users try to fetch the high-res images from the catalog, the machine tells them the files couldn't be found. That's a subtle message to look on the CD.
Does that lack elegance? Of course, Hille says, but he's careful to point out that this is hardly an electronic-image library—it's a backup system. That's all it was ever intended to be.
The actual library will be the Hermes DocCenter, now under construction at the Inquirer as a tightly integrated part of that paper's Unisys pagination system.
But Hille also has a piece of that action—his system acts as a pre-processor for DocCenter. When images enter Cumulus, scripts force image resolution from museum-mural quality down to a newspaper-quality 200 dots per inch, change the filenames to a Unix-friendly format, and send them to DocCenter. And of course, the system keeps the originals in Cumulus/Novell for present users.
"I can't tell you everything is flawless," says Hille, "but it works really well."
Among the many qualities of stand-alone photo backup systems like the Inquirer's is flexibility. If you need a special archive, it's a mouse-click away, no big deal.
Hille clicked his mouse and created a special, 2,000-image archive for a book on the 20th century the paper is producing.
Access to the partitioned archive is limited to the library, book editors and the Inquirer's video division, which is using about 500 of the pictures for a television documentary accompanying the book's September release.
So when DocCenter is fully operational, will the Cumulus system fold its operation and steal off into the night?
"Being the skeptic that I am," Hille says, "I still plan on running this just as a backup."
It couldn't hurt.
John Bryan leads the news systems and pagination support team at the Los Angeles Times. E-mail, john.bryan@latimes.com; phone, (213) 237-4711.