Overview
In retrospect, it seems oddly appropriate that the industry decided to hold its last NEXPO of the century in Las Vegas.
Ah, Las Vegas. Glitter Gulch. The land of high risk, high reward and the ever-present danger of losing your shirt.
Gambling
is in the air, it's everywhere. It's in the rows of slot machines they
force you to walk through to get to your hotel room. It's in the hotels
themselves-The Bellagio, the Venetian, Mandalay Bay and Paris all represent
multimillion dollar bets that people will continue to flock to the City
of a Million Lights.
The newspaper industry descended on Las Vegas, took a deep breath, and placed its collective bets. By showing its new InDesign product, Adobe Systems Inc. bet that it could dislodge Quark Inc.'s decade-long stranglehold on the newspaper-pagination market. Charles M. Geschke, co-founder, president and chairman of Adobe, said in his Monday keynote address, "Our objective is to set the standards, build products that embody those standards, and give the best product to our customers."
Several companies, including Digital Technology International and Managing Editor Inc., bet on InDesign to power their editorial offerings. In response, Quark announced that it would, for the first time, open its QuarkCopyDesk client software to an outside company. That company, veteran industry-supplier Systems Integrators Inc., is hedging its bets with both Quark and InDesign. Another veteran player, Atex Media Solutions, is betting on a completely new, internally developed editorial system called Omnex, based on Extensible Markup Language.
Whew! And that's only one segment of newspaper operations, one stack of poker chips.
"If there's one thing that makes our industry different now from the early part of the decade, it's that we've stopped our hollering," said NAA Chairman William S. Morris III, chairman and chief executive officer of Morris Communications Corp., Augusta, Ga., in his opening-session address. "We've stopped hollering about new competition, about the changing habits of our readers, about the technologies that are putting up for grabs the territory that used to be ours and ours alone. We've started to move...and we're moving in some very exciting ways."
One of those moves is apparently toward a 50-inch newsprint web. The Washington Post already has placed that bet, and the Los Angeles Times and The Dallas Morning News are at the table. Many papers have tried to reduce the risk by testing reader and advertiser reactions to narrower pages. But a jammed Tuesday session, Attack of the 50-Inch Web, revealed that the move is still a gamble. Will the industry be able to sort through the issue of adapting Standard Advertising Units to the new format?
Another area of high risk, high reward and high anxiety: the Internet. E-commerce had a coming-out party of sorts at NEXPO'99, with systems from IBM, iCat and InfiNet, among others, on display. The Los Angeles Times signed a technology agreement with-and Times Mirror Co. invested $5 million in-early market-leader Internet Tradeline Inc.
Newspapers and industry suppliers both bet on various permutations of advertising over the 'Net. Online classified providers move into online auctions. On the print side, sales reps tap into Internet-based spec ads, and their clients place orders and ship ad materials over the wires. One exhibitor, Pape + Partner Media GmbH, even used the Internet for a real-time demonstration of how its software controls a newspaper site in Hanover, Germany.
Computer-to-plate technology continues to advance. The big news in this area came from the buy side, as USA Today purchased CTP systems for 33 remote-printing sites from a consortium led by Pitman Co. This followed The New York Times' pre-NEXPO decision to bet on CTP from Western Lithotech.
One of NEXPO's highest rollers turned out to be Heidelberg Web Systems, with plays in both the press and packaging areas. Heidelberg released more details on its Mainstream 80 press, scheduled for a May 2000 launch. It also unveiled its NP1280 inserter, designed for more efficient zoning and integration with the Mainstream 80. Other heavy-metal suppliers anteing up new products included MAN Roland (Regioman press), GMA (The Bundler), Gammerler (PrintPath STC-70 stacker) and several strapping-machine companies.
If NEXPO'99 proved anything, it's that both the newspaper industry and its suppliers are taking more risks, sometimes betting on widely divergent views of the future. As new software, narrower webs, the Internet, computer-to-plate, and innovative press and post-press equipment beckon like hyperactive casino billboards, we find that we can no longer sit on the sidelines and watch. It is time to push out our chips, pick up the dice, take a deep breath, and roll into the millennium.