The Cole Papers, April 2001: Graphic fidelity | Delivering and archiving newspapers in the format that God intended

April 2001, Vol. 12, No. 4

Graphic fidelity -- Delivering and archiving newspapers in the format that God intended

Belle of the ball: A New York Times front page as it is archived in Bell & Howell’s ProQuest database.

In the mid-1990s, those of us who were involved in the development of on-line archives (at that time called "electronic libraries") thought we had found a panacea to the problem of storing a newspaper in ASCII text: in addition to not having the pictures, graphics and advertising all in one convenient package, the all-ascii archive prevented the serendipitous discovery of a salient fact during research.

When a researcher or historian leafed through back-issue books or used a dual-spindle microfilm reader, stories that might not be directly related to the topic at hand were frequently discovered.

Then we heard about an Israeli company that had figured out how to scan a newspaper page, read the text and provide a search response that had the complete graphically correct newspaper page. We used these pages to call it the "Holy Grail" of newspaper archiving. But after a tantalizing debut at NEXPO 1995, the company disappeared.

At about the same time, when the Washington Post, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, and many other newspapers thought of new media, they envisioned a product that would graphically represent the paper, delivered to a proprietary computer application; the content would cost the customer money, they thought.

The Post, the Star Tribune and other papers invested heavily in the Interchange product just as the World-Wide Web and its enabling technology, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) took off.

But by the mid-'90s, AT&T had pulled the plug on Interchange and it became accepted wisdom that the graphical representation of the on-line newspaper would be limited to whatever designs HTML was able to provide (not much, it turned out).

Now, six years after AT&T shut down Interchange and the mysterious Israeli company disappeared, the whole notion of digital delivery of newspapers with graphic fidelity -- that is to say, the way the print designers intended them -- has come roaring back.

Inside, we visit with five companies that are now selling (or soon will be selling) products or services that allow for either the distribution or the archival of graphically accurate newspapers:

In light of a recent agreement with the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, Contributor Kellie K. Speed takes another look at the world of microfilm-to-digital Bell & Howell Co. and Cold North Wind Inc. (which has recently added the New York Post to its stable of customers) as they discuss their plans to allow papers that have microfilm to digitize their back issues in a graphically accurate format.

In a move to get digital newspapers delivered in a manner that looks more like print newspapers, NewsStand Inc. has begun the rollout of its products (announcing not only a deal with the aforementioned New York Times, but also bringing on Stuart Gardner, the former chief executive of Thomson Newspapers, as its new chairman of the board). NewsStand isn't alone, though: as Copy Editor Aimee Beck finds, a group of tinkers at Ohio’s Akron Beacon Journal have come up with a similar technology.

That mysterious Israeli company? I finally found the guru behind the artificial intelligence that could "read" newspaper images: he has founded a new company specifically aimed at not only graphically accurate delivery, but also graphically accurate archives. Inside, I take a look at this new business, Olive Software Inc.

Also inside, Contributor Jason Zappe examines how handheld computers are providing newspapers with new ways to handle circulation as well as advertising sales.

The digital newspaper with graphic fidelity -- once thought of as, if not impossible, at least an improbable -- appears to be close at hand. In 1995 when we said that we had discovered the "Holy Grail" in that Israeli company at NEXPO, little did we know that, like King Arthur’s knights, the quest for the Grail would take a while.

-- David M. Cole, dmc@colepapers.net

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From THE COLE PAPERS, April 2001, Copyright © 2001, All Rights Reserved.