The Cole Papers, November 2001: Outside the box | From Malaysia to Rocklin, Calif., to San Jose: innovative thinking

November 2001, Vol. 12, No. 11

Outside the box--From Malaysia to Rocklin, Calif., to San Jose: innovative thinking

Yes, it is a cliché to say that when people come up with new and unusual ideas, they are thinking "outside the box."

The use of a cliché doesn't denigrate the quality of the ideas. Looking at problems with unique perspectives is what makes this business so interesting: It’s always fun to watch an editorial person sitting in on an advertising or technology meeting; the way advertising or technology people look at editorial sometimes causes editors to wince.

These outside perspectives help us to innovate, creating new and unusual ways to run our businesses.

Publishing is a uniquely collaborative process and it takes a variety of talents -- and perspectives -- to make a newspaper or a magazine come out.

This month, we look at four innovations that come from both newspapers and suppliers. Witness:

In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the Utusan newspaper group realized that it needed a new way to create and control content -- not just words and pictures, but audio and video as well -- and found that there was nothing on the market that could meet its needs.

Compounding the problem was the Asian economic slowdown of 1999 and a desire to avoid layoffs. The result is the Virtual Newsroom system, which the company believes will save it more than $500,000 in the first year of implementation alone.

Contributor Linda Crider, a 16-year veteran of Ohio’s Dayton Daily News who is working in Asia as vice president of Kohorst Design Works Inc. of Dallas, talks to the principals of Utusan to give us the scoop.

For the last couple of years we've known about Ad Looks Inc. of Rocklin, Calif. Started by refugees of the late CE Engineering Publishing Systems, Ad Looks specializes in electronic tearsheets -- taking the tedious process of clipping and mailing advertisers a proof-of-publication and turning the whole thing into a digital process.

We're always reluctant to write about a single company and when, over the summer, it became clear that both MerlinOne Inc. of Quincy, Mass., and Engage Inc. of Andover, Mass., were going to offer similar products, I dispatched Contributor Rich Pollack to find out how these systems work and how they benefit publishers. Pollack is a veteran of both newspaper newsrooms and newspaper front offices (a large piece of his career was with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale), and is a correspondent on our sibling newsletter, NewsInc.

Correspondent Jason Zappe examines Adobe InDesign, in light of its recently announced upgrade to Version 2.0 (see The Cole Papers, October 2001). Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose is taking a variety of interesting tactics in rolling out InDesign -- it now seems to have settled on the system integration model as its primary selling mechanism, and many of the leading lights of the publishing systems world are participating.

Zappe, a systems editor at the Miami Herald, talks not only to Adobe people about the new version, but also with traditional suppliers who have adopted InDesign into their products.

Further outside-the-box thinking from Adobe comes in the realm of cross-platform typography.

Anyone who has tried to open a page developed on one type of desktop machine on another type of desktop machine knows that there can be font problems. Adobe -- in conjunction with Microsoft Corp. -- acknowledged these problems, and now offers a solution it calls OpenType, a new font format that is truly cross-platform.

Contributor Kellie K. Speed talks to newspaper executives and type experts to determine how OpenType works and what it offers. The OpenType kicker: no application supports it -- except InDesign.

While the phrase may be a cliché, thinking outside the box is essential to innovation.

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

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

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