Vol. 5, No. 5, May 1994

Recycling Center

Publishers must buy technology today with new media in mind

When we last parted, I was lecturing on the concept of the Recycling Center. For those who have just tuned in: The Recycling Center is a term coined by the Poynter Institute’s Nora Paul; it’s the system that will allow us to "repurpose" -- or recycle -- the material from our printed newspapers to our new media systems such as on-line, fax-on-demand and CD-ROM.

Shortly after Paul and I talked about her Recycling Center concept at the Digital ’94 conference in Miami, I was to give the keynote speech at the America East conference. The title of said speech was to be "An End to the Front-End."

I had most of my core ideas down about the end of the front-end, but the term Recycling Center crystalized everything (thanks for the boost, Nora). I gave the speech on March 23 in Hershey, Pa.

The rest of that day, people kept coming up to me, saying I'd talked about some important issues. The conference organizers told me they got great evaluations, including comments such as "Excellent presentation; on the mark!" and "The most interesting session I've attended in the last several years."

I speak rather frequently and, frankly, don't often get this kind of good response. So, in the ultimate example of recycling -- no "center" needed here at The Cole Papers' world headquarters -- I've reworked that America East speech as an article for the newsletter.

As important as the Linotype machine was to mass-circulation newspapers, as important as the phototypesetter was to reductions in overhead and costs, the Recycling Center will be to the newspapers of tomorrow -- and I literally mean tomorrow.

Whether or not you accept my premise that within 10 years, 50 percent of newspaper revenues will come from activities unrelated to newsprint, you must agree that some significant portion of your revenues will come from something else than -- as John Evans of News America says -- crushing trees and smearing ink on them.

And the only economical way any newspaper will be able to handle those new news products will be to streamline its news and advertising systems to allow them to work in concert with the Recycling Center.

I firmly believe that if publishers do not take the Recycling Center into consideration as they make system purchases today, they will be woefully behind the times -- and their competitors -- in the next decade.

Also inside, you'll find some helpful thoughts on help files.

Chris Feola, the systems guru at the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American, has been teaching a lot lately, training people on Macs and PCs and getting them over the hump of learning new software (whatever the platform).

Much as the words "Recycling Center" crystalized my thoughts on the end of the front-end, the words "help files" crystalized Feola’s thoughts on training.

Feola puts forth a cogent argument that even newspapers with limited technical resources can use the existing help file technology to improve their users' abilities to make desktop publishing software work for them, not against them.

For those who might need to buy a laptop or two (read: everyone) in approaching months, Bill Woodruff, a systems editor at the Phoenix Newspapers, has done some leg work for you. Woodruff called newspapers of all sizes around the country to find out what they're buying, or not buying.

He also checked out the computer magazines' reviews, so if you're going to buy some laptops, this is the story to read.

To wrap up, I cover the Newspaper Association of America’s annual EDI/Pre-press Symposium, which was held April 13-15 in Florida.

Once again, we put our money where our mouth is: Recycling is good for you.

-- David M. Cole

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Illustration : Joe Shoulak

Recycling Center

Publishers must buy technology today with new media in mind

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 1994, Copyright (c) 1994, 1995, All Rights Reserved.

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 1994, Copyright (c) 1994, All Rights Reserved.