Vol. 6, No. 1, Janaury 1995

Atex in play

Venerable supplier to merge with Norwegian firm -- or maybe not

I hope your Christmas Eve wore more of a holiday theme than mine. I spent it immersed in talk about Atex Publishing Systems Corp.

Three weeks after the early December announcement that Sysdeco Group AS of Norway had made an offer to swap stock with Atex and bring it under the wing of Sysdeco’s media division, the phones would not stop ringing.

The deal was falling through, the callers kept saying.

Whether or not these were Nervous Nellies or legitimate tips, the point is that the U.S. newspaper industry was freaked by the prospect that its most established supplier was again in play.

It was only two short years ago that Eastman Kodak Co. shed itself of Atex to end a decade of ownership. At the time, pretty much everyone agreed that Kodak had not run Atex right.

Maybe Danny would.

"Danny" was Danny Chapchal, an industry veteran who had done time with Linotype, QED, Xenotron and Maxwell Communications. He put together a group of European investors and bought Atex from Kodak.

After meeting Chapchal, I was convinced that if anyone could turn Atex around, it was Danny. He was affable, charming and had a good business sense. I could picture Chapchal breezing into a meeting with a publisher and putting the newspaper executive completely at ease -- enough so to reach for his wallet.

What’s happened in the two years since then? The Chapchal team, depending upon new products for cash, cut those products' development times a little too tight.

Inside, I offer my impression of the situation, including interviews with new and longtime Atex customers, and the principal behind Sysdeco.

Only time -- always a force in publishing -- holds the key to Atex’s future. We'll keep you posted on this one.

Even before Chapchal, Atex executives faced a dilemma: how to move off their proprietary systems and onto "open systems." It might have been easier if "open systems" carried a clear definition.

We've encountered a lot of muddled thoughts on this topic, so we dispatched Chris Feola (technology guru at Connecticut’s Waterbury Republican-American) into cyberspace to try to answer the question, "What is 'open systems?'"

Feola speaks with a sampler of experts, from system suppliers to consultants -- and technologists from the Associated Press. His conclusion: While "open" is in the eye of the beholder, constraints certainly can be put on the definition of "open systems."

On the other hand, the process of getting election results into the newspaper is easily defined:

We're on deadline -- where are the vote tables?

In an on-line conversation with Bill Woodruff of Phoenix Newspapers Inc. in Arizona, we chatted about November’s off-year election. He spun exotic tales of Excel macros and DOS routines, and it sounded interesting.

At first I thought I'd ask him to be on tap for a story in about a year, so that people could prepare for the ’96 general election. But then I realized that if a newspaper wanted to plan properly for ’96, it should begin now.

So I dragooned Woodruff into writing about his election experiences -- which included working damned hard on 21 days out of the last 24 before ballots were cast. I'm certain other papers have done as much in their own ways to automate the vote tabulation process, but for those who haven't this just might be a blueprint for the inevitable next election.

Also inside, you'll find a story about the country’s largest newspaper chain starting its own systems supply firm.

Once again, a new year starts with many a bang.

-- David M. Cole

Also: Hellbox.

Illustration : Joe Shoulak

Atex in play

Venerable supplier to merge with Norwegian firm -- or maybe not

From THE COLE PAPERS, January 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.