Vol. 6, No. 6, June 1995

Morgue mortality

Picture archives, page archives and databases put nails in its coffin

When I was a boy copy editor, the all-powerful night news editor would sometimes give me his key to the library and let me go down to pull a mug shot or two, or check a fact.

I would get lost in the vast array of filing cabinets, opening little envelopes filled with clippings or big folders filled with pictures.

In leafing through the pictures, I came to appreciate the craft of the photo-retoucher (while learning something about photo manipulation), and began my life-long appreciation of the work of the "markers" in a newspaper library.

I was there when the library switched from marking-and-clipping to "enhancing" for the electronic library. It was tough for many of the librarians (some just quit), and I think I shared their pain at the passing of an era.

The transition to the electronic library was, for most papers, less than a decade ago, yet here we are on the cusp of another era. As Correspondent John Bryan details inside, the jerry-built solutions for picture archiving of just a couple of years ago have now been supplanted by true, industrial-strength products that can handle terrabytes of pictures.

These solutions come from a wide range of suppliers -- everything from former photographers to former display ad makeups (not to mention a news-gathering cooperative).

And pictures aren't the only problem solved: Inside, I visit the home of the suburban San Francisco Alameda Newspaper Group, which publishes five titles (including the Oakland Tribune) in PostScript full-page negatives. The technology guru for the group, Grady Cooper, tells a story of learning about Adobe Systems' Acrobat technology that turns a bloated PostScript page file into a trim -- and fully indexed -- page in the Portable Document Format.

What Cooper has learned at Alameda is that it is easy (and inexpensive) to create a database of whole pages that preserves all the text, all the pictures, all the graphics -- and all the ads.

What I learned during my visit is that it wouldn't be all that difficult to modify the existing Acrobat technology to turn archived pages into a full, annotated and enhanced, librarian-approved electronic library.

Then we turn to Correspondent Chris Feola, who has some thoughts on the notion that we have held onto the model of an assembly-line newspaper just a little too long.

Feola believes that we should begin to develop a "matrix of interlocking databases" to give our readers exactly what they want -- whether we give them that information in digital (on-line, fax-on-demand, audiotext, etc.) or analog (ink-on-paper) formats.

As Feola points out, all newspapers throw away more information than they print, and that it behooves the paper to collect that information and market it.

In an entirely different direction, we go to Sacramento, where Michael Kinerk, the newsroom technology editor of the Miami Herald, gives us some insight into the first System Integrators users group meeting following the massive restructuring of the company that happened in the wake of the supplier’s emergence from Chapter 11 protection.

Though Kinerk listens to the dissident users, he and I both believe that SII is still in pretty good shape; the company’s executives have made some missteps recently but they can probably rectify the situation -- if they don't wait too long.

Much like a newspaper library, SII has the chance to change now to adapt for the future.

Yes, it is time to say good-bye to the "morgue." A newspaper’s library can no longer merely be the repository of folders of pictures and envelopes of clips -- it must be the heart of the new newspaper.

The people who work in the library must be elevated from second-class citizens to the key leaders of the newspaper; they are experienced at figuring out what’s useful to keep and what’s not.

The morgue is dead; long live the morgue.

-- David M. Cole

Also: Hellbox

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