Vol. 6, No. 8, August 1995

Riddle me this ...

How is NEXPO’s Atlanta like Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, Calif.?

ATLANTA -- We came. We saw. We yawned.

Oh, certainly there were new things to be seen, and perhaps acquired, at the newspaper industry’s annual technical exposition and conference -- NEXPO ’95, held here June 24-28.

So many new things, in fact, that we've filled this issue -- and plan to fill the next -- covering them.

But in retrospect, it doesn't seem there was much. Maybe this is the downside of having attended 14 of these affairs in 15 years.

More likely, though, it’s a sign of the times.

The pall of newsprint price increases hung over the show dramatically. Whether you were shocked by how few people were there (the official count: 11,442 attendees, but the aisles looked much lighter) or by the emphasis placed on the narrowing of the newspaper page (it was said that a summit of industry chieftains convened to discuss how to "narrow the web"), the fact of life that newsprint prices have been artificially low for the last five years has now hit home with every newspaper reporter, ad-taker or janitor.

The other major issue of the show, the lack of innovation -- or, should we say, the lack of innovation aside from Internet-related items -- is another function of business.

Once again, we're not seeing much in the way of new products, especially from our larger and more established suppliers. This comes, in part, from the fact that our larger suppliers are having a tough time adjusting not only to the world of "open systems," but to our erratic buying patterns.

It takes a fairly constant stream of revenues for a business to be able to adequately plan what portion of those revenues will go toward research and development of new products. In the last few years, with the lingering recession of 1991 keeping capital expenditures at a minimum, most of our suppliers have had a hard enough time just keeping their heads above water without even beginning to worry about new products.

So there are, essentially, no new products.

The area where we did find growth, not unsurprisingly, was in Internet-related items. The show floor here was rife with the Internet buzz.

Inside, you'll find our look at the Internet stuff, as penned by Correspondent Christopher J. Feola. He examines Internet solutions -- hardware, software and content; as he says, you could have walked onto the NEXPO floor without a clue about the Internet and walked off with a complete World-Wide Web site.

Also inside, Senior Editor Pete Wetmore takes us from 'Net surfing to channel surfing. Wetmore found a new product category at NEXPO ’95 -- the interactive TV log. Both purveyors of TV listings, TV Data Technologies and Tribune Media Services, are introducing TV grid software that can run on a consumer’s home PC. Wetmore takes these competing systems out for test drives.

Another major trend that we noticed at NEXPO was the notion of "outsourcing." The concept here is that you're not, for instance, in the weather forecasting business. So you hire a weather forecasting company to build your weather page.

Or you aim even higher, as the Houston Chronicle has done. After saying it’s not in the color separation business, the Chronicle hired a color separation company to handle all its color. Correspondent George Powell takes you step-by-step through outsourcing -- and through the suppliers that would like to be your out source.

Finally, in what has become a tradition, we dispatched the irrepressible Team Bryan -- Donna and John -- to scour the show floor for the finest in handouts, giveaways and cheap junk that suppliers somehow think will cause us to buy their ever-more expensive products.

John writes that he came away a happy man -- if you overlook his concern with a certain tote bag given away by a company that has the same name as a Scotch liquor.

Which is more than you can say for me; I mean, if I was happy about NEXPO, would I have posed the riddle in the headline?

(The answer: Stein once said of her hometown, Oakland, "There’s no there there.")

-- David M. Cole

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