Vol. 6, No. 10, October 1995

Electronic photojournalists, new attitude at SII, Internet vs. Videotex

CONCORD, Calif. -- The streaks look ominous.

I am standing with a couple of newspaper technology heavyweights and a couple of technicians from Autologic Inc. We're staring at a four-color proof of a newspaper page, and there are streaks in the pictures on the page.

We're all scratching our heads -- the others from true bewilderment as to why the proofs are coming out incorrectly. Me, I'm just pretending to know what they're talking about.

This is the seventh annual issue of a little publication called the Electronic Times. The principle is dangerous: A group of 150 photojournalists, editors and technicians gather in a hotel ballroom for 10 days.

In that time, they build a complete newspaper publishing environment -- everything from display ad makeup to archiving to output to either newsprint or the Internet -- gather some news and publish it.

Co-sponsored by the National Press Photographers Association and the World-Wide Publishing Consortium (a group of desktop pre-press companies, among them Adobe Systems and Apple Computer), the Electronic Photojournalism Workshop (EPW) has progressed mightily from 1989, when the first Electronic Times was published on Martha’s Vineyard.

This is my first visit to the EPW. I'm here mostly because it’s a 40-minute drive from home, and a few of the participants had asked to hear me talk about archiving.

The sight is awe-inspiring: a hotel ballroom packed to the walls with Macintoshes, scanners, proofers, film processors and guys running around with propeller-beanies (I'm not making this up).

I finally run into Neil Chase, consultant and journalism teacher at Northwestern University who has covered this thing in the past, and ask if he'll do another write-up.

"That’s impossible," he says. "I'll have it by next weekend."

At the same time, a much smaller group met in a hotel in Des Moines -- the System Integrators Systems Users Group.

It’s unfortunate that more SII customers didn't show up at the conference. Senior Editor Pete Wetmore -- an SII customer in two lives and a veteran of these meetings -- reports that the attitude of the company has changed dramatically.

In a dangerous turn of events, SII has decided to listen to its customers. Incredibly, the company says it plans to build products that customers want.

Now, we've heard similar sentiments from other suppliers to our industry, but this is certainly the first time the company founded by Jim Lennane -- who once poo-pooed integration as "making cats and fox terriers mate" -- has implied that its customers might have an inkling of what’s going on.

A chunk of this change apparently springs from the company’s new chief operating officer, Erika Williams, a 17-year veteran of Amdahl, the maker of IBM mainframe clones. Inside, Wetmore profiles Williams and details the changes at SII.

Our next stop is with Cole Group Consultant Mike Middlesworth. Poor Mike -- he’s had the dangerous thought that everything he’s hearing about the Internet sounds suspiciously like the things he heard about Videotex in the early ’80s.

He makes a valid case that there are a number of parallels between the two technologies. He reviews the history of Videotex and tries to figure out just why the Internet will be different -- if at all.

All in all, an issue filled with dangerous minds -- at work.

-- David M. Cole

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