 January 1996, Vol. 7, No. 1
TV nation
On-line program listings have potential for publishers and viewers
For the true television aficionado, the weekly listings printed in a book distributed over the weekend are not enough.
Canceled shows, vague sports listings ("If the playoffs go to seven games, then none of these programs will air.") and the whims of station managers are not accurately reflected.
The listings in the daily paper are marginally better, but they're usually still 48 to 72 hours out of date.
For those with cable, there is usually a "preview" channel that has a window in which specific programs are advertised, along with a "crawling" listing. The problem is that for a 50-channel service, the "crawl" is literally that, taking three to four minutes to get through all 50 channels.
No, the true TV aficionado wants his or her listings on computer -- in theory.
That theory has been adopted by the two major providers of TV listings. Both Tribune Media Services and TV Data Technologies have built systems that allow readers to access listings on-line, either through bulletin board systems (BBSes) or the World-Wide Web.
Our resident TV aficionado, Pete Wetmore, who edits an award-winning TV book in real life, takes a look at the two products (Tribune’s is in operation in a couple of places; TV Data plans to unveil its offering next month).
Wetmore comes away impressed with the technology, but a bit puzzled as to why people would spend lots of time in front of their computers just to plot their existence in front of the TV.
Nonetheless, this new technology does give one a chance to pause: With a good on-line TV listings service and a mailroom that can handle "tailored" newspapers, a publisher could stop sending the weekly TV book -- or even the daily TV listings page -- to subscribers who partake of the on-line version. That’s quite a lot of newsprint.
Another example of how new technology can save newsprint comes from the Dayton Daily News in Ohio. As the "local" paper for the Proximity Peace Talks -- held to discuss the future of the former Yugoslavia at nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base -- the paper was able to score a scoop: It acquired a complete copy of the peace accords just after they were initialed.
Inside, we reprint a column Dayton Daily News Editor Max Jennings wrote for the paper because it explains that in a newsprint-only world, he would not have been able to adequately leverage the scoop. But with a World-Wide Web site, the Dayton paper was able to reproduce the entire accords -- and make them available to people around the world.
Jennings' point is that this new medium not only gives him the opportunity to do new things, it also gives him the opportunity to give readers what newsprint would have never allowed him to provide.
Our next stop is also new media-oriented: Rick Smolen, a photojournalist with a long history at National Geographic as well as the Day in the Life coffee-table books, pushes the envelope he pretty much personally created in photojournalism CD-ROMs, with Alice to Ocean and Passage to Vietnam, with a new project: 24 Hours in Cyberspace.
Kurt Foss, electronic photojournalism expert (he’s a big part of the digital efforts of the National Press Photographers Association), talks to Smolen and his merry band of picture takers about how they plan to move beyond CD-ROMs and into the World-Wide Web for this new venture (Foss is a participant as well).
A shifting of thought patterns is also the basis for a piece by Cole Group Consultant Mike Middlesworth, who talks about what a publisher should look for when attempting to move into new technology -- and, specifically, what a publisher should seek when retaining a consultant.
And, lastly, in the Hellbox we have news from P.INK and ISGI -- the two German-based front-end suppliers have encountered rough patches recently, and we take a look at what’s going on.
Yes, so far we are a TV nation (though the Michael Moore show by that name was recently canceled by its second network; your printed listings might reflect it), but it seems like in a very short time we might become a PC nation.
-- David M. Cole
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