 August 1996, Vol. 7, No. 8
Leaving Las Vegas
Before we bid NEXPO ’96 adieu: pagination, databases, more Internet
Whether you're talking about the depressing Academy Award-winning movie or the depressing Sheryl Crow song, leaving Las Vegas can be a downer.
Generally, people exited NEXPO ’96 -- held June 15-19 in the gambling capital -- not in an optimistic mood. In fact, while attending the late-July annual meeting of the California Newspaper Publishers Association in San Diego, I was asked what I thought of the show.
Before I could answer, my questioner said, "Our people who went said there was nothing there."
No, I told this person, there was a lot there -- just not as much as there was in the ’80s.
And I was compelled again to make my chicken-and-egg remark: "When was the last time your newspaper made a significant investment in pre-press technology with one of the companies that exhibits at NEXPO? Because if you don't spend money with our industry’s suppliers, how do you expect them to have money to develop new products?"
Fortunately we were interrupted, so this poor person wasn't obliged to hear me rant on. But I defy you to come up with a formula that allows publishers to financially ignore their suppliers and still have those suppliers be healthy and innovative.
Publishers seem to want their angel food and eat it, too: They want the low prices of off-the-shelf hardware and software -- and then they complain that there’s nothing being shown at the distinctly niche-market newspaper trade show.
You must come to grips with this: If you don't spend money with the industry’s suppliers, they will go out of business. Then you'll be forced to build your systems as "one-offs," which will ultimately cost you more in consulting fees, self-integration costs and large support staffs than you would have ever paid to an industry provider.
Inside, Senior Editor Pete Wetmore finds that some of the most interesting things in editorial, classified and pagination applications have come from companies based outside the United States. After looking at a variety of systems, he and I agree that the hit of the show was the Unisys Publishing System -- developed in Italy -- from Unisys Corp. of Irving, Texas.
Interestingly, despite the fact that the Unisys product runs on industry-standard hardware, the software is written specifically for the newspaper industry. Though it uses a standard database, the Hermes editorial system is elsewise -- please forgive the word -- proprietary.
But maybe this isn't bad. After flirting with off-the-shelf software packages for the last five years, perhaps it’s time to realize that what we do is different enough that to achieve the proper degree of productivity, we will have to use proprietary solutions.
(One leading industry pundit was getting his Unisys Hermes demo in the same last minutes of NEXPO as was I. At one point he asked about how some function would work in Microsoft Word. When the demo'er said that the function did work in Word, but was much easier in the Hermes word processor, said pundit got up and walked away.)
Also inside: You'll find some thoughts on element tracking by Correspondent John Bryan, while Correspondent George Powell takes a look at using the Internet for content delivery (not to mention an aside about monks with Macs) and Correspondent L. Carol Christopher explores the trend toward providing newspaper pre-press systems and services to the Spanish-language market.
Yes, all in all NEXPO ’96 was depressing. But even more depressing is the lock-step monomania of publishers to squeeze the life out of their suppliers -- and then to complain that the suppliers aren't doing anything for them.
-- David M. Cole
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