 September 1996, Vol. 7, No. 9
Budget blues
Some concrete ideas to include in your capital requests for next year
Capital equipment budgets are like the weather -- everyone talks about them, but nobody does anything about them.
Everybody who’s called me lately -- both publishing executives and suppliers -- seems to be ensnared in the grip of financial planning.
From my days as the Only Guy in the Newsroom With a Capital Budget, I remember the process quite well: sweat bullets over the smallest cost details, go to a meeting, see everything get shot down.
The things you thought would sail through are scrutinized; the things you thought would be niggled to death sprout wings and fly through to approval.
Assuming you're in the same boat as most of our readers (and if you're not, you undoubtedly work for someone who is in this particularly leaky dinghy), we decided to devote a certain piece of this issue to the budgeting blues.
Correspondent Christopher J. Feola -- who’s bought a piece of capital equipment or two on behalf of his benevolent employers at the Waterbury Republican-American in Connecticut -- chatted up more than half a dozen newspaper executives and other experts to come up with 15 ideas about how to flesh out your capital expenditures for 1997.
Virtually all of Feola’s suggestions are good ones, but I'm most taken with a comment from Maggie Ballough, the former editor of the Austin American-Statesman in Texas. She told Feola that newspaper executives should "stop looking for the Atex of today. It doesn't exist."
Right now the best investment newspaper executives can make is incremental: buy some RAM or a couple of Macintoshes rather than kill yourself trying to find the ultimate system.
Elsewhere inside, I stop by the offices of System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento to meet its latest president and chief honcho.
As I think you can tell from the interview, I came away quite impressed with Frank Washington, who revealed to me that he plans to make an equity investment in the company.
His other plans -- to broaden SII’s market beyond the newspaper front-end business, to recruit new executives and rebuild the company -- all seem to be the right moves for the troubled industry supplier.
On more than one occasion since I spoke with Washington, I have been asked, "Can he save SII?" Read the interview and decide for yourself, but my guess is yes.
Also inside, Correspondent L. Carol Christopher takes a look at how technology has affected the way newspapers and their labor unions handle strikes. Christopher talks to executives at both Detroit newspapers (they've been on strike for more than 14 months) about the issue of technology and strikes; she also speaks with an official of the Newspaper Guild.
With more and more newspapers migrating to the Wintel environment -- that’s a computer that uses an Intel chip running Windows -- and with the media storm about the big losses at Apple Computer Inc., we decided to let our two partisans -- ProMac George Powell and AntiMac Chris Feola -- thrash out whether Apple and the Mac will survive.
And to wrap up, we stop by Sysdeco (where the second round of losses seems to have caused the chief executive to leave) and the Seybold San Francisco conference.
Budgeting can be a major hassle. But like our other topics this month, you either get down and get dirty with it, or you live to regret that you didn't.
-- David M. Cole
Illustration: Joe Shoulak
| 