March 1997, Vol. 8, No. 3

Internetpaper

Network permeates everything, from delivery to research to teaching

MELBOURNE, Fla. -- The digital press is gaining on the printing press.

You would think it would have dawned on me earlier. Sitting here on Day 2 of the annual Harris Publishing Systems Corp.’s newspaper technology conference in January, it struck me full force:

With the notable exception of one person, all the speakers this day had no background in pre-press technologies.

They were all new media mavens.

The mainstream of publishing technologies has now inexorably shifted -- though pre-press is still an important aspect (hey, we still print an awful lot of papers every day), the newspaper world has quickly begun to revolve around the World-Wide Web.

It doesn't seem to much matter what aspect of the business you view: E-mail and the Web are not only major enabling technologies, but they also are the hot place to be at a newspaper.

And as if the 'Net weren't enough, we now can see that intranets -- networks inside your company that use the same protocols at the worldwide Internet -- are going to be increasingly important. Our old friend Grady Cooper of Alameda Newspaper Group has built an intranet to serve his company’s seven physical locations scattered around the San Francisco Bay Area.

Cooper even has built a prototype of a classified front-end that will run on a web browser -- which should open the eyes of one or two of the suppliers who have devoted vast resources to client/server-based classified front-end technologies.

Inside, in addition to my report on the Harris conference, is a file from David Galloway, a columnist and writer with Chronicle Interactive, the on-line effort of the Houston Chronicle (http://www.chron.com/). Galloway was somewhat morally obliged to attend the annual Interactive Newspapers conference, as the Chronicle was one of the many co-sponsors (the primary sponsor was Editor & Publisher magazine).

Galloway heard that change is coming to newspapers. Although not all the speakers he heard were able to define what those changes will be, L. Carol Christopher, ace correspondent of this fine journal, has a couple of ideas about those changes.

Her first is the notion that reporting research is happening through computers more and more often. Christopher talks to a number of reporters and editors about their experiences with using computers in reporting, and finds that so much reporting is being done with computers now, the phrase "computer-assisted reporting" is nearly passé.

After all, as one person told Christopher, "you don't have telephone-assisted reporting."

Her second notion is to ask whether the journalism schools of America are changing as rapidly as the institutions for whom they are training students. Christopher chats with half-a-dozen full-time and part-time educators to see whether technology has become an important part of journalism school curricula. She finds some good indications and some not so good.

Back here in Melbourne, the second-day speakers are inadvertently repeating themselves. As is the wont of presenters at sessions such as this, they have not coordinated their talks.

Serendipity has caused them to warn over and over again that if newspapers do not take an aggressive stance in terms of new media -- specifically, on-line delivery -- the proverbial "two kids in a garage" will steal their markets.

With the world of newspapering now firmly entrenched in the Internet, this oft-repeated warning should be heeded even by the most skeptical.

-- David M. Cole

From THE COLE PAPERS, March 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.