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April 1998, Vol. 9, No. 4
Noo Yawk City
Center of publishing universe isn't necessarily the seat of innovation
NEW YORK -- I've always loved Manhattan. The sights, the sounds, the smells. I loved Manhattan before I set foot on the island, having lived vicariously through the pages of the New Yorker.
Having often said that it is the only place in the United States I would live besides San Francisco, I think I should achieve at least unofficial Manhattanite status.
New York is the center of the publishing universe -- there’s nothing like strolling down Sixth Avenue on a crisp winter evening, past the Time/Life Building and the McGraw-Hill Building, knowing that the Times and the Daily News are just blocks away.
But New York has not been good to the Seybold Seminars.
In its second year of residence at the Javits Center on the East Side, Seybold Seminars has suffered during the transition from its longtime Boston digs. The conference, held March 16-20, was smaller this year, and the trade show floor had obviously shrunk.
As a program adviser and sessions organizer for the company, these problems are as much my responsibility as those of the staff. Things just don't seem to be clicking with Seybold in New York, and that’s sad.
Especially for newspapers. Chris Gulker of Apple Computer and I each had scheduled day-long sessions devoted to issues of newspaper new media; the preregistration was so low Seybold officials asked us to combine our efforts. We eventually got 100 people into the room, but many were not from newspapers.
It didn't help that the Seybold scheduling office put the show directly on top of America East, the longtime newspaper trade show in Hershey, Pa. (Also scheduled that week was the Newspaper Systems Group, where top newspaper technologists meet.)
But while Gulker and I and a hundred of our friends talked about new media -- inside, Correspondent Christopher J. Feola gives us highlights of the entire Seybold conference and trade show -- throughout the rest of the country, true innovation was coming to pass.
Senior Editor Pete Wetmore revisited The Times of Munster, Ind., to find that this hotbed of innovation was changing its editorial front-end system again. When he and I were there last (see The Cole Papers, January 1994), the paper was using UNIX workstations on reporters' desks with a modified SGML application as the front-end.
Today, Wetmore finds, The Times is implementing NewsEngin, a new front-end based on Lotus Notes. Though what has been done in Munster is impressive and the staff is wild about the new system, it will be interesting to see how a newsroom that has been on a traditional front-end such as an Atex or SII adapts to something as different as Lotus.
Also inside, Correspondent L. Carol Christopher maps the worlds of distance learning and affinity groups. As weird circumstances would have it, during her research on distance learning the executive in charge of that arena at the American Press Institute of Reston, Va., elected to leave.
API officials, having met Christopher previously, asked her if she'd be interested in the job. We are proud and happy to announce that last month, she was named associate director of the Extended Learning Center at API.
Much like our other API hand, Chris Feola, we anticipate that Christopher’s "day job" won't affect her work here at The Cole Papers.
In exploring distance learning, Christopher finds that those attempting to use it have to work harder than their compadres who are in a classroom, and that technology -- especially on-line chat groups -- are what makes the process actually work.
She also looks at organizations like The Newspaper Guild/CWA, the Committee for Concerned Journalists and the American Copy Editors Society to see whether they are willing to take leadership roles in the adoption of new technologies in publishing.
Ah, those new technologies. The irony of innovation being rolled out in the heartland during the chattering in New York City was not lost, even on me.
-- David M. Cole
See also Hellbox.
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