July 1998, Vol. 9, No. 7

6 days, 7 nights

NEXPO ’98 (and other NAA meetings) highlight incremental advances

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The parallels appeared abundant:

Palm tree-studded landscapes.
Oppressive heat.
Snappy one-liners.
Plenty of splashing around in the water.
A planned trip to paradise turns into something of a comic bust.

What was missing here, though, were a crashed airplane, pirates and Harrison Ford and Anne Heche.

In fact, the only real commonality between Touchstone Pictures' recent Six Days, Seven Nights and the Newspaper Association of America’s four-ring summer meet -- NEXPO, Connections, the Co-Op & Sales Conference and the Marketing Conference -- is that they both lasted one-quarter of a month.

Occupying the center ring of this June 18-25 multi-conference mix was NEXPO, the venerable newspaper industry trade show and conference. More than 12,000 people were registered to attend the show (though how many forsook the lures of Disney World and other Orlando attractions to actually come to the trade show is open to debate).

If you had attended NEXPO in the last couple of years, you certainly wouldn't have needed even two days and three nights to cover the entire floor to see new things -- again, NEXPO was more about incremental advances than revolutionary change.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as revolutionary change at this point in publishing systems development might cause all the publishers to halt buying until they figured out what was going on.

So the fix here and the tweak there were to be not only expected, but welcomed. Nonetheless, one of our merry band of reporters was startled to hear a supplier’s representative say, "What’s different this year? Well, this year it works."

That’s not to say that, as always, we won't require a couple of issues of The Cole Papers to cover what went on. Inside, you'll find the start of our Orlando ’98 coverage:

Senior Editor Pete Wetmore takes a hard look at the way the business of doing business has changed over the last couple of decades. Wetmore visited with a number of newspaper industry veterans, talking with them about how the relationship between suppliers and publishers has subtly shifted in the 20 years between the heyday of system sales and today.

Correspondent Christopher J. Feola weighs in on an issue that was lurking in a conference room off the show floor -- a move by the NAA to create a standard for the exchange of classified advertising between newspapers. The work of this committee is important to the industry, and Feola (who is a member of the task force) gives us the background on the issues and an insider’s look at the process.

Correspondent George Powell pulled double duty. He offers a thorough evaluation of a new portable computer seemingly designed for travelling reporters, as well as an examination of the state of the Portable Document Format (PDF) and how it can be used in a variety of ways to improve production workflow.

Correspondent L. Carol Christopher gives us her view on the world of computer-to-plate. If there was a true "trend" on the show floor, it had to have been all the new products in this arena. Suppliers are providing a variety of price, size and speed options in the world of imaging pages directly to plate; Christopher takes you through them all.

In addition to this Orlando coverage, you'll find eight full-length articles about the various conferences on our web site at http://colegroup.com/tcp/specials/orlando98/. We've also covered the Connections and Co-Op conferences in our sister publication, NewsInc.; that coverage, as well as an upcoming article on the Marketing Conference, is available on the web site as well.

And, of course, we'll take the better part of the August and September issues of The Cole Papers to round out our NEXPO ’98 coverage, with scheduled stories about on-line classifieds, browser-based access to traditional systems, element-tracking systems, color management and a look at a new system that was shown off the floor.

Looking back, we'd have to rate the six days and seven nights in Orlando as almost as entertaining as the Ford-Heche movie.

-- David M. Cole

6 days, 7 nights

NEXPO ’98 (and other NAA meetings) highlight incremental advances

From THE COLE PAPERS, July 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.