How to move beyond the
Fourth Wave: Nextwaving
(I first encountered Brad Koltz at a Seybold Seminar, where he was attempting to explain his preference for the PC over Macintosh. Since this was in the late '80s, he was getting a certain amount of grief from the crowd.
(Nonetheless, at that point Koltz had built one PC-based publishing system -- for New England Business magazine -- and was about to build a second for the Essex County Newspapers, a division of Ottaway Newspapers that publishes the Beverly Times in Beverly, Mass.
(I missed this year's Seybold Seminars, so when Koltz called to ask if I'd heard he'd self-published a book on how to integrate systems in-house I had to say I hadn't. He sent me a copy of Nextwaving -- A Guide to Fourth Wave Publishing Systems and Beyond.
(I thought so much of it, I decided his introductory chapters bore great import in these times of change. Here are excerpts:)
In the bad old days, we had no real choices: You didn't so much buy a system from a supplier as marry one.
A publishing business depends entirely upon its publishing system. Should your needs change, as happens in all businesses, you had to convince your system supplier that enough other publications would also need to alter their systems in the same way.
Then you waited while the supplier made modifications. Then you paid a fortune -- and prayed that the changes would work.
The problem is that far too often, not enough other publications evolve in just the same way at just the same time. This creates a situation where the interests of the supplier and the customer diverge.
The customer needs a system that changes as business needs change so as to stay competitive. The supplier needs to cost-justify the expense. Often this results in half measures -- or none at all.
The final analysis is that proprietary systems hold the publication hostage to the needs of the supplier and the pace of the majority of the industry. The open architecture approach of the Fourth Wave puts the publication back in control of both the pace and direction of system installation, support, expansion and improvement.
This is because the publication buys a modular publishing environment, not simply a product. By choosing to adhere to a set of industry standards, the publication gains control and choice. If the system is built using word processor X in 1992, and in 1995 word processor Y is released, the publication can substitute word processor Y for X without having to scrap the rest of the publishing system.
If faster PCs become available a few years after the installation, simply replace the existing PCs without worrying about whether the software will run. Modularity means control.
No longer in love with PageMaker? Replace it with Quark XPress or Ventura Publisher.
Don't like one illustration program? Change to one of almost 20 on the market -- they all generally support the same file conventions, use the same imagesetters and RIPs, and run on the same PCs.
If you want to take control of your publication's destiny, you need open architecture.
Until now, there has been a trade-off for this freedom and control: support.
Traditional suppliers generally have provided excellent support. Publishing executives didn't have to know about the technology; that was the supplier's problem. All publishers wanted was to know that their publication would print on deadline. So long as systems suppliers provided systems that worked and made sure they kept working, publishers were happy.
But things began to change.
First, competition among suppliers increased -- and margins fell. Some companies went out of business, leaving some publications without publishing systems support.
As each generation of systems was released, they were often not compatible with the last generation. Suppliers saddled with the burden of supporting multiple system types began to raise the rates they charge to support these systems, and they began to cut off service to perfectly running but older systems because of the costs in training a support staff to maintain all these different types of systems.
Reliance on proprietary suppliers is not what it used to be. Then again, if you kept spending money on the supplier's system, they kept it running. Until recently, if a publication was to go the open architecture route, it went it alone. This has changed.
The traditional supplier model has failed. The challenge to publishers today is to develop relationships with a new breed of suppliers in such a way as to provide stable growth and stable operations. My belief is that publishers must take on more of the burden of systems design and integration to accomplish this stability. The future requires much more by way of in-house expertise.
In a world predicated on change, publishing systems must be based in a philosophy that embraces change. That vision -- of systems that evolve in sync with, and under the control of, the publication -- is the Nextwave. The technology to achieve this vision is based in the Fourth Wave, the PC desktop.
Defining the Fourth Wave
A Fourth Wave system, by my definition, consists of off-the-shelf components (both hardware and software). Its purpose is to synthesize all or nearly all publishing systems into a single integrated whole.
This means that the business system feeds data to the page layout process, that spec ads can be finished in composing when they are sold and redesigned, that pages are assembled electronically, containing all elements.
A Fourth Wave system is as much about integrating processes and people as it is about connecting hardware and loading software. The fact that these systems are made from off-the-shelf components means that they are user controlled. That break from traditional, supplier-specific, turn-key systems is what is setting off this revolution.
Today you can build a systems infrastructure, adapt plug-in modules, and modify the modules as the technology improves or your needs change. Because the technology is mass-market driven, the costs are substantially lower.
The caveat, however, is that the publisher's responsibility, and the caliber of employee skills required, increase in kind.
The two key elements of the Fourth Wave are:
Open architecture of the system.
Integration of previously independent systems and tasks.
The Fourth Wave has limits. There are too few integrators of any substantial size (affording security to the publication) and expertise. Many of the smaller integrators have the needed skills, while many of the larger integrators have the desired financial stability.
Large publishing concerns have been integrating their own systems. Smaller publications have too, but in much more ad-hoc ways.
The challenge for the Fourth Wave has been matching vision, drive, talent and resources. Many publishers have the needed vision but not the resources, while many other publishers have the resources but lack the vision.
Publishers with both the vision and the resources are the ones scouring the marketplace for the talent to focus those resources into the execution of that vision.
This last mix has been, unfortunately, extremely rare. I have been fortunate to encounter two such publishing enterprises during my career, and this has led to truly revolutionary developments in the application of publishing technology.
The Fourth Wave is as much about process as technology. How this technology is applied, how publications go about making systems decisions, and the recognition that systems are more than a tool to print the publication, but a platform for the growth of the publication and related products and services, are the essentials that distinguish the Fourth Wave from the Third.
In the ever-increasing spiral of technological innovation leading to more innovation, the forces that have made the Fourth Wave attractive today are already pushing its boundaries into the next wave.
Defining the Nextwave
The Nextwave goes beyond using desktop tools to create print publishing systems: Nextwaving is building desktop systems with future growth in mind.
They have a direction for that growth that anticipates future trends of communication, such as the merger of telephone, cable, TV, computers and even radio.
Nextwave systems are platforms for communication that may include print today but expand into the many evolving areas of commercial communication. The Nextwave system leverages the efficiencies of the Fourth Wave toward these visions of the not-so-distant future.
A Fourth Wave system, for example, generates a searchable archive for editors to use. A Nextwave system creates a similar archive, but with dial-in capabilities for the public. These are small, incremental steps, but ones that should be components of systems being built today.
Competition in the future won't be between print publications as much as between various communications modes, and for ever-diminishing audience attention. The Nextwave system built today will be a powerful competitive advantage both today and tomorrow.
Changes to expect at your organization
Fourth Wave installations involve a lot more than merely wiring different departments' computers together. The way you do business will change: This technology literally blows away bottlenecks in the movement of information.
Workgroups develop in subtle but often unexpected ways. Suddenly the editor, production director, sales director, art director and circulation director can exchange ideas on a new product, work up a prototype, change it, match it to demographic and distribution models and fine-tune it some more -- all without leaving their respective offices (or desks), and often within an hour or two.
They can do this without wasting time trying to coordinate a series of meetings. The entire organization begins to respond faster and more precisely. But most importantly, disparate, sometimes warring departments begin to take a much broader, group-oriented approach to problem solving.
Slowly, "You guys screwed up" gives way to "We have a problem."
This happens because the Fourth Wave is really about empowerment. The look on editors' faces -- when they master the technology and grasp the significance -- is much the same as when a scholar hits upon a new thesis.
The power of the Fourth Wave isn't just in its low cost, its use of standard and interchangeable components, or even its associated boosts of performance and quality. The power of the Fourth Wave is that it sets newsrooms free.
These tools add a new dimension to the work process and its corresponding products. Prototype pages are built and rebuilt in minutes, new designs are proven or discarded in the privacy of one's office space rather than on page one.
WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) means that there is no one in another department interpreting the editor's layouts or designs. Nothing stands between the editor and the reader. This is absolutely revolutionary.
As with all revolutions, it is also dangerous -- in two ways. First, you run the risk of playing with a page design long beyond deadline. The risk of incurring several hundred dollars in press overtime because an editor can't choose between a dozen designs for an inside page is very real.
The second danger lies in putting people who lack graphics skills at graphics workstations. The skills needed to draw a paper page layout and code copy to be typeset may not gracefully translate onto computer screen and mouse.
Does every story on Page 1 need a process color drop cap with lime green type silhouetted by an electric pink shadow? The risk of over-designing is constant. The intoxication of so much flexible design power can cripple an unwary newsroom.
There is also the issue of work flow regulation. Newsrooms as a rule are cajoled into compliance by the production staff. When you paginate there may be no pre-press staff.
Who takes on this role? If your answer is the newsroom, then you'd probably let a fox guard the chicken coop. Be prepared to discuss missed deadlines with explanations running the gamut from "The photo border was a quarter of a point too wide and I couldn't seem to adjust it just right," to my favorite, "They should have made up the time at the typesetter."
The editorial staff can do these tasks on time, by themselves, but know what you face.
There are other dangers, of course. I'm being so productive on my e-mail system that I often overlook checking my "antiquated" voice-mail system for phone messages. It can be a bit daunting to start your day with 20 or 30 "urgent" e-mail messages, even if only one might truly be urgent.
As with pagination itself, there is a tendency to over-analyze, to over-prototype, to get so wrapped up in all the vast detailed information that decision-making takes a back seat to thinking about making a decision. It is a very fine line between providing just enough information to people so they can do their jobs, versus inundating them with extraneous and distracting data.
Knowledge may be power, but information is the stuff knowledge feeds on. Be careful not to choke on it.
In all likelihood, you won't go into the Fourth Wave with pat solutions to these issues. Just go into it with your eyes open. The balance of control of information, of deadlines, of design specifications becomes just one more variable in a constant sea change.
Nextwaving:
A Guide to Fourth Wave Publishing Systems and Beyond
is available from Bradley M. Koltz, P.O. Box 2616, South Hamilton, Mass. 01982
or CompuServe 71072,3723.
Copyright (c) 1994, Bradley M. Koltz
-- Bradley M. Koltz
From THE COLE PAPERS, June 1994, Copyright (c) 1994, All Rights Reserved.
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