No fear, no loathing of
pagination in Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS, Nev. -- The Las Vegas Review-Journal could be a textbook example of newspaper-driven, supplier-provided pagination -- if there were such a textbook.

Digital Technology International of Orem, Utah, is providing Nevada's largest daily with a migration path to a Macintosh-based system from a classic J11-based workhorse made by Atex Publishing Systems Corp. of Bedford, Mass.

"We're stepping into a new arena," said Terry Duck, production operations director and a prime force behind the project. A veteran of three Donrey Media Group newspapers (the Review-Journal is Donrey's flagship), Duck brings to the task the essentials: experience, enthusiasm and patience.

In the Age of The Indeterminate ROI (return on investment), the impetus for the change was not money, according to Review-Journal executives; the goal was more efficient production.

"We didn't justify the new system on the loss of people," Duck said, noting that the time for change surely had come. "We had 13-year-old technology in place. We could add to that system, or we could bring in a back-end pagination system and hook to it, or we could bring in a new system fresh."

About six months into the changeover, the Review-Journal is far along its migration path. While sports and stocks are still being handled on Atex, the editorial portion -- text, rules and photos -- of 40 to 60 percent of its inside pages are being created on DT. (About one page in six is completely paginated, including ads.)

The relationship between newspaper and supplier is comfortable: DT asked the Review-Journal to beta test its next release (the R-J has yet to say yes), and DT praised the contributions the Las Vegas paper made to helping it develop its products.

"They had a very aggressive installation schedule," said DT Marketing Director Garth Despain. "The Review-Journal did an awful lot in a very short amount of time with a high degree of professionalism and resiliency."

The project remains on track.

"I predicted it would take a year," Duck said. "I still think that's going to be fairly close to accurate.

"It's such a massive change across all departments of the newspaper."

That massive change hit Linda Wrzesinski on the desktop last spring.

As assistant business editor, Wrzesinski lays out a three-page business section every weeknight. When we visited in late June, five weeks after the business desk went live (the first desk to press a deadline), Wrzesinski clearly was pleased with her new tools.

"It's cut the way I want it, it's built the way I want it, it looks the way I want it," she said. Gone is the wait for composing "to get available to do the work."

On her desk were two terminals: a diehard Atex box (used for producing stock tables) and a Macintosh Quadra 800 with 32 megs of RAM and a 20-inch monitor running eight-bit color for crisp display of much of a page.

Running on her Mac were two large chunks of DT software: SpeedPlanner and PageSpeed. The first does page layout, the second shows how pages have been filled.

DT's screen display is obviously not Quark XPress. The graphical user interface is definitely in the Mac family but by no means a Quark clone.

SpeedPlanner is a layout tool, so while type that appears in standing elements or as story slugs is WYSIWYG, the remainder of the page is empty of text. To see a page in WYSIWYG, an editor must switch to PageSpeed.

Floating wherever it's most convenient for the user is a toolbox containing a readout of pertinent information, more like an Atex header than a Quark data box. It lists the story length, total placed and remainder that needs a home.

A quick switch into PageSpeed and a readable vision of the page appears. In this mode editing changes are done in a text window that can be opened with a quick click on the desired story.

Coding appears with the story in the text window, which at first is distracting. But typesetting instructions are bracketed with a single character that reads "tag," helping to isolate format words from text. And everything preceding the body of the story appears in boldface, facilitating a quick visual jump to the lede.

Headlines can be made to fit not by changing a number in a dialog box but by simple clicks of the mouse to alter point size.

Stories are tracked through six status levels: raw, written, assigned, rim, edited, ready. Page progress is monitored similarly, with empty boxes magically filling in as stories are completed.

Unique is DT's facility for multiple user access to a page. While Wrzesinski was busily making design decisions, a copy editor nearby opened up stories on the page and began to work on them.

Then she clicked on a story that jumped. What appeared was a full-page layout showing only that story, in position; she could edit through the text window and have her changes take effect after clicking on a "flow" button in the text window.

The jump also could be displayed in position by jumping to that page in the section onscreen.

Directory lists are written in two steps: designate what's being sought, then command the system to search. The user could use one of many standing filters to generate oft-needed lists displaying a few lines of text and such vital information as story length, date, status and page assignment.

Graphical page elements are selected from the graphics directory which displays color thumbnails of each item along with originating desk, dimensions, file type and user-added notes.

At the Review-Journal, production people tweak photos -- local pics are scanned in from negatives, wire images imported through an AP Leaf Picture Desk -- and editors place them in pages for output. If the crop changes and the image must be enlarged by more than 115 percent, it's sent back to production for regeneration, ensuring even image quality throughout the paper.

Photos for nonpaginated pages are massaged in Adobe Photoshop and output to negative for stripping into the page negative. Eventually, Duck said, the AP Leaf Picture Desk will become only a storage device, with all photos handled on a Mac.

Other windows into the DT database show users WYSIWYG page-by-page renditions of a complete section, or the ad stack for an entire newspaper (begging the question: When you're looking at 66 tiny pages, what's smaller than "a thumbnail?").

For Wrzesinski, the new way of doing her job is a positive step. She can see the results of her toils immediately, laying out three pages in about 40 minutes. And Duck can put his fingers on a key goal.

"My vision," he said, "was that eventually everyone would do their jobs from one seat."

Executives of the Review-Journal didn't wake up one morning and decide to have pagination along with toast and jam for breakfast.

"I started planting the seeds for pagination about five years ago," Duck said. "No one was taking it seriously in the beginning."

When Atex upgraded its system in Las Vegas in 1990, Duck and others told the big cheeses at Donrey Media Group -- who oversee the Review-Journal and some 50 other newspapers, in North Carolina to California, from Fort Smith, Ark. -- that the life of that system would be somewhat short.

Corporate gave the go ahead to buy a new system, but not to take too much time doing it. Chosen to go shopping were a half-dozen folks drawn from various rooms in the R-J's comfortably institutional plant (the halls resemble those in a grade school; the tumult in the newsroom and composing is vintage newspaper).

The marketplace said go for pagination, not just a new front-end. Among those invited for consideration were System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento, Calif., Dewar Information Systems Corp. of Westmont, Ill., and DT. Notably excluded was Atex, Duck said, "because it was in such an uproar" at the time.

The two finalists were DT and Dewar. Because DewarView was not a complete system back in Spring 1993 it came in second; in addition, Duck said, "I saw a problem taking all these individual pieces and keeping all their pieces upgraded."

On the other hand, Digital Technology International was one vendor with a complete package that would put the Review-Journal not only into pagination, but position it for expansion into new markets.

"Their data was truly in the database," Duck said. "Data would be easily transportable to new environments in files and fields we could interpret. It gives us a foundation to build on."

Putting DT over the top was a visit by its president, Don Oldham, who sold section editors on a feature they rather liked: a new library that would be accessible from every Mac. After three years on DataTimes, the prospect of not having to walk to the library to access the archive was good news, as was the prospect of no longer "paying to search our own data," Duck said.

"This system will put the library on everyone's desk," said Managing Editor Charles Zobell. "It's another way we're trying to keep pace with the industry so we can stay in business."

In booming Las Vegas, that seems an unlikely fate for the Review-Journal, which outsells its evening competitor, the Las Vegas Sun, by almost 100,000 copies.

Under their host-tenant joint operating agreement, the common composing room sees final production of some pages of the 36,000-circulation, locally-owned evening Sun.

Output is through three Monotype Cpsi RIPs from Monotype Systems Inc. of Rolling Meadows, Ill., to three Monotype 3850 ImageSetters. A Harlequin RIP feeds pages to a plain paper output device from Graphics Enterprises Inc. of Canton, Ohio. Pictures are scanned on one of four brands of scanners, or brought in through the AP Leaf Picture Desk.

The DT database runs in UNIX on 128 MB Sun SPARC 10 workstations with 6 gigabyte mirrored disc drives; one database stores graphics and display ads, the other editorial and pagination information. Reporters work on one of 73 Quadra 610s, while editors can work on one of 20 pagination workstations.

Seven satellite offices continue to write stories on PCs using XyWrite, then file to a Mac that inserts files into the DT database.

Sitting squarely in the maelstrom of change was Greg Haas, assistant managing editor for systems and design. Haas played a critical role in generating enthusiasm for the shock of change and preparing the staff to weather it. He took pains not to let history be repeated in a new environment.

"I was under the impression that someone had Atex knowledge and held it close," he said. "I set out to try to teach everyone as much as possible up front. This will lead to new approaches to doing our jobs, including computer-assisted reporting."

"Few people here were familiar with the Mac," Haas continued, so training was done in two steps -- an overview of the Mac and then up-close training on DT's software. "Having the introduction to [the Mac] overcame apprehension," Zobell said.

The introduction was valuable, but Duck pointed out that newspaper software is a strange kind of beast.

"In virtually any Mac application you can get to first base, then second base, then third base," Duck said. "But DTI does require more training than the standard Mac program because they give you more tools than the standard Mac program."

DT adapted its training for R-J staffers at its headquarters in Utah, Haas said. While the trainers "were proficient in software -- there was no problem there at all -- they learned a lot from us in terms of how a newspaper works and how to train newspaper people."

After overviews of the week-long training programs (one week each for PageSpeed and SpeedPlanner) were presented, Haas said, the Review-Journal team persuaded DT to alter the plan to simulate a day's work. "They adjusted their training to accommodate us," he said.

Training was made more difficult by the installation of a software upgrade in mid-week, Haas said, which did cut into time for training while equipment was down.

DT "needs to enhance training facilities in Orem," Zobell said. While the "willingness to teach us was apparent," he said, "we didn't get the full benefit of time because equipment needed to be more stable."

By late January, Macintoshes were in the newsroom and people had been given their initial training, Haas said. The training effort in-house has involved five people in the newsroom, two on the ad side, one in promotions and one in MIS.

While implementation is the first priority, Haas said, the second phase "ideally" would have someone available to train new employees and enhance everyone's use of the system.

"We need to find where manual repetitions are and find a shorter way of doing it," said Editor Tom Mitchell. "We taught people so much that they can't possibly remember it all. It's going to be an education process for a long time."

Adopting pagination "put us in a unique position to redesign how we put out our newspaper," Duck said.

Revamping production was a high priority. Two departments were merged to create a new entity, ad operations.

"We had the art and ad departments operating separately," said Ad Operations Manager Duke Robison. "We wanted ads done the same way and wanted it under advertising."

Typesetting, which was under the aegis of production, was brought into the new unit, without consternation in the union-free shop.

"These people in composing saw this thing coming," Robison said, "and that no one would lose their job because of it." Some compositors were sent to a local junior college for Mac training "to allow transfers" to other Review-Journal departments, Robison said.

Display ads have delayed full pagination at the R-J. Many advertisers in the Review-Journal supply camera-ready ads, which poses a large obstacle to full pagination because scanning in such ads is a tricky proposition. For now, the R-J is setting the issue aside.

DT's AdSpeed program has been used to generate display ads since March. (Multi-Ad Creator still is used occasionally to update pickup ads created in it months ago.)

Classified ads continue to be generated in Atex, with pagination handled by a system from Harris Publishing Systems Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., that was installed nearly two years ago. The R-J plans to shop for a new classified front-end in 1996, Duck said, noting that DT will be a candidate in part because "Harris back-end pagination could fit with DTI."

As the Review-Journal nears its first benchmark, phasing DT into every department, a few bugs have appeared and some features have not been implemented. Most notable are problems with AdSpeed and the library.

"If an ad has too many graphics," Duck said, "it corrupts the file so that it won't open."

DT is working to solve this problem, Despain said, with a programmer on-site. While other papers have used either AdSpeed or the graphics database, Las Vegas was the first to link advertising and graphics by using the DT interface. Out crawled a bug.

DT also acknowledged the R-J's complaint that the supplier was suffering severe growing pains. "As we've pushed up into bigger newspapers," Despain said, "the demands have become more strenuous."

A nascent DT users group, which met twice this year, has twin demands: more features and more stable software. In response, DT hired an experienced software developer specifically to implement quality control procedures in the R&D department. And, since April, six people with newspaper backgrounds have been added to the support desk.

DT and the users group also agreed on procedures to develop features -- as requested by users -- and introduce software revisions on a six-month cycle, Despain said.

Bringing the library on-line has been delayed, Duck said, because already archived stories could not be easily corrected and he estimated searches could have a sizable impact on system performance.

DT is working to bring on-line a search engine from ConQuest of Columbia, Md., which uses a natural language request for searches, Despain said, which should allay Duck's fears of system inconvenience. At the same time, DT is responding to librarians' requests for additional features, he said.

These and other problems aside, Duck stands by the selection of DT.

"This whole system is DT," he said. "All the pieces should be there and they should fit. Some of them didn't."

Even so, he said, "we've still got the right system, we're still on the right path."

-- Pete Wetmore

From THE COLE PAPERS, October 1994, Copyright (c) 1994, All Rights Reserved.