Stuck in the GUI: Both the America Online interface (left) and the CompuServe Information Manager (CIM, below), give the impression of being graphical systems, though underneath they are just text-driven.

The mechanics of running an on-line newspaper system

So, there you are, quietly going nuts managing all those newsroom computers, and you find yourself thinking a wonderful idea: Why not launch a flashy on-line service, just brimming with color and graphics?

By yourself.

What to do? Here's The Cole Papers on-line program to help you decide:

1. Pick up a hammer.

2. Ask yourself: Do I want to launch an on-line service?

3. If "yes," hit yourself on the head.

4. Ask again: Do I still want to launch an on-line service?

5. If "yes," go to 3.

6. If "no," then end.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that it isn't quite accurate. In reality, a bunch of reporters or editors -- or the editor, for heaven's sake -- comes to you with the Flashy Color-Laden On-line Service Idea.

Please note: You can't use the hammer on them (we may be masochistic, but we're not stupid).

Instead, think of on-line services as automobiles: The text-based CompuServe guys -- Westchester Rockland's New York Newslink, Detroit's Free Press Plus and Cocoa, Fla.'s Florida Today are like the Ford Taurus: Solid, comfortable, no-nonsense.

The America Online crowd of the New York Times, San Jose Mercury News and Chicago Tribune are more like a Mercury Sable: Basically a Taurus with nicer trim (since America Online is a cleverly disguised text-based system, but a text system nonetheless).

Enough of kicking tires and comparing EPA mileage: We looked at three on-line services through the eyes of a manager. How much overhead an on-line service takes is an important subject, along with the different levels of integration between the electronic and paper products.

As with a lot of things, how much effort it all takes depends on how much you want to do.

New York Newslink
Systems Editor Barry Abisch is the chief Taurus mechanic for the Westchester Rockland Newspapers, a Gannett agglomeration of suburban dailies based in White Plains, N.Y.

Abisch is a one-man band: In addition to managing a System Integrators newsroom computer system, plus a bunch of IBM PCs, he has to keep New York Newslink up-to-date five days a week.

Make that "wants to"; it's a labor of love. "I make the time," Abisch said.

How much time? Five to seven hours a week, on average.

Pretty good, and made possible by a lot of scripts Abisch has written on the SII system that automate the scut work. One puts a header atop each story for the CompuServe file description, another strips out typesetting commands ("CompuServe doesn't like quad lefts," Abisch said), and a third writes a script for the popular TapCIS program that uploads all 20 to 30 daily stories in one swell foop.

Lack of staff makes for a bare-bones operation. "We're doing very, very low-key stuff. It's an adjunct to the newspaper, not a new product itself," he said. "And we don't do a lot of things that we could or should do."

Low-key or not, it seems to be working, Abisch reported. Newslink clocks about 1000 accesses a week -- "it's been really picking up since Labor Day," he said.

Some of that traffic seems to be from people planning to visit the Big Apple, so Abisch makes sure entertainment news and reviews get up on the board. Other exchanges are more local.

"Our county hospital is always mired in controversy. So the chairman got on-line a couple of weeks ago and started a dialog with readers," he said. "Usually, we'd interview him, interview the opposition and write a story. This time, we served as facilitators for a direct exchange with the citizens."

Another biggie, predictably, is New York sports teams, and in this Abisch sees a glimpse of the future:

"On-line services tear down the geographic boundaries of how far a circulation truck can go. If you're a Giants fan in another city, you can get a game report on any number of services -- but with us, you can get all the training reports through the week."

Abisch sees these nuggets as evidence that a vein of gold lies nearby.

"You won't see much [on-line profitability] until there's a different technology for getting the data downloaded into the home, probably through cable or fiber optic connections," he said.

"Some day there'll be an interactive application that will allow me to assemble my own paper overnight while I sleep, based on my choices. That's possible right now, but it's slow -- it's not viable."

In his view, newspapers don't have a choice about going on-line.

"I think it's important for newspapers to get involved because if they don't, somebody else will. We're sitting on the information -- now we have the added overhead of making it available in a different way."

That added overhead has its own rewards, Abisch said. "It's really fun to play with this."

Detroit Free Press Plus
One neighborhood west of New York Newslink in sprawling CompuServe City lies Free Press Plus, the nine-month-old on-line service of the Detroit Free Press.

Minding the store are two veteran Free Press staffers: Director John Smyntek, a former features editor, and Associate Director Rick Ratliff, ex-reporter and computer columnist.

They spend a couple of hours loading stories each morning, using a variation on the Westchester method: strip out the codes, then dump 'em into the CompuServe hopper.

Does the text-based nature of CompuServe hobble Detroit's on-line efforts? Nope, says Smyntek:

"CompuServe is easily accessible -- you don't require a lot of software. Besides, CompuServe offers on-line video and pictures, so even though they're text-based, they're a lot more than that.

"We're already offering multimedia stuff," Smyntek said. "There's a real hunger for video products -- live animation, video downloads, pictures. People want to see these things; people will download them. In fact, CompuServe says we're one of the best download forums around.

"We have one program that analyzes political commercials. You can download a Windows Write file and it'll show you the full commercial." (Of course, if you're not running a Windows 3.1 machine, feel free to pound sand.)

But the point is that all this maintenance can be done by two people, Smyntek said. "It's a simply managed system."

OK, we'll give points for ease of use, which obviously translates into fewer people shoveling coal into the on-line boilers. What about the larger newsroom?

If you see that the immediate goal of on-line services centers on customer service (and you might as well, since newspapers aren't making a dime off this stuff yet), then any number of people in the boiler room aren't as important as the reporters, artists, editors and photographers with whom the readers should be interacting.

In today's frantic newsrooms, who has time to log on to discuss yesterday's stories with an itinerant mojo salesman from Carbuncle, Pa.? But if you are going to go on-line, you have to go on-line with the readers.

How does Detroit do it?

"We gave 15 newsroom members essentially free access to CompuServe, and a number of others have free access to the forum," said Smyntek, noting that while they're in the forum the CompuServe clock is not running. "The level of cooperation from the newsroom has been good. Unfortunately, out of the 15, four have left the paper. So we're rebuilding that."

Some cultural shifts have yet to take place, Smyntek admitted. "A lot of newsroom people think their job ends when they file the story for the day," he said. "But slowly but surely, they understand their jobs are changing. So far, so good."

What of the on-line future? It would seem to lie in graphical user interfaces, what with a world made up increasingly of Macs and Windows PCs.

CompuServe has the CompuServe Information Manager (CIM), which puts a graphical shell around the subscriber. Other services, notably America Online, put the shell around the database, or at least make it look that way.

"We've seen demos of other services," Smyntek said, "and we're real pleased with CompuServe. But realistically speaking, this whole area is metamorphosing, and Knight-Ridder (parent company of the Free Press) is placing all kinds of bets.

"Obviously San Jose (Mercury Center) is a big bet. We're a smaller bet, and I suspect they'll get involved with Prodigy at some point.

"I don't know what our next step is," Smyntek said. "We'll want to respond quickly to challenges that come our way," not the least of them being a rumored foray into on-line services by the rival Detroit News.

Mercury Center
Have you, the America Online subscriber, logged on?

Have you, the Mercury News reader, seen the tags in the printed paper pointing to audiotext, fax and on-line additional information?

Are either of you aware of NewsHound, the collect-it-yourself electronic newspaper kit the San Jose Mercury News just launched? Twenty-four message boards, nightly chat sessions -- you think San Jose could do all this with just two people?

Guess what? It can't.

To get this mammoth job done, the Mercury News, which is basically framing the on-line discussion with its aggressive, inventive Mercury Center service, uses 17 paid staffers plus about three dozen volunteers (who receive on-line time free).

"Our approach is that integration with the printed paper is the core quality of Mercury Center," said On-line Editor John Murrell. "If you don't see the paper, you don't appreciate the way it's integrated."

The daily paper, classifieds included, goes up to America Online overnight, thanks to a lot of scripting on the Mercury News System Integrators front-end, which automatically splits the SII film dump into pre-assigned categories on AOL. Then there are 300 or so daily supplementary stories that are manually mapped to AOL categories and posted as well.

It's a big job that's attracting attention all over the industry.

"People are going to school off us, but everybody's going to school off everybody else at this point," Murrell said. "There's a general acceptance that nobody knows what's going to work here, but everybody accepts that it's time to go to work on this and be ahead of the curve."

A major zone of exploration is advertising. In-your-face print ads don't cut it in the on-line world, Murrell said.

"We have to invent how advertising is going to work in this medium. The going assumption is that the type of advertising that works is informative," he said. "It makes use of the same advantages that on-line offers in news -- the fact that you can put up vast reams of data, when the readers want and where they want it, and provide searching capabilities. Space is of no concern.

"In this medium, people have to seek you out as an advertiser," Murrell added. "You need to put something up that is of enough value that people will search it out and go after your stuff."

It's not just the newspaper's job, he said: "Advertisers will have to take a fresh look at what works and what doesn't."

Which bring us to the World-Wide Web, a uniform method of addressing and sending data over the Internet, which supports graphical user interfaces, hypertext, multimedia -- and advertising. Mercury Center is branching out into it as well, Murrell said.

"In one sense, it allows you to use typography and graphics more easily than AOL," said Murrell. "One of AOL's drawbacks is that in the end, what you have is a bunch of headlines to click to choose stories -- you're missing the visual cues you have in the printed paper to guide the reader to page elements, so it's kind of a flattening effect."

The Web solves that problem. Items can be viewed using a variety of programs, including the freeware Mosaic interface that runs on all kinds of platforms.

If you want your Web home page to look like a newspaper, you can design it that way, though there are probably better ways to design it. The point is, it's free-form, which the other services aren't. That bodes well for both news and advertising.

What's more, the Web puts your product anywhere there is an Internet Web server, and that's rapidly becoming everywhere. As Murrell said, "You can click your way all around the world."

And what firm could well be at the forefront of the Web providers? Good old text-based CompuServe, which recently announced formation of a company to help others establish presences on the Web as well as making CompuServe a Web gateway itself.

Some things, however, will not change.

You -- down in the boiler room: Keep shoveling!

-- John Bryan

America Online,
(800) 827-6364;
CompuServe Information Service,
(800) 848-8199;
Detroit Free Press Plus,
72662.1735@compuserve.com;
Mercury Center,
jmurrell@aol.com;
New York Newslink,
71333.3066@compuserve.com;
Prodigy Services Co.,
(914) 448-8000.

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