Romano summed up his presentation by saying, "New media and old media will live together in some uncomfortable harmony, each suspicious of the other's intentions."

As for making money on the Web, Chris Gulker, an executive with Apple Computer of Cupertino, Calif., said transactions of a fraction of a cent were probably the way to go, rather than subscription fees.

"In the unlikely event I were to offer something on the World-Wide Web which people would pay to read," said Gulker, "they might only choose to pay only a hundredth or a thousandth of a cent.

"It's possible that if a million people a day were reading my content, then the thousandth or hundredth of a cent might be something worthwhile," said Gulker, who is a former newspaper photographer and creator of the San Francisco Examiner's Web site.

Finally laying to rest the issue of whether the Associated Press would compete with its member newspapers and broadcasters in new media, John Reid, the cooperative's vice president and director of communications and technology, told the audience that the AP would not be "publishing directly on on-line services."

Rather, he said, the news service would provide "content for the on-line services that are hosted by our members."

Reid said, "Our focus in Internet technology will be to gain the widest possible distribution of information through our member organizations."

The news cooperative would not become an Internet access provider, Reid said, despite the fact "that's what we've done in the delivery of traditional information."

The AP would provide members with pre-packaged Web pages -- topics to include national, international, sports, business, state and background information -- which would be thorough and updated frequently, he said.

The news cooperative would provide news forums for discussion about current events, a sports database and archives of the AP wire, he said.

"These will be multimedia pages in the true sense," Reid said.

The AP executive said that "much of our effort" would be to "provide context, and providing the tools for making it easy to get to that information."

"Our information will be accessible only through a member's site -- you'll have to come through their front door," Reid said.

Display, digitally delivered
Digital delivery of display advertising has been a recurring topic at Seybold conferences over the last few years. Every spring and fall, a group of speakers comes forth with the latest reports from the battle field.

This semi-annual gathering included some good news, especially from advertisers.

"We're moving approximately 50 ads a week live, with no [backup] hard copy," said Laurie Rejzer, the electronic publishing administrator for Dayton Hudson Corp. of Minneapolis. The nation's fourth-largest retailer, the company owns the Dayton Hudson, Marshall Fields, Target and Mervyn's department stores.

Dayton Hudson has an agreement with the Associated Press that anticipates delivering ads via the news cooperative's AdSEND system to more than 600 newspapers, Rejzer said, pending Target and Mervyn's following the digital delivery lead of the company's other two chains.

The Dayton Hudson and Marshall Fields chains have been testing digital ad delivery through AdSEND at 85 papers -- "the majority are small Midwestern papers," Rejzer said -- with 45 papers receiving the ads on a regular basis.

Getting to this point was difficult, she said.

"The testing and installation process was really up and down," she said. "We worked directly with the AP to identify and help those of our papers who could not output a quality halftone."

She said the problems at newspapers ranged from poor output devices to insufficient staff knowledge.

"Digital ad delivery is forcing many cut-and-paste small papers into the '80s and teaching them how to deal with electronic files," Rejzer said.

"Just because a paper is installed doesn't mean they're producing a quality image," Rejzer said, although "ultimately the ads end up looking pretty good in the newspaper."

The benefit for a large retailer is not to send ads digitally to just the metro-sized newspapers, but to all papers that print the retailer's ads, Rejzer said.

"We want to take our imagesetters and put them back in the room with the old stat cameras," she said.

While her stores gain some time by not having to ship veloxes via delivery services, making digital ads for the AdSEND system is no picnic either, the retailing executive said.

Part of the issue is that AdSEND uses the Adobe Acrobat portable document format (PDF) technology.

"For each version of each ad," Rejzer said, "there's a multistep process that involves creating a PostScript file from a Quark file, distilling it to a PDF file in the Acrobat Distiller, viewing the ad in the Acrobat Reader for a quick proof before the final step, which is creating the electronic delivery ticket for every ad."

Because each ad must be localized for as many as 10 markets, Rejzer said, "This multistep process must be done nine or 10 times for every ad -- and we run several ads a day."

Prices being charged by third-party delivery systems like AdSEND are high, she said, but now, during the trouble-shooting process, they're worth the cost.

"Ultimately," Rejzer said, "and I mean years down the road, Isdn will be an attractive alternative, once the phone companies learn how to install Isdn. We've been having a heck of a time with US West."

Rejzer said the Dayton Hudson and Marshall Fields stores "anticipate eliminating all ad velox shipments and delivering all ads via AP AdSEND by the end of the year."

But, she said, "we have several years to go before digital ad delivery is a solid, reliable system that's taken for granted for delivering retail ads to newspapers."

While the parent of Target stores was fairly happy with the AP, the cooperative was the target of one newspaper executive.

"AP gives you some free stuff," said Bryan Burnett, the new media manager of the Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C. "It's deja vu all over again for those of us who dealt with the AP LeafDesk."

The 53,000-circulation morning paper gets about 85 national ads per month, Burnett said, and "90 percent of our time is spent on output, not ad quality, and that has to change."

Quality is in the eye of the beholder, the Herald-Sun executive said -- "and that's the advertiser, not mine, not our production director's."

Saying that "I'm sure people here have heard stories of densitometers used as paper weights," Burnett said that aside from training, the next best thing for quality is to "measure, measure and measure again."

Burnett said the paper's production ad services department "is going to be the foundation of our digital ad scheme." The paper must develop "a different kind of compositor," he said, who is trained not only in desktop applications, but also telecommunications, PostScript and PDF.

At the slightly larger Los Angeles Times (1 million copies each morning), many of the concerns are similar, according to Janet Owen, the paper's director of pre-press and publishing systems.

While pagination at her paper was "moving at a very slow pace," Owen said "electronic ad delivery is moving at a faster and uncontrolled pace."

Concerns about the labor required to process and manage the ads, as well as the risk associated with taking in digital ads in a variety of formats and the quality of the digital files received, led the Times to set up a digital ad desk, Owen said, staffed with employees who have knowledge of desktop software.

As a cushion, "the deadlines have been advanced 12 hours ahead of the camera-ready deadlines," she said.

The Times receives "100-plus" digital ads per week, Owen explained, considerably fewer than the 3000 camera-ready ads delivered every seven days. More and more national advertisers, she said, were using third-party delivery systems from AP and DigiFlex.

"Eighty percent of our problems associated with ad delivery are being generated from our local and smaller advertisers," she said.

"We would like to tell our advertisers that we won't accept any ads that are not built using Multi-Ad Creator, but we know that isn't realistic," Owen said.

"They feel that if it's on the screen, it should print," she said. "Right? Wrong."

To help combat these problems, the Times has created its own best-practices guide to assist advertisers in learning how to build digital ads that the paper will be able to reproduce faithfully.

(The Newspaper Association of America has been working for almost a year on a similar guide, which will be made available to all member newspapers at little cost.)

Library lucre
A session with the provocative title, "Publication archives on-line: profit center or money pit?" pitted two newspaper librarians against two suppliers of newspaper archiving systems, with one of the largest providers of on-line newspaper archives in the middle.

It was a draw: All the panelists agreed that if on-line archives weren't necessarily profit centers, neither were they money pits.

For example, the San Francisco Chronicle uploads its daily report to five on-line services: DataTimes, Dow Jones, Knight-Ridder/Dialog, Lexis-Nexis and Newsbank.

Richard Geiger, the paper's library director, said the five-part royalties "significantly offset the cost of putting the database together, but we don't make a profit."

News stories cost different amounts at different times through different media, Geiger pointed out.

"If you look on the newspaper rack," he said, "you pay 50 cents and you get about 150 stories, so that's a third of a penny a story.

"What we put on the Internet right now are free stories.

"If you put the paper on a CD-ROM -- we have an agreement with Dialog and they charge about $900 for a year, which is about 50,000 stories -- that's like a penny and a half.

"E-mail clipping services are about 10 cents a story -- some more, some less.

"The Copyright Clearance Center has a whole lot of prices, but a copy of a Chronicle story is $1.50," Geiger said. "On-line vendors? DataTimes has been charging $3 a story."

Alison Head, the director of information management at the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, Calif., said the sudden appearance of on-line archives has given rise to the "first time non-librarians, for the most part, have access to information."

Calling this a "novelty phase" and a "fascination phase," Head termed use of on-line libraries "a short-term phase with short-term profitability."

"The customers will become more demanding," Head said. "We have to recognize that on-line customers are fickle and to retain them, we need to get more in touch with customer feedback."

One panelist posed a novel question: "Is it possible that old news is worth more than new news?"

Chris Jennewein, the director of the Knight-Ridder New Media Center who served as part of the start-up team of the San Jose Mercury News' Mercury Center, contrasted the prices Mercury Center charges on America Online versus what the Web version of Mercury Center plans to charge.

On AOL, access costs 15 cents a minute nights and weekends, and 80 cents a minute during the business day. Over the Web, Mercury Center plans to charge 25 cents an article nights and weekends, and $1.50 an article during the business day.

"In the beginning," said Jennewein, "people will be doing simple searches and most people won't have the time to learn complex searches."

While acknowledging that the interfaces on AOL and the Web "work quite well right now," Jennewein said it was the content of the archives that was going to sell them, not the interfaces.

Returning to his opening question, Jennewein said, "Everybody has the latest news -- it's kind of a commodity now. But newspaper archives, particularly local newspaper archives, are unique.

"When you have data going back over a decade or more collected by a local newspaper, no one else has got that kind of information."

Panelist Don Oldham -- the chief executive of Digital Technology International of Orem, Utah -- likened a newspaper's archives to "gold that's still in mountain veins waiting to be discovered or in a stream waiting to be panned."

Like gold, Oldham said, newspaper archives are "much more valuable after it's been mined and turned into jewelry. Sitting there waiting to be searched it has value; but once it's packaged, it's value goes up substantially."

Newspapers and their suppliers shouldn't emphasize interfaces or search engines, Oldham said, but should "focus on the tools that will help librarians and editors and reporters repackage that valuable information that's in the archives."

The other supplier on the panel offered his list of on-line up-and-comers. Richard Patterson, chairman of Cascade Systems, based in the United Kingdom and Andover, Mass., said several companies were worth watching in the on-line "revolution":

"The first is [Sun Microsystems'] Java -- not just HotJava, the [Web] browser, but Java underneath -- is almost a sea change of the way computing is done.

"Adobe with Acrobat and its acquisition of Ceneca's SiteMill and PageMill [see Page 5]. Watch Netscape, and of course, Apple, and He from Redmond can't be ignored" -- the last, of course, a reference to Bill Gates and Microsoft of Redmond, Wash.

Addressing the issue of on-line archives, Patterson said, "They can be a profit center, but they can be a money pit if you don't do it right.

"If you don't store it, and if your users and you can't find it, I expect your cash generation will be minimal."

-- dmc

Apple Computer Inc.,
(408) 996-1010;
The Associated Press,
(212) 621-1720;
Cascade Systems Inc.,
(508) 794-8000, e-mail: info@cascade.com;
Digital Technology International,
(801) 226-2984, e-mail: joann_froelich@powertalk.dtint.com;
Newspaper Association of America,
(703) 648-1000.

From THE COLE PAPERS, November 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.