Gannett's new system supply firm to sell to all newspapers

Suppliers to the publishing industry cope with considerable turmoil and strife, so you'd think hardly anyone would want to get into the business -- especially a large company that has had a long history of dealing with established suppliers.

Think again.

Gannett Co. Inc., the publishing and media giant, has created Gannett Media Technologies Inc. of Cincinnati. Conceived last summer, GMTI was announced in early December at the PaineWebber Media Conference in New York by Gary Watson, the president of Gannett's Newspaper Division.

The new supplier will sell products based on specifications put forth by Gannett's 82 newspapers, which range in size from the 1.9 million-circulation USA Today to the 15,000-circulation Daily News in St. Thomas, V.I.

The target market is the newspaper industry as a whole, including Gannett's properties. "The Gannett papers aren't a pushover for us," said Daniel Zito, the new company's president and chief executive. "The products need to stand on their own."

Zito, the former vice president and general manager of longtime industry supplier Software Consulting Services of Nazareth, Pa., said the new company's first product will be AdLink, a computer application that allows real estate agencies to create and maintain display advertising on their own PCs and then transmit the finished ads to a newspaper.

"In a sense, it's shrink-wrapped," he said. "It requires some customization, but it's as close to shrink-wrapped as you can get with a vertical market."

AdLink is in version 3.1, which Zito described as stable. About 60 newspapers nationwide have placed orders, Zito said, including Newhouse's Plain Dealer in Cleveland and 18 newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises of Davenport, Iowa.

AdLink was developed by Over-The-Line Inc., a Cincinnati software development firm, using specifications drawn up by ad executives at Gannett's Cincinnati Enquirer. Gannett not only acquired the source code to AdLink, it also secured the services of Stephen Burns, Over-The-Line's founder and president, who will serve as GMTI's vice president/development.

"When I started OTL," Burns said, "what we did we were doing in a vacuum. I'm not on the outside looking in now. I feel like I'm on the inside."

Burns will remain OTL's president but has phased himself out of the company's day-to-day operations. Over-the-Line will continue to market and support two other products.

In addition to AdLink, GMTI will represent other products brought forth by Gannett's papers and its Advanced Systems Lab. Among them is Mass, the company's Mobile Advertising Sales System, a product for automating the sale of advertising with laptop computers, and the development of products similar to AdLink for other advertising markets, including automotive and employment classifieds.

Specs for Mass were written by the Advanced Systems Lab; RWD Technologies of Columbia, Md., wrote the code under contract. Though Mass was written to specifications dictated by the supporting products at Gannett's newspapers, the company is testing a generic version.

Gannett also is in discussions with Digital Collections of Hamburg, Germany, to allow GMTI to market its picture and text archive, which Gannett is installing at 50 of its papers.

But why, in these trying times, did Gannett even consider entering the systems supplier sweepstakes?

"The bottom line is that we think we've been developing some decent products either through the lab or at our newspapers," said Carleton Rosenburgh, senior vice president of Gannett's Newspaper Division. "When we bring a product to market, we will have tested it at many of our own papers. That may mean that we can move faster than others could."

Gannett's family of papers brings a more real-world aspect to testing software, Rosenburgh said, noting that "the majority of the papers in the country aren't large metros."

Rosenburgh gave another reason for spicing up the supplier soup: "We're worried about the industry. We think we're responding to market needs, not the technology. I think our systems are better proven -- and perhaps more importantly, they're responsive to newspaper needs, not technology needs."

Gannett is following in the footsteps of other publishing companies that have become suppliers. They include: