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Give them credit: The EdgCapture system from Edgil Associates allows newspapers to clear credit cards from the screen. New product category dawns: 'paper management services'ATLANTA -- Until NEXPO '95, "newspaper services" was widely accepted as being limited to content, and helping out in the pre-press end of things. You need a weather map? TV listings? Pagination off-site? Look up "newspaper services" in the industry Yellow Pages. Not there? Try "outsourcing." Outsourcing has tended to be focused on providing soup to nuts in the way of content, such as weather maps, or entire processes, such as the deal struck by American Color of Phoenix with the Houston Chronicle to manage all aspects of the paper's color production (see The Cole Papers, August 1995). On the other hand, what was seen at NEXPO '95 were things that assist a publication in accomplishing one task or a set of tasks -- particularly in the start-up arena of things like on-line services. Newspapers heading into the dawn of the 21st century know now that thanks to computers, much of what once was press and post-press has been moved into the pre-press arena -- and so the traditional orientation has been made obsolete. Many companies at NEXPO had products to aid newspapers in producing a paper from other than the traditional twin orientation toward content and things strictly mechanical, press and post-press. Here's a look at the NEXPO booths that offered products in the somewhat pliable realm of what might best be called "newspaper management services."
If you were a publisher, you might ask yourself: The Washington Post did just that when it was trying to decide where to locate a new production facility. It hired a consultant, who used a logistics software package, Caps Logistics Toolkit, to run several "what if" scenarios to narrow down possible site choices. The Post was one of the first newspapers to employ this software in its decision-making. This Atlanta-based company was making its first big marketing push into the newspaper market, after serving such corporate giants as AT&T, Coca-Cola and Time Inc. The Toolkit is a PC-based system that operates in a Windows environment, but with version 3.5 now can run on a Novell network as well. This is not software for the casual user, as it puts more than 275 management tools at the operator's disposal. The efficiency-driven organizations of the 1990s obviously can see its usefulness -- from November 1994 to June 1995, the number of licensed copies of the software jumped from about 500 to 650. To make it really useful, you need the database connection module to hook it up with an Oracle or SQL database. But as the distribution methods of newspapers continue to change, this software could be a method of ensuring every possible path is explored. Another example of a large organization using its experience with legal, health and military sectors to serve as a stepping stone to newspaper-related endeavors could be seen at SRA International of Arlington, Va. SRA was showing some full-text searching software that has quite a few built-in smarts. The software, NameTag, is part of the developing software field of companionware. Think of helper applications for an Internet browser --- that's essentially companionware. Instead of trying to integrate the artificial intelligence of NameTag into every text management and electronic filing product, NameTag adds value to all such software by extending the underlying word recognition component to understand proper names, organizations, locations, money and dates. For example, it will suggest that a "Bob Jones" could be the same as a "Robert Jones," and recognize that Monte Carlo could be a city or a car. And it can assign SGML-compatible labels or other annotations to text. The total SRA multimedia search environment can have up to five modules: a text-search server, an image server, the client software, a choice of text database products if you have none, and an optional data feed server, which can access Internet databases. There may be other ways to use this smart search technology that haven't been thought of yet. One service to newspapers comes in the ad department, where remote ad entry is a welcome feature. Leading in this sweepstakes is Ad-Star, based in New York, Los Angeles and Brussels, whose products can handle both classified and classified display ads, and even regular display ads (on computers using the Macintosh OS). Right now, Ad-Star certifies that more than 400 classified and display ad reservations per hour can be pumped into a newspaper from offices equipped with only a '386-based remote PC with a hard drive and 2400 bps modem. The estimate is based on an average classified ad size of 320 characters. This is a system for everybody. Ad-Star Remote will run on Macs or PCs. The PC configuration can be running MS-DOS 3.1 with as little as 1 MB of memory, a hard disk with 5 MB of available space and a 2400-baud modem. The Mac requirements are slightly more weighty --- some version of System 7, 4 MB of memory and the ability to transfer display ad files from the ad makeup system, if it's not Mac-based. On the receiving end is Ad-Star TP, which provides the interface between remote users and the newspaper's advertising system. Once configured, it seems to be able to interface with all the usual front-end systems. Naturally, each advertiser has the ability to check the status of his ad with the newspaper's database and make changes, if the ad deadline hasn't passed. Ad-Star sites already are handling more than 1 million ads annually, so it seems the volume for this sort of delivery system will only grow. Need a little help with credit card transactions? Dmgt of Nashua, N.H., wants to take the processing hassles out of your hands. Dmgt wants to perform all credit card transactions, handling all the credit cards a newspaper reader may use: the usual -- VISA, Discover, MasterCard, American Express -- as well as private label cards and Canadian transactions. Just like a newspaper, Dmgt never closes, processing transactions every hour of every day. A newspaper simply transmits all credit card data to one of Dgmt's dual data centers and waits for the money (minus Dgmt's fee) to flow back. Also in the hunt for newspaper credit business is Edgil Associates. Its EdgCapture software can address several kinds of transactions -- clearing all credit cards, directly debiting a subscriber's checking account or even automatically drafting a check for a recurring payment. From its home in North Chelmsford, Mass., Edgil also will tempt a newspaper's business side with EAP, which is already providing the Los Angeles Times with a classified advertising database that can be accessed by subscribers to the Prodigy on-line service. The Sybase database can give on-line browsers access to an ad just minutes after it is posted to the database. EAP makes it unnecessary to ship the classified data to the on-line service. (This seems like an idea whose time has come, but Prodigy-accessible classifieds didn't prevent another Edgil client, New York Newsday, from closing.) Edgil has many other ideas for options and enhancements for EdgCapture. In fact, it's part of a business solution offered by another company, DSI, of Silver Spring, Md. DSI -- Data Sciences Inc. -- specializes in UNIX-based business solutions for newspapers, and has a suite of business and advertising applications that are non-proprietary --- buy one or buy them all. All accounting functions are covered, with EdgCapture handling credit transactions. There's database marketing software as well, for those organizations looking for new revenue streams, and of particular import for newspapers right now, newsprint inventory software that doesn't need a UNIX workstation, just an MS-DOS PC, to run. Mix and match: DSI also will do programming, training, network design and database conversion -- a cornucopia of editorial services. One of the hardest things to do on a daily newspaper is to schedule who is going to work when. Allowing for vacations, sickness and downsizing makes this a nearly impossible task for anyone. T/One, a bi-coastal company with offices in Quincy, Mass., and Petaluma, Calif., has solved that problem for photo and graphics departments with Trax, which combines with T/One's Merlin photo archiving system to make an attractive package. With all the emphasis on getting photos into a digital library, the combination of assignment tracking and photo archive all on one Windows NT-based server is an attractive one. The Trax software evolved from a photo assignment database kept at the New York Times. The scheduling management functions were added to keep track of all functions dealing with an assignment on one searchable database that can be accessed from both Macs and Windows PCs, with virtually the same interface. The Merlin photo archive is based on a dual Pentium 90 MHz CPU, with a 4 gigabyte usable capacity Raid level 5 disk array, which can store a minimum of 10,000 JPEG-compressed high-resolution images, or 80,000 thumbnail images that would reference high-res versions stored on CD-ROM disks. As a newspaper person who has struggled for more than a decade with finding out who shot what photo when and who should be available, this is an editorial service that would have made my days very happy a few years ago. It could make someone who now faces this situation every day very happy as well. Finally, there exists total help for the newspaper executive who is bemused, befuddled and bewildered by the breakneck speed of technological developments and the struggle to understand it enough to make an informed decision. Although a cheap fix would be a subscription to The Cole Papers, EDS will be glad to accept outsourcing of all technological thinking. Just state some business goals, and EDS will (for a fee) help a company achieve them. EDS (a.k.a. Electronic Data Systems, and yes, it's the company founded by Ross Perot) may be headquartered in the Texas town of Plano, but it certainly has the experience to act locally while thinking globally. It provides a full range of services, including consulting, systems development, systems integration, systems management and business processes management. EDS serves customers in 40 countries, and has 15,000 employees working outside the United States. The headline for an Editor & Publisher story about the company in 1994 said "Superintegrators." That pretty much says it all. A closing thought: just turn the strategic planning for the future over to these Texans, and layers of top management might be rendered irrelevant. In the 1990s, if it can happen to home delivery drivers and the schoolkids who plop the paper on a porch, why not a few executives, too? -- George Powell
AD-STAR Publishing Technologies, From THE COLE PAPERS, September 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved. |
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