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Walrus on Web: EPW staff coded some stories in HTML format for the Internet Walrus in PDF: Pages were automatically turned into Adobe Acrobat format Journalism and technology mix it up in a hotel ballroomCONCORD, Calif. -- For seven years, the Electronic Photojournalism Workshop has been letting the industry test new photography and production technology in a real working laboratory before newspapers decide what to buy. But the seventh rendition of EPW, held Sept. 8-15 in this suburb of San Francisco, made it clear that EPW tests more than the latest equipment. It tests the people. After all, it's people, not computers, who perform the daily miracle we call newspapering. You'd think a bunch of people who get together to test technology would expect problems. Crashes. Lost photos. Busted assignments. Ugly digital images. Network disasters. Missing files. Long delays. Lousy color. Not a chance. This bunch puts together the newest of everything and insists on making it work right. The goal is not to see how well it can be done. The goal is to do it well. The goal is to put out an amazing paper despite the fact that most of the equipment is so new that nobody would be surprised if it exploded into flames. Don't try to tell 150 people spending a week at the Concord Hilton that some newfangled gadget has made it impossible to retrieve their digital photos or correct quality or finish a page. Those who register come to EPW to try the latest digital cameras, computers, photo-editing software, archiving systems, pagination databases, page-makeup software, OPI servers and output devices. Those who volunteer their time as faculty come for much the same reasons, with the added joy of being able to build a complete newspaper operation from scratch and make it work in just a few days. It really is a complete newspaper, from display ad sales and makeup to a newsroom, photo operation and even a production department making color keys and full-page negatives. All in a hotel ballroom. It had just about everything but classifieds and delivery trucks. To round out the facilities, a hotel bar was a 30-second walk from the newsroom. So when a group of editors, photographers and workshop faculty spent 24 straight hours using digital cameras to record a day in the life of San Franciscans for one section of the newspaper, you'd think they would have been ready for anything. They were. Even the loss of some photos (they were eaten by a monster magneto-optical disc that declined to give them back) didn't daunt this crew. The plan was that (after some sleep) the crew would reassemble for an editing session. Using paper proofs of the hundreds of pictures made in those 24 hours, the gang would decide which ones to use on which of the eight pages in their section. But when they got to the meeting, there were no proofs. A software glitch had made it difficult to get that many pictures printed in time for the meeting. That's when technology took a back seat to journalism. Neal Pattison, managing editor of the Albuquerque Tribune in New Mexico and writing coach for the group doing the Digital City story, resorted to some old-fashioned story-telling techniques. He went around the room, asking each team to tell the most interesting story they saw while in The City. He made notes on the board, and pretty soon clear themes began to emerge. Editors and photographers started to see the parallels in their work, and what had been a collection of pictures turned into a series of powerful stories about a city and its people. The result was a great eight-page story that was shot by a couple of dozen people in 24 hours and ready to go on the press less than 48 hours later. Digital cameras, computers and software made it possible. Journalists made it good.
Emotional ups and downs
In other words, EPW managed to replicate in a week the same emotional roller coaster ride experienced in many newsrooms: The frustrations were many. Camera suppliers who didn't have the right equipment with them for all the assignments were frustrated about not having been told more about the assignments in advance. Computer suppliers were frustrated when they had to do such things as clean off the disk of a PowerBook on short notice so a photographer could take it on assignment to design pages in the field. A photographer who spent all day making beautiful pictures in Yosemite National Park was near tears when a digital camera left streaks and "digital noise" on the images. Photo editors on the sidelines at Candlestick Park were frustrated when their cellular modem couldn't hold the phone line long enough to complete transmission of a photo from the field. Throughout the production process, the frustrations built. It led to a lot of questions that started with the words "why don't we just ..." and "I wish we were using ..." and "wouldn't it be easier if. ..." But that's the whole point of the Electronic Photojournalism Workshop. Yes, it would be easier if there was only one pagination database, instead of three, used for different parts of the paper. It would be easier if we had year-old Macintoshes instead of new ones with memory quirks. It would be easier if we just sent cartridges full of files to a printer instead of worrying about making pages and color keys in the newsroom. Anybody can do easier. This group thrives on difficult. The many frustrations were exceeded by the number of successes. The Yosemite pictures looked better after some minor surgery in Adobe Photoshop. The detail in some of the digital football pictures, and other digital images, was amazing. And, of course, the pleasure of having a completed page signed off by all of the top editors, sent to film and then posted on the wall left all participants happy in the end. There was joy over the fact that the first page was done before anyone started to make pages in the newsroom. It was assembled on a PowerBook at the Altamont raceway and transmitted to the newsroom. But wait -- the very first page had been done even farther away, by high school students in Arizona. They were participating in the "virtual" EPW7 workshop, an extension that invited students all over the world to design pages using our templates on stories they created as well as using stories and images from the workshop.
New media emphasized
Along with electronic contributions coming in from all over the world, a vast expansion of new media publishing meant a lot of digital information was going out as well. The newspaper had been published on the World-Wide Web in Adobe Acrobat format at EPW5 and EPW6, and that was done again this year -- with one change. Instead of a few people converting all the pages afterward, creation of Acrobat PDF files was part of the workflow. When a page was sent to film, it was sent to the Acrobat Distiller program at the same time for creation of the PDF file. PDFs were only part of it. Pages also were posted in HTML on the Web. Instead of being finished when their pages went to film, workshop participants took their stories to the new media area (it was easy to find -- the faculty wore propellers on their heads) and learned how to post PDF files and Web pages. While the paper was going up on the Web, a CD-ROM was being created across the table. Grover Sanschagrin and Brian Masck, the Michigan photographers who stumbled into the multimedia spotlight by creating a CD-ROM presenting the winners of the Michigan Press Photographers Association's annual contest, were combining sound, video, photos, text and graphics into a multimedia masterpiece. They were able to collect live video footage to go with every story, sometimes while the story was being shot, other times while it was being edited or designed.
Some new things
ScanPrep Pro from Cytopia Software of Redwood City, Calif., offers the ability to automate nearly all of the steps involved in preparing a photo for electronic output. Nobody's really ready for the day when photos can be scanned, cleaned up and output without ever being checked by a human, but ScanPrep Pro allowed us to get much closer to that point at EPW. We all know that color pictures are made up of dots that go from zero percent (white) to 100 percent of cyan, magenta, yellow or black. So a Photoshop dialog box that lets us adjust levels of color between zero and 100 percent makes sense. On the other hand, wanting to take the shadow areas up over 100 percent or highlights below zero doesn't seem to make sense, but another Cytopia plug-in does just that. CSI Levels provides a slider that goes below zero and above 100, allowing even more shadow and highlight detail in a picture. It doesn't make sense when you first look at it, but it works. Adaptive Solutions of Beaverton, Ore., provided PowerShop, a plug-in card that adds a whopping 64 processors to the Mac for rapid processing of photos. With it came a filter called PhotoPerfect that was great for taking grain out of some of the digital images. The card was a PCI model, matching the architecture of the new Macintoshes, but a NuBus version is also available for older Macs. Autologic of Thousand Oaks, Calif., brought its new broadsheet color proofing device to the workshop, but it didn't have an Autologic label on it. It's the Hewlett-Packard DesignJet 650C, a color inkjet plotter that's great for outputting posters as well as broadsheet color proofs.
Pagination returns
Half of the newspaper (20 pages) was assembled using the Quark Publishing System from Quark Inc. of Denver. With a Mac Performa 475 running the QuarkDispatch server (to show that it doesn't need lots of horsepower) and an Apple Workgroup Server 8150 storing the files, users were able to pick up stories, photos and pages from any Mac on the network and track them through the production process. The most interesting challenge was making the photos work. When QPS was used at the EPW5 workshop two years earlier, it didn't get along with the Autologic OPI server that was handling photos. QPS takes the photo off your computer, moves it to the server -- and changes its name. When this was done to low-res photos, the new name didn't match the name of the high-resolution file sitting on the Autologic server. QPS now keeps track of the old file name, so OPI was no problem. Our well-planned workflow did have a quirk. We arranged it so that pictures would be scanned, then corrected by imaging coaches, after which the page would be designed. But some teams wanted to design pages as soon as they saw their raw images. So we decided instead to send the raw images straight to the Autologic OPI server, which returned low-res versions that were then checked into QPS. Designers could start working immediately. Then, when the pictures were edited in Photoshop, the new high-res version was sent to the OPI server. As long as the size and name weren't changed, the OPI replacement process worked perfectly and there was no need to update the image sitting in the QPS database. The moral: Buy some extra storage and pick a standard size for raw photos (we used 6-by-9 inches at 200 dpi). Then, once an initial crop is made in the scanning and editing process, stick with that size for the photo and enlarge or reduce it on the page in Quark. It makes the production process much simpler. The Tech Times, printed in years past as a companion to the Electronic Times to explain the technology, was done live this year in the newsroom as a part of the paper (it was section four). It was produced by the P.Ink pagination system from Scitex America Corp. of Bedford, Mass. This was the section that brought live advertising to EPW, building display ads for all of the participating suppliers right there in the hotel. (Out by the pool, a photographer who seemed to be pointing the lens at insects was actually on the ground doing product shots of software boxes for the ads.) In addition to ads, Tech Times featured coverage of the workshop, which of course often meant people taking pictures of people ... taking pictures. With two sections done on QPS and one in P.Ink, the fourth was created with a combination of products. Some pages used the Javelin database from Digital Technology International of Orem, Utah, with pages made in Quark XPress, while others were made with Adobe's new PageMaker 6.0, which users raved about. The old feeling that Quark is for newspapers and PageMaker is for everyone else seemed to be giving way to a sense that maybe Adobe was bringing PageMaker back to the point where it could be a strong competitor. And, again, while new technology made the process work well, people made the publication good. The age-old tradition of covering breaking news continued in the Electronic Times newsroom up to the last deadline. At 4:30 a.m. on the last day, a student intern from the University of North Carolina raced out of the newsroom to cover a fire nearby. Her picture made the front page. -- Neil Chase
The on-line version of the Electronic Times is available at:
The on-line version of the Michigan Press Photographers Association is available at:
Adaptive Solutions, From THE COLE PAPERS, October 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved. |
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Search Copyright © 1990-2012, The Cole Group. All Rights Reserved. Contact us. Modified date: 10/ 8/1995, 5:53:26 PM. URL: http://www.colepapers.net/TCP.archive/Cole_Papers_95/TCP_95_10/EPW7.html |
Laptop layout: Cindi Christie, Peter Mayes, Stephanie Bombay and Daniel Shanken examine digital images gathered from the streets of San Francisco. Photo: Rick Giase/Nikon 8008/Electronic Times; used with permission.