PDF on-line: This prototype front page is something that editors at the Alameda Newspaper Group could easily build every day on their existing pagination system.

Paginating on the Web

MELBOURNE, Fla. -- Grady Cooper always comes to these affairs prepared to impress, and this year was no different.

Cooper is the systems director of the San Francisco Bay Area's Alameda Newspaper Group (ANG), which publishes five morning dailies: the Oakland Tribune (75,000 circulation), Daily Review of Hayward (41,500), Tri-Valley Herald of Pleasanton (35,000), The Argus of Fremont (31,600) and Alameda Times-Star (6600).

(As we were going to press, ANG announced it had purchased a sixth paper, the San Mateo Times, a 39,000-circulation evening daily across the Bay from Alameda.)

In previous visits to the Harris pagination workshop, Cooper has patiently explained his vision for complete pagination that produces in excess of 2500 full-page negatives a week (see The Cole Papers, February 1994) and how, using the PostScript files from which those pages are created, he has built a full-page archiving system using Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) technology (see The Cole Papers, June 1995).

At the session devoted to pagination and new media, held here Jan. 24-25, Cooper said his papers had "ventured into on-line services last year."

Established as a separate company with a separate staff, the ANG on-line services business is a bulletin board system (BBS) that offers Internet access through its modem pool.

The BBS provides content from the five papers, he said, including text of all stories (local and wire), most of the photos and "a lot of other traditional services, including games and videos."

Cooper said the ANG on-line service was "getting ready for the Web" and that the ANG web site would "probably include some HTML, text of stories and access to classifieds."

Cooper's next statement was the most important of the two-day session:

"Some of the things we've been doing as an outgrowth of pagination -- including PDF page archiving -- has caused us to rethink the way we'll do the Web."

With that, Cooper unveiled a prototype newspaper created exclusively for web distribution in the Portable Document Format. The prototype paper included many elements from the print product, but was formatted for a computer screen.

All the work on the PDF on-line paper was done on ANG's Harris pagination system.

In Cooper's vision, newspapers in the next century will have four components: