Missing link in new media: a good pagination system

MELBOURNE, Fla. -- Early in the Publishing Integration: Pagination and New Media conference here, it was clear that pagination and publishing on-line were linked.

On Day 2, Grady Cooper articulated the situation.

"To do new media right, you have to be paginated," said the director of systems management at the Alameda Newspaper Group in the San Francisco Bay Area,

Heads nodded up and down. Though it had been said in less direct ways, this was the message that got through to those attending the Jan. 24-25 session sponsored by Harris Publishing Systems Corp. at its headquarters here.

The third annual meeting was organized as in years before: though speakers were uniformly newspaper executives presenting case studies, not all were Harris customers. (The editor and publisher of this journal moderated their sessions.)

Five of the 11 speakers did come from newspapers using Harris pagination systems, and virtually all of them made an obligatory remark about "not wanting to be an advertisement for Harris." None of them really was, although their success stories spoke well of the Harris product line.

The 50 people who paid $150 to attend were split between existing Harris customers and newspapers still mulling a pagination decision.

Pagination
In suburban Chicago, the Pioneer Press of Glenview, Ill., publishes 47 weekly tabloid newspaper titles across 112 zones, reaching 180,000 subscribers.

The moving parts of this operation are so complex that Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Peter Neill said he and other executives at the paper spent "nine to 12 months visiting various large newspaper sites" to get a handle on how to handle the Press' volume of pages -- about 3000 tab pages a week.

Neill said Pioneer believed "there were really only four" suppliers that could deliver a pagination system that could handle its operation; the papers quickly narrowed the choice to two.

Pioneer chose Harris, and integrated it with an existing System Integrators Inc. System/55 editorial front-end; classified continues to be handled and paginated on another System/55.

Pioneer developed an evaluation sheet for choosing suppliers of not only pagination systems, Neill said, but also output systems. The features of each system were listed down the left, with a "weighted score" of suppliers across the top. The company with the most points won.

"The people who pick the system should be the people who use it on a seven-day basis," said Neill. "Do not let [information technologies] pick your vendor."

At the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., picking a supplier wasn't a problem -- the issue was trying to do pagination with a legacy Atex front-end.

As related by Director of News Systems Randy Jesse, the 166,000-circulation morning paper recently went to chaos "in a few nanoseconds."

The editors at the Virginian-Pilot had written a fine editorial commenting, as the headline said, on the "accomplishments of Virginia Beach." When the page was proofed on the screen and in hard copy, the editorial resounded correctly.

But as the press started up, there was merely a hole where the text should have been (even though the head and pull quote were in their places).

"Finally," said Jesse, "an inquiring pressman wondered where the editorial might be." The press was stopped, the new page was sent out and an embarrassing situation was remedied.

The problem?

"Dissimilar RIPs [raster image processors]," said Jesse. If the RIP of the proofing device and the RIP of the machine that makes film are not from the same manufacturer, you can get situations like this, he said.

Jesse also warned of the perils of building a network so that various computers can talk to one another. "Networking can look so darn simple," Jesse said. "A poorly planned network can bring your newspaper to its knees."

On the other hand, Barry Mechanic didn't have a poorly planned network -- he didn't have any time to plan anything.

The vice president of technology at the New York Post was faced not only with devising a scheme to replace an ancient editorial front-end, but also provide pagination, install three new business systems (circulation, accounts receivable and accounts payable), and move the newsroom from its plant at the tip of Manhattan to space in an office building in midtown.

All of this came about as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. reacquired the 400,000-circulation morning paper in 1994, following some disastrous ownerships throughout the early part of the decade.

As Mechanic began to cut workers in the composing room, he found that the composing room takes care of details.

"They have a tendency to save people, and we didn't realize it until we began to eliminate them," said Mechanic. In moments of crisis, he noted, the composing room worked quite well.

"At the last minute when there's five pages to close, you could put two or three people on a page," he said.

Mechanic built a centralized pagination department with 15 paginators -- seven former compositors and eight editors. The pagination group, which labors in the newsroom just outside the editor's office, now handles many of the problems that used to be solved in composing.

A similar decision about centralized pagination was made at a much smaller operation, J.H. Zerbey Newspapers Inc. of Pennsylvania. Zerbey publishes two papers: the 28,000-circulation evening Pottsville Republican and the 8000-circulation Evening Herald in nearby Shenandoah.

In Pottsville, said Dennis Melnick, the company's pre-press production manager, there are just two people in the newsroom who make up all pages for both papers. "Our copy desk people are slowly getting into pagination," said Melnick.

The Zerbey titles are hardly typical small-town papers. They are the home of the New Horizons Group, which is the divisional parent of audiotext supplier Info-Connect, and their publisher is Uzal Martz, the president of the Newspaper Association of America and one of the industry's leading voices in new media.

Melnick said Zerbey has the philosophy that there are "four lanes on the Infobahn": ink-on-paper, basic audiotext, enhanced audiotext (which includes fax-on-demand) and on-line services.

The Republican and Herald have had the first three services, along with a bulletin board system, for a while, but added Internet access providing (IAP) just recently.

The IAP business, Schuylkill Online, had 272 customers in its first month of business. The newspaper company links customers to the Internet through Infinet, the Norfolk, Va.-based Internet access company owned by Knight-Ridder and Landmark Communications.

The papers also have pages on the World-Wide Web (http://www.infi.net/pottsville/) that are fed through the pagination system.

"We basically have a gateway to the Macintosh that passes the text file, where they do HTML [HyperText Markup Language] on it," said Melnick.

New media
At the Western Producer, a 95,000-circulation Canadian weekly agriculture newspaper published in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, the UNIX architecture of a Harris Cash classified system provided the impetus for getting onto the World-Wide Web (http://www.producer.com).

"We were not UNIX literate," James Haggarty, the paper's technical services manager, said of his group. Rather than learning the operating system on a machine that handled revenue, he said, "Our staff made personal commitments to learn UNIX by developing Web pages."

The link between the Producer's classified system and the Web became even tighter when it became apparent the leading feature of the Web site was access to the print product's classified section.

Each month, the paper records 3200 unique addresses accessing its site; those are only for the first hit, so activity is far greater. Classified readers are coming in from as far away as New Zealand, South Africa and Moldova, and they're primarily looking at listings for airplanes, auctions, farm equipment and livestock.

Haggarty said the paper plans to offer sponsorship of some of these heavily trafficked areas to advertisers.

The technology the Producer uses to get its classifieds onto the Web includes a program written by Harris to move the liners out of the database as text, which is then imported into a Macintosh.

In the Mac the text is massaged by a program called Torquemada, which provides an easy way to handle large-scale search-and-replace. After Torquemada has replaced Harris markup code with HTML code, the file is sent back to the Web server for posting.

"It takes us about 15 minutes to do the whole thing," Haggarty said.

With almost three years of publishing on-line -- on both America Online and the Web (http://www.sjmercury.com) -- Mercury Center is the elder statesman of on-line publishing.

As the newly installed director of the service of the San Jose Mercury News, Bob Ryan reviewed the lessons he's learned over the first eight months. He found what he calls "electronic epiphanies":