Before this crop, companies such as Morris Communications Corp. of Augusta, Ga., and the Washington Star invested time and energy in systems that were marketed across the board.

What motivates a newspaper to become a supplier? Are there synergies with the two roles? What are the benefits? To answer these questions, we talked with three newspaper executives who are now also supplier executives.

'Would you build me one?'
Uzal Martz isn't like most newspaper publishers.

For one thing, he's been chairman for the last year of the Newspaper Association of America, the publishers group that's usually led by someone from one of the big chains.

Not bad for the head of a 28,000-circulation evening daily in Pennsylvania.

Another of Martz' unique characteristics is his belief in what he calls the "four lanes of the Infobahn":

Most publishers of a paper like the Pottsville Republican wouldn't have gotten out of the slow lane, much less onto four arteries.

Martz also is unique in that he's in the newspaper supply business as well as the newspaper business. In addition to his publisher's chores, he also runs the New Horizons Group, which not only sells the Info-Connect audiotext system and an on-line bulletin board system, but is also branching out into the world of phone directories.

How did he get there?

"It was an accident," the modest Martz said. "I would like to say that it was through foresight and planning, but it was an accident."

The accident came about when Martz decided in the late 1980s that his newspaper had to move beyond ink-on-paper toward what was then the latest trend in "new media": audiotext.

"The existing systems were complex and expensive," Martz said. "One supplier offered us time and temperature [features] for $30,000."

One of the members of the paper's audiotext system search committee was an electronics technician. He began tinkering with a personal computer and became convinced he could build an audiotext system designed specifically for a smaller paper, for far less money.

Martz green-lighted the development, and soon the Republican had its own home-grown audiotext system.

"A publisher friend said, 'Would you build me one?'" Martz said. The next thing he knew, Martz had a whole division of his business dedicated to building audiotext systems for newspapers.

"We went to America East in 1992," Martz said of his paper's exhibit at the annual trade show in nearby Hershey, Pa. "From then we started basically doing a leap-frog."

Growth has been so good that the company today is installing its 75th system -- in Scotland, now that New Horizons is represented by an agent in the United Kingdom.

The success of Info-Connect, said Martz, stems from the fact that the product was "designed by a newspaper for newspapers. ... It sounds, feels and tastes like something for a paper."

The challenge for Martz was, as he said, to "not muck up the core business" -- the Republican, a paper founded in 1884. "Until we got the division going," he said, "we took a piece of this person and a piece of a second person" to develop the supplier business.

Today, the New Horizons Group has 13 employees -- "about half of them came from the newspaper or the industry" -- and provides not only the Info-Connect hardware and software, but also training and market analysis.

"We sell a capability, not just a system," Martz said.

The company's market analysis services include bringing an experienced "system champion" into the newspaper to assist it in developing a sales program for the audiotext system.

"One of the reasons we've been able to stick to our knitting," said Martz, "is that [Info-Connect] has a direct relationship with what we do with our newspapers."

Martz said, "This is a business we know. I wouldn't buy a plot of land and try to be a real estate dealer, because I don't know squat about real estate."

But, Martz said, when he "puts [his] supplier hat on" he finds newspapers to be difficult customers. ("I didn't think I was that difficult," Martz said defensively.)

Martz and his crew have been aggressive in moving toward his "four lanes of the Infobahn." In addition to its audiotext capabilities, the Republican recently purchased another daily newspaper, the Evening Herald, an 8000-circulation paper in nearby Shenandoah, Pa.

The Republican also has become an affiliate of InfiNet, the Norfolk, Va., Internet access provider owned by Landmark Communications, Knight-Ridder and Gannett. New Horizons sells a bulletin board system that can be adapted as a World-Wide Web server.

In addition, the Republican has developed a telephone directory -- among the first to feature e-mail addresses -- called Easy To Read.

And, through the New Horizons Group, the paper is offering technology and services to other small papers so they too can enter the directory publishing business.

"As newspapers look into the future," Martz said, "we're not dead yet. We just happen to be in a stable market, so these things give the company a way to grow until the next wave of economic development."

They 'saw what we had and said, "Wow"'
After working as a mainframe computer programmer and spending time as a Mormon missionary, Don Oldham thought he knew "a little bit about distributing information and a little bit about computers."

So, in 1969 he decided to start a weekly newspaper in his native Orem, Utah.

Oldham wrote all the software needed by his weekly, the Utah County Journal. This included accounting, circulation, classified and a typesetting system that hooked dumb terminals to a "supermicro" (a box that ran on the CP/M operating system and had 32 microprocessors) which was then connected to a Compugraphic typesetter.

At a regional meeting of weekly newspapers in the early '70s, the talk was of "computerizing." Oldham's brother, an attendee, told the group about the features of the Journal's systems. The others at the meeting were skeptical.

Before the next meeting, Oldham's brother said, "Look, these guys think I'm blowing smoke. We're taking some computers down there and showing them."

Offering demonstrations in a suite, Oldham said the other publishers "saw what we had and said, 'Wow.'"

The Oldham brothers took orders. Digital Technology International was born.

Today, DT has hundreds of customers around the world, including major systems at the Evening Standard in London and contracts with Cox Newspapers (Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Dayton Daily News in Ohio) and Donrey Newspapers (Las Vegas Review-Journal).

Missing from the DT product portfolio was a display ad makeup tool, but Oldham didn't want to build something on a standard, monospaced screen display. When he saw the Lisa -- Apple Computer's next-generation machine developed in the early '80s that employed something called a "graphical user interface" -- the company began to write an ad makeup product.

"We just got the software finished," said Oldham, "when they canceled the Lisa. They gave us a Macintosh and boy, were we mad! They'd had a real computer and then they gave us this toy."

Oldham decided to use the Mac as something of a "dumb" terminal itself. DT perfected the display ad product so that it ran on the server computer, with the graphical Mac screen only displaying what the server had computed.

The advent of the Macintosh II gave Oldham his "real" computer again, and AdSpeed, DT's popular ad makeup program, was born. The company then built an entire suite of Macintosh-based publishing products.

The next step was to move away from the "supermicro" to a real server environment. The company first tried Novell servers and an Oracle database, but soon moved to Sun servers and Sybase.

"We were doing client/server before it became hot," Oldham said. "We already had this distributed processing environment -- with 32 CPUs in the supermicro you had to write the software to distribute the work across all the CPUs."

Oldham said that all his early work made building client/server technology easy.

"It's supposed to be brilliant foresight and planning, but it was mostly serendipity," Oldham said.

Oldham acknowledges the positive effects of owning both a newspaper and a business that supplies newspapers.

"You've got programmers writing software on one floor and the people using it on another floor," Oldham said. "The guys doing the stripping and platemaking know where to go get the programmer."

Saying that it's the "peer-to-peer" relationships that improve the DT software, Oldham acknowledges the company had problems using the Utah County Journal as a testbed for DT software.

"Software would come hot off the compiler and they'd run upstairs with the new version. For a year and a half nobody at the newspaper had run a stable version of the software," he said.

Finally Oldham directed that the day after publication, a small group of editors who'd built the paper on the stable version of the system would rebuild the paper on the latest release.

"It was a nice comparison, because they could say, 'Last night it worked like this and today it works like that,'" Oldham said.

And the DT business, with 80 workers, is populated by former Journal employees as well.

"You might consider it career advancement," Oldham said.

'We'd like to buy one, too'
In the late '80s, the problem at the Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune was "a corporate concern that we were not doing any research and development for any of our publications, and that was an aberration as far as industries go," said Glenn Cruickshank.

At the time, Cruickshank was manager of information systems for the 24,000-circulation paper, a member of the Kerns-Tribune group. So Cruickshank and James Shelledy, the editor of sister paper Salt Lake Tribune, "cooked up this thing ourselves to free up some money for research and development," said Cruickshank.

They decided that full-text archiving was a problem both papers needed to solve -- Salt Lake wasn't happy with the function set of available systems and Lewiston was concerned about affordability. Cruickshank went to a regional newspaper meeting and asked some librarians there what they wanted from an electronic library system.

"They said, 'If you guys do this, we'd like to buy one, too,'" said Cruickshank. "So we went back, wrote the software, commercialized it, wrote the manual and sold it."

The result was NewsView, a newspaper electronic library system that ran on an IBM PC clone.

"Corporate said, 'Hey, this is neat,'" said Cruickshank.

The process of going from a few papers in the region to building a real business was difficult -- "it was a guerrilla operation and we had no clue what we were doing," he said.

But not long after, the paper was approached by Mead Data Central, the company that had the Lexis-Nexis databases. Mead had customers who desired in-house full-text archives and the company didn't want to develop a system on its own. It also had a sales force and a good brand name in Lexis-Nexis.

A deal was struck: Mead would market NewsView. (Mead was sold last year to Reed Elsevier and renamed Lexis-Nexis.)

Today, NewsView has been joined by PhotoView, a picture archiving solution based on the same code as NewsView, and NewsView Connections, a translation system to move text from editorial front-ends to libraries and on-line services.

Four full-time employees work on the product line in Lewiston, while three full-time and half-a-dozen part-timers contribute their talents at the Lexis-Nexis headquarters in Dayton, Ohio.

The systems have been sold to almost 100 customers around the world, ranging from the Washington Post and New York Daily News to, well, the Lewiston Morning Tribune.

"Normally a paper of 28,000 wouldn't have these types of resources," said Cruickshank, who is now director of research and development for the Tribune.

The paper not only has NewsView and PhotoView, but it also has Connections, providing it with an effortless way to move copy from its editorial front-end (DewarView) to the World-Wide Web "without adding any more people," Cruickshank said.

On the flip side, Cruickshank said, "I have a 40-person design team in the newsroom." The downside, though is that "the whole newsroom are alpha testers."

Everyone in the Tribune newsroom has "had influence at one time or another over every feature" of the products, Cruickshank said -- but when it comes to support, Tribune employees are just like everyone else.

"If the newsroom has a problem, sometimes we say, 'Look it up in the manual,'" Cruickshank said. "The Lewiston Tribune is just another customer."

Cruickshank relishes his newspaper connections for other reasons. "If we had to try to do it totally on our own, without the guise of a newspaper company, it's a lot less likely we would be here," he said.

Acknowledging the succor of his superiors, Cruickshank says the support of his publisher, A.L. Alford Jr., has been "key" and that the top executives of Kerns-Tribune have been supportive as well.

With products that touch the major components of new media -- archiving and data translation -- Cruickshank and the Morning Tribune are well positioned to benefit from the explosion in the Internet and the World-Wide Web.

"Our strategy is somewhat like Bill Gates," Cruickshank said, referring to the founder of Microsoft. "There's a gold rush going on, and I'm selling blue jeans and gold pans."

-- dmc

Digital Technology International,
(801) 226-2984,
e-mail: don_oldham@powertalk.dtint.com;
Info-Connect,
(717) 628-6016;
Lexis-Nexis,
(800) 227-9597, Ext. 1819.

From THE COLE PAPERS, March 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved.