Pagination path pocked with persnickety providers

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. -- Attendance alone marked the Newspaper Association of America's first Operations SuperConference as a success.

With a new format that brought together the three previously separate spring meetings of the NAA's technology special-interest groups, the SuperConference drew more newspaper executives than had the independent meetings held in previous years.

The prospect of a week of newspaper technology discussions -- covering pre-press to press to post-press -- attracted more than 400 newspaper executives here March 3-8. Combined attendance at the separately scheduled meetings in years past never topped 300.

The program featured more than 80 speakers and included such topics as "Count Accuracy of Newspaper Stackers," "New Postal Environment," "A Fresh Look at Newsprint Conservation" and "New Press Installations Point the Way."

The day-and-a-half pre-press segment on Monday and Tuesday spanned a range of topics, too. As in years past, a portion of the first morning was devoted to "Hot New Technologies." The problem in a couple of cases was that the technologies were a little too new, or a little too proprietary -- or Not Ready For Prime Time.

Apparently Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash., had told the NAA it would have an announcement to make to the newspaper industry during the session, so organizers blocked out time for the company. When Microsoft changed its mind, NAA allowed it to retain its place on the schedule.

The resulting presentation baffled virtually everyone in attendance.

Another scheduled presenter was unable to give his talk because the computer on which his slides resided was stolen from his car, but most of the other pre-press sessions went smoothly.

Pagination's path
Although the session was titled "The Uncertain Path to Pagination," a trio of newspaper executives and a veteran industry supplier sought to make the audience of about 200 feel confident about the issue.

As a longtime newsman at papers big and small, Mark Francis has a self-deprecating sense of humor.

The last metro editor of the Buffalo Courier-Express, fabled for being the only major morning daily to fold in the '80s, Francis now is publisher and president of the Niagara Gazette, a 26,000-circulation morning paper in Niagara Falls, N.Y.

Technology is not his specialty -- "I am, after all, just a publisher" -- but when it came time to replace the Gannett paper's ancient Hastech pagination system, Francis headed the committee.

He learned quite a bit.

Newspapers "generally do a lousy job of making decisions on picking or implementing pagination," Francis said. Papers go through the process "backwards," he said, after being motivated to act at all by many wrong factors, such as dying terminals, comatose mainframes or lack of supplier support.

Papers then select their pagination systems for still more wrong reasons, Francis contended, choosing the one that will be the fastest, or the cheapest, "or the one that will allow us to lay off the most union printers."

A newspaper, Francis argued, should start the process with its ultimate goal firmly in mind:

"One hundred percent direct-to-press. No paste-up, no full-page output, no negative output, no plates. Just direct-to-press, with all the plates showing up in their proper position on the press."

With an elderly letterpress "that's just a little bit older than I am," Francis admitted his goal remains far away. For now, using a pagination system from Digital Technology International of Orem, Utah, the Gazette is creating full-page negative film for 100 percent of its pages.

"And while it's true there may not be direct-to-plate for newspapers today, it's coming," Francis said. "It's not a question of whether, but when."

Francis said the paper would not have achieved so much if it had not set the ultimate goal, a goal which Francis exhorted every person within earshot to take back to his or her publisher:

"Direct-to-press."

Chuck "pagination," another panelist argued.

Howard Finberg, senior editor for information technology at the Phoenix Newspapers Inc. (publishers of the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette), said he believes pagination is "an old method and that the term should be banned from conferences here on out."

Phoenix Newspapers has been fully paginated since 1988 on a system from Information International Inc. The Triple-I boxes now are giving way to a new system being installed by CCI Europe of Marietta, Ga.

"Going from hot type to cold type wasn't really revolutionary," Finberg said, "it was evolutionary" because the new technology was merely overlaid onto the old workflow.

"The real revolutionary aspect of pagination will be digital input and digital output," the longtime newsman said.

Unlike the Niagara Gazette's goal of direct-to-press, Phoenix's goal was "multiple products using the same information." Finberg said, "It's not just a newspaper anymore," not with zoning, more special publications and "spin-offs from print -- on-line."

Finberg believes newspapers need a publication database that changes the workflow of the newspaper.

"In the same way Ford Motor Co. wants to end the assembly line in the quality production of cars, we wanted to end the assembly line of, you touch a piece of copy, a piece of copy is touched by somebody else and then it gets sent to somebody else.

"Nobody has ownership of the copy except when you have it in front of you," he said. "Hence, nobody is looking at the entire publication."

Finberg said the paper plans to reorganize itself into teams and use the power of the CCI database to make that happen.

A presentation by Mike Schoepke, manager of computer operations at the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, Ill., addressed the issues faced by the 125,000-circulation morning daily three years ago, when it was one of the first papers to adopt the DewarView pagination system as implemented by Digital Equipment Corp. (see The Cole Papers, January 1994).

Linda Bruning, who has worked for mainline suppliers such as Hastech, Crosfield and DuPont, spoke about a pagination integration project recently undertaken by her current employer -- Electronic Data Systems of New York. (A confidentiality agreement prevented Bruning from naming the paper.)

Bruning believes a pagination project will work only if it has complete support from a paper's entire management. At the EDS site, she said, the publisher was "enlightened and supportive," and although the editor "wasn't too much with computers -- technologically challenged" -- he understood how he wanted his newsroom organized under pagination.

The key players were, Bruning said, "the managing editor and systems editor, who were very technical. I think their success was because of that."

A paper must have "an evangelist," Bruning said. "Somebody in the newsroom has to really believe, has to want it to work, to bring people through those peaks and valleys."

Every pagination site that's been successful has had a person like this, she said.

Oblique outlook
If the path to pagination was -- or is -- uncertain, the path to profitability for suppliers is even more so.

A panel of four industry supplier executives danced around issues like survivability, business models and customer support in a session moderated by Eric Wolferman, the senior vice president for technology of the Newspaper Association of America.

Alden Edwards, president of Autologic Information International Inc. of Thousand Oaks, Calif. (see Page 11), sees one problem in the long-term survival of supplier companies: "The buyer is spending less money with us as suppliers."

Suppliers "are controlled by when you want to spend money," Edwards said, "not when we need money."

Dennis Nierman, who is a top executive with International Publishing Associates Holding Ltd. (IPA), which controls a number of pre-press companies including Monotype Systems Inc. of Rolling Meadows, Ill., and Freedom System Integrators of Wichita, Kan., said, "In the '90s, everybody talks about pagination and some people are doing it."

He noted that "everybody looks at the prices" of the application software but "no one looks at the integration" costs.

Some publishers didn't spy where they'd end up after making a purchase, said Johs Jamne, the chief executive of the Sysdeco Media Group of Bedford, Mass., which includes Atex Publishing Systems Corp. and Dewar Information Systems Corp.

Many companies "didn't manage to jump from proprietary systems to open systems," he said.

Further, Jamne suggested that many newspapers forced their suppliers to take unprofitable orders. "You forced them to do it," said Jamne. "But it's not your fault, it's their fault."

In the end, he believes, "only a handful of suppliers will survive."

Agreeing was Bob Trenkamp, president and chief executive of Prepress Solutions of East Hanover, N.J.

"The carnage isn't over yet and it isn't going to be over for some time," Trenkamp said. "If you're going to buy integration services from your traditional pre-press systems vendor just to keep that vendor afloat, you've got a sick situation that you shouldn't be pursuing."

Edwards attempted to explain pricing models in the '70s and '80s.

"We had these brown things called Coyote terminals," Edwards said, referring to his time at System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento, where he last served as president. "They had about $6000 worth of profit margin in them."

Rather than having a line-item in a contract for "integration services," SII and its competitors "hid their costs in the hardware," Edwards said. "Now, there's a line-item in most contracts that says, 'integration.'"

Defining "integration" kept the panel occupied for a while. Moderator Wolferman charged that many of the suppliers "forgot to hire the experts needed to install this equipment."

Edwards said it was, again, "a margin issue."

"How does the traditional supplier go out and hire the expertise you were looking for when at the same time [the supplier] had to continue to sell and maintain the existing customer base?"

Jamne said system integration was "the '80s. We're not talking about system integration any longer, we're talking about skill-set integration now."

Nierman defined the first step in integration as "getting together with your people and developing a statement of work." He said that "the only way that it will work is if we both put it down in writing."

Trenkamp asked his cohorts if anyone was making money on customer support, admitting that "we're just breaking even on service."

"It's marginal," said Edwards.

"We earn money on support," said Sysdeco's Jamne. "If we don't earn money on support, we should drop it."

-- dmc

Autologic Information International Inc.,
(805) 498-9611;
CCI Europe Inc.,
(770) 419-1588,
e-mail: edeasley@mindspring.com;
Digital Technology International,
(801) 226-2984,
e-mail: joann_froelich@powertalk.dtint.com;
Electronic Data Systems Inc. (EDS),
(212) 403-6029,
e-mail: info@eds.com;
Freedom System Integrators,
(316) 722-8100,
e-mail: info@ipa-fsi.com;
Monotype Systems Inc.,
(847) 427-8800,
e-mail: keith@monoexpress.com;
PrePRESS Solutions,
(201) 887-8000,
e-mail: info@prepress.pps.com;
Sysdeco Media Group,
(617) 275-2323.

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