The Cole Papers, AmericaWest, January 1997

The scoop from Europe: The multiple panes of the Macintosh version of Scoop show directories and stories

From Europe: editorial front-end and an archiving system

(Last month's newsletter contained our review of the America West conference; unfortunately, we did not have space to include a look at the equipment exhibition. Herewith, a couple of observations about the trade show.)

RENO, Nev. -- Held a mere four months after NEXPO, the equipment exhibition at America West did not hold much new for the grizzled trade show veteran.

America West was sponsored by the press associations of 16 western states and provinces, under the leadership of the California Newspaper Publishers Association and had more than 400 attendees in its first go-around, held here Oct. 23-25.

But a casual glance at the attendee list and some chitchat in the aisles indicated that many people attending America West were not those who traditionally went to NEXPO.

For them, much of what was shown was new. We had to look a little deeper, and in so doing found two items of interest:

MediaVu -- As System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento emphasized its new-found relationship with Cybergraphic Systems Pty Ltd. at NEXPO, many didn't get a chance to see another recent addition to its product line: an archive system for text and images.

Developed by an SII customer -- Helsingin Sanomat, the 476,000-circulation morning daily in Helsinki, Finland -- MediaVu is based on the BRS Search database and search engine.

It runs on a Sun SPARCstation or Tandem's Fault-Tolerant UNIX, though SII says it would be a piece of cake to port it to other platforms.

Available clients are Windows 3.11 (95 and NT versions are in development), Macintosh and intranet, which would allow you to use browsers such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The software has been "localized" for English and has been developed with customization in mind -- there are 45 predefined indexing fields but "they're real easy to add or subtract," said Marc Saltzberg, the product manager. MediaVu uses an index card metaphor for input and retrieval.

When used as a picture archive, the system saves not only the original copy of an image, but also the cropping coordinates, so that a second copy is not necessary.

SII said Sanomat has more than 100,000 images stored, "and must be pushing 1 million stories." The system has not been installed anywhere else.

Scoop -- Those intimate with SII's product line might think this is about the company's OPI server. Wrong.

Scoop is the editorial front-end system from Sweden that has been installed in more than 70 European newspapers, the largest having 305 workstations. Developed for the Macintosh, it now runs on Mac, PCs or a mixture.

The North American marketing rights for Scoop have been acquired by David Lightfoot, a former executive with DuPont Newspaper Systems, who plans to license a number of regional newspaper integrators to resell the product.

The first reseller is Sparrow Information Inc. of Hampton Falls, N.H. Sparrow, which has supported and is now actively selling the old Intertext classified system, demonstrated Scoop at America West.

Scoop has its own text editor and database (though larger systems run standard SQL databases such as Oracle7 or Microsoft SQL Server). It interfaces to Quark XPress for page makeup and can use QuickWire Lab's QuickWire for wire collection.

The text editor appears to be quite good -- actually much better than the industry-standard Microsoft Word. It has multiple levels of undo and allows for systemwide, departmentwide and personalized dictionaries.

It appears that Scoop is entirely configurable -- which is both a blessing and a curse: blessing because a sophisticated newspaper can exploit all its features, curse because a technologically impaired paper would have nothing but complaints.

Lightfoot's marketing scheme and Scoop's inherent qualities make it a product to watch.

David R. Lightfoot LLC, (410) 280-2264, e-mail: drlight@annap.infi.net; Sparrow Information Inc., (603) 926-3366; System Integrators Inc., (916) 929-9481, e-mail: sii@sii.com.

-- dmc

From Europe: editorial front-end and an archiving system

From THE COLE PAPERS, January 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.