There's a there there (left): The Oakland Tribune -- part of the Alameda Newspaper Group -- uses Pantheon Builder to get the stories out of the paper's pagination system and onto the Web.

A new frontier (right): The Community News Online product is based on the Macintosh scripting environment Frontier, with the stories to input in the left window and the control panel in the right window.

Tool time: getting stories out of the front-end and onto the Web

Now that newspapers have been dabbling in web sites for a couple of years, the grim reality of retaining staff sans profit is closing in.

While budgets are tighter, on-line producer expectations are getting more sophisticated. They're looking for tools that will speed the creative process and handle the routine tasks.

Even newspapers that have talented programmers or corporate media laboratories are sniffing around for tools to manage web production. With a few exceptions, many of the early candidates from newspaper suppliers may disappoint. Many are largely web publishing tools, without sophisticated system management tools firmly embedded.

Newspapers with experts in production systems, markup languages and servers probably have been home-growing their publishing tools. With a robust system and a talented programmer or two, your newspaper may convert typesetting format language to HTML, route the stories, drop them into the right directories or an indexer, and have everything that some web management products offer.

So who's shopping? Aside from small operations that lack coders with free time, buyers seems to have two motivations: Either the on-line department is a separate entity, which doesn't commingle resources with its newspaper, or the newspaper's technical staff has its hands full with current projects.

At current prices, the right ready-made programs can vaporize fatal labor costs.

The news publishing programs here have similar basic operations: a pipeline for channeling files from pre-press to web servers; some conversion or replacement of pre-press formatting with HTML codes in text files; automated posting of web stories to templates or indexes, and automatic replacement of old material.

The finesse features deal with such things as what happens to yesterday's material, how visitors can sort stories, how easy it is to reorganize material or link related components (say, stories and art, or stories and other web sites).

The tough nut in web work, as with pagination, is moving image files. Since pre-press requires images in Cymk channels, TIFF and JPEG formats, and pica or inch dimensions, the Web is foreign territory, needing RGB, GIF and pixels. No fabulous software yet pulls photos, logos and graphics from print production servers into webland and automatically links related stories and caption text, even from pagination systems.

By selecting the handful of companies detailed below, we are not suggesting these are today's definitive solutions, although they may be hot names now in the market. Also, many new developments will appear at the Interactive Newspapers '97 Conference, to be held Feb. 12-15 in Houston, Texas.

Community News OnLine
Aimed at smaller daily and weekly newspapers, but getting the eye from larger on-line players, Community News OnLine (http://www.olympus.net/leader/cno/) offers the bare basics of web site management tools at an entry-level price.

Created for the Port Townsend Jefferson County Leader in Washington state, this Macintosh-based system converts files from Microsoft Word format to HTML, guides the editor to organizing a web-page hierarchy, forwards fresh stories into place, rolls yesterday's news into other directories and creates title lists, called indexes, that appear on web templates.

The process takes about four steps and will manage about a hundred stories in a couple of hours, said CNO's programmer, Stephen Schumacher.

Each page has customized headings and footers, functional rather than fancy, as you can see on The Leader OnLine (http://www.olympia.net/leader/), produced by the parent of Community News Online.

No graphics handling, interlocking web categories or search engines here, just a straightforward menu of today's news and classified categories, plus a few previous editions.

Schumacher said that by automating the bread-and-butter part of the newspaper, CNO leaves editors time to lavish on showpiece sections and front pages. It gives weeklies and small dailies with no technical expertise a door into the Web.

Schumacher based the system on script sets from Frontier (http://www.scripting.com/frontier/). Joining the Leader and Sequin (Wash.) Gazette as live users is the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's On Wisconsin (http://www.onwis.com/).

Edgil Associates Inc.
While best known for its credit-card verification package and WebCentral on-line classified advertising system, North Chelmsford, Mass.-based Edgil (http://www.edgil.com/) applies its skills to editorial traffic management with NewsCentral, a PC-based communications server.

Running at five metro-sized newspapers worldwide, this routing system does in an open systems environment what wire intakes did on proprietary front-end systems. From wire feeds, fax receivers, bureaus and e-mail, News Central checks file headers and text and then sorts stories and sends messages based on customizable criteria.

The Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/) uses its NewsCentral to process feeds from Atex and other sources into web directories. In Aarhus, Denmark, the Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten (http://www.jp.dk/) pushes stories out of its Atex system into specific web directories after a pass through John Juliano Computer Services Co.'s Atan HTML2 converter (See sidebar).

NewsCentral's evaluation features can rework the ASCII flow and make changes in it that suit your newspaper. At the Chicago Tribune, NewsCentral alters the racing wire's tab coding, changes the order of lines and adds CText markup language.

KOZ Inc.
Some web site tools streamline the task of bringing the news to your audience; KOZ products help the audience create the news.

By presenting a fill-in-the-form entry into the web site's Informix Universal Server database, KOZ Community Publishing System (http://www.koz.com/) makes correspondents out of the leaders of civic organizations, sports leagues, clubs, churches, schools -- all those folks who are your readership. They type in events, newsletters and opinions, and you just post them.

There are private spots for password-equipped members only and public areas for general perusal, which means there is content and motivation to tune in frequently, without anything except supervision by your editors.

Without benefit of script, HTML or programming languages, anyone with a standard web browser can manage an electronic "clubhouse" and submit or retrieve public information. Newspaper editors can maintain their gatekeeper role through a pre-release review area or by shutting off access to a group's area.

More than a bulletin board, this system offers nifty computer tricks, such as a sortable events calendar, newsletter locations and hot links, say, to an association's national web site.

"We focus on the use of a database underneath the publishing system, so that, No. 1, we can manage the information assets, and two, so that we can use those assets in multiple ways," said Harry Bailes, president of KOZ, based in Greensboro, N.C.

So a July 4th event posting in the Rotary Club's members-only newsletter can be released to appear in the newspaper's events calendar or a roundup of holiday activities.

You could say it's a great way to turn the power of the press over to the readers, or you could call it an audience-building tool.

Cox Interactive Media has agreed to give KOZ Community Publishing Solution a whirl in more than a dozen Cox markets during the next six months. A pilot installation is under way at Atlanta's Journal and Constitution.

A second KOZ package, Media Publisher, facilitates the usual activity of presenting a newspaper's editorial content on the Web. It does wire parsing and story presentation, manages site assets and permits staff delivery of stories. For ad placement and management, KOZ will plug into third-party advertising servers, for example, NetGravity or RealMedia.

Lexis-Nexis
If you don't want the task of offering your published stories and images via the Internet, Lexis-Nexis can take the problem off your hands entirely.

Its remarketing service is now web-accessible, but the business-oriented archive might be a little dear for your average reader. Fortunately, the company (http://www.lexisnexis.com/) -- sellers of NewsView and PhotoView -- has two versions of Connections "middleware" that can webify your goods with the same archive tools, but different database, as you could use in-house.

Distinguishing the more sophisticated version from its competitors are the editor interface, variety of format conversions, byline tracking and reporting tools.

The first-born 16-bit Connections package accepts feeds from as many as eight production systems and converts stories to more than nine on-line formats, including the NewsView archive, Nexis, AOL, CompuServe, wire services and HTML. Then a NewsView package for the web server lets site visitors search daily offerings and back issues on-line.

Brawnier brother Connections32 is a 32-bit version that runs on Windows 95 or NT, which has those features plus a content management and publishing package called WebDesk.

Here's a product that escorts stories out of a number of pre-press systems, converts to HTML codes for the page selected for its appearance, associates the photo with the story file, and lets you drag-and-drop it to different pages, where the file then flows onto a page template.

For the newspaper grappling with author compensation issues, Connections32 has a byline rights management system that tracks and reports the creators of stories.

The system has been operating since Oct. 1 at mostNewYork, the on-line subsidiary of the New York Daily News (http://mostnewyork.com/).

"We're really happy with them," said Managing Editor Sandra Heddon. "We haven't had one problem in getting this site up every day."

Pantheon Inc.
An early developer of web creation tools for newspapers, Seattle-based Pantheon has the largest customer list and a long (in web life) history. Its suite of communication, conversion and presentation products offers one primary benefit: labor savings.

The automation is simple, reliable and easy to cost justify at web shops using a herd of HTML authors. Rory Kealohi, on-line assistant manager at the Alameda Newspaper Group in suburban San Francisco, said that one copy of Pantheon Builder 2.0 processes 15 to 20 stories in about 10 minutes -- a blur, compared to the human rate of five to 10 stories in four to six hours.

Check the results at http://www.cyberia-ang.com/ or http://205.229.108.9/.

Starting with a directory of editor-selected files from a front-end or pagination system, Pantheon's Transit clears unnecessary pre-press coding, converts useful codes and strings to HTML, checks on header designations, then sorts the files to directories in Builder, which often is running on a second PC.

It checks each story into the archive program, based on WebDBC by StormCloud of Seattle, and then creates an index from the directory, links the stories to web templates and, as scheduled, rolls in new stories and rolls old stories into archive directories.

Once a story is nudged out of an index, typically because it has aged out, the file is automatically purged.

Transit, the successor to Pantheon's Bridge program, handles multiple sources, including Smtp e-mail, FTP transfer and serial connection, resembling the basic features of Edgil's NewsCentral.

After the initial setup and template design, the day's new stories require almost no human contact, vouched several customers. Although Pantheon hasn't cracked the nut of exporting photos and graphics and linking to stories automatically, its programmers have devised ways to hook columnist mug shots and standing headings to templates. For now, photo and graphic links have to be done manually.

Typically, this processing takes two PCs running Windows 95 or Windows NT -- one for Transit, one for Builder -- between a production system and web server. (Sorry, no Mac versions.)

Pantheon is venturing into the territory KOZ scouted: gathering information from the audience to populate a web site. Pantheon's approach, called Community Link, capitalizes on Transit's ability to sort e-mail into categories plus Builder's page-creation features.

While there's no cost for the set-up, the number of groups or topics, which translate into categories, will add to the system's price.

Another development is an expected pact with System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento, Calif., a deal Pantheon hopes to duplicate with other traditional production system suppliers.

For SII customers, the two companies will offer SII Bridge for editorial or classified, the Tandem-only portion of SII's former WebLink/E and WebLink/C products. SII will customize a newspaper's translation, forwarding and output processes to feed Pantheon processes.

In turn, SII will promote Pantheon instead of SII's own approach to web site construction.

-- Marion J. Love

Community News OnLine,
(360) 385-2900,
e-mail: solmaker@olympus.net;
Edgil
Associates Inc.,
(508) 251-9932,
e-mail: marketing@edgil.ccmail.compuserve.com;
KOZ Inc.,
(910) 632-1144,
e-mail: info@koz.com;
Lexis-Nexis,
(800) 227-9597, Ext. 1819,
e-mail: info@lexisnexis.com;
Pantheon Inc.,
(800) 668-1647,
e-mail: info@pantheoninc.com.

See also Tools for specific brands

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