In-house intranet: At the Alameda Newspaper Group of California, advertising sales representatives can find out information, status and run dates of display ads on Visitron, the name of the company's intranet system.

Digital dilemma: pagination, on-line still go hand-in-hand

MELBOURNE, Fla. -- Pre-press first, then on-line.

The one-two punch that is the newspaper business today -- worrying first about pre-press issues, then sweating out on-line quandaries -- was evident Jan. 23-24 at the fifth conference sponsored by Harris Publishing Systems Corp., which is based here.

Each year, Harris (which is quite good about keeping its sales pitches to a minimum) brings together 50 newspaper executives from around the world to discuss pagination topics. In recent years the company has split the focus to include on-line issues as well, giving newspaper executives in attendance an updated perspective on how pre-press and on-line dovetail with one another.

(As in years past, Harris has requested and received the services of the editor and publisher of this journal as moderator and speaker; the supplier pays for travel but I take no other compensation.)

The pagination gurus held forth the first day; the second day was devoted to the Internet experts.

Installation insights
The old joke in the industry used to be that a supplier could not list the Los Angeles Times as a customer, because the Times "bought one of everything."

Times -- and the Times -- have changed.

Wayne Parrack, the paper's director of its Technology Resources Group, spoke to the meeting about the process the Times used to identify a supplier of software for a pilot pagination project.

Last year, the 1 million-circulation morning paper began working with suppliers, "particularly Harris and Digital Technology International," Parrack said. DT had provided the paper with technology to paginate the Times edition produced in Washington, D.C.

"We worked with potential vendors to create the time and resources for our selection," said Parrack. "What we required was two weeks of on-site training so we could build L.A. Times pages."

Parrack said the paper's search committee -- representing constituencies ranging from senior management to copy editors and page designers -- was carved into three groups: architecture, implementation, workflow.

Implementation group members spent two weeks each at DT's headquarters in Orem, Utah, as well as Harris' offices here last May and June. The workflow and architecture groups also spent a few days at each supplier.

Following these visits, members of the committee filled out a 22-page checklist that posed 430 questions, addressing such issues as the relational database used in the products to a comparison of the number of keystrokes it currently takes an editor to achieve a task versus the number it would take on the new system.

(The checklist actually has only 429 items; Parrack said question No. 430 was, "Are we nuts or what?")

The committee chose Harris' solution, and a contract for a pilot project -- encompassing the daily business section as well as special sections -- was signed in June. The system was operational in August; training began in September.

"We're doing about 50 pages a week on special sections and from two to four pages a day in the business section," said Parrack. The goal is to handle all of the business section as well as all special sections through Harris.

What's the future for pagination at the Times?

"A lot of that is going to depend both on money issues as well as buy-in from our senior editorial managers," Parrack said.

At a more typical paper -- Florida Today, the 85,000-circulation morning daily that serves the Melbourne community -- implementation of a new pagination system was "clearly the most demanding and stressful project I've ever worked on," said Tom Kehoe, the paper's director of technology and training.

There was, of course, an added problem: Today was moving to a complex zoning operation that required a different color centerpiece for Page One and the local front for each of three editions. The paper's old Hastech pagination system couldn't handle all these zones, so, as Kehoe said, the two projects "became joined at the hip."

Today also chose a Harris solution. Although it didn't integrate with the paper's existing Atex front-end as closely as executives would have liked, Kehoe said, it did provide a "completely digital environment," with all subsystems feeding into a centralized database.

Kehoe said the staff created a "kind of Information Age mantra: integrate, consolidate, paginate; integrate, consolidate, paginate."

"Stare at a blank spot on the wall and repeat it over and over until the pain starts to fade," Kehoe said. "Trust me, there's going to be pain."

Today developed an ambitious schedule, calling for system installation to begin in August 1995 and zoning to start on July 4, 1996. Unfortunately, the contract was not signed until February 1996 and installation didn't begin until March.

But it's a newspaper, so the date to start zoning remained July 4.

Using tactics he called "a kind of guerrilla warfare concept of pagination," Kehoe said the paper decided to focus on paginating the first and local sections so that the zoning deadline could be met.

"We had to start training the copy editors, even though we weren't yet finished writing all the formats," Kehoe said. "Every morning I'd hand the instructor copies of the latest formats, and every evening he'd hand me a list of bugs they discovered during the day's work."

Had Today not stressed planning early on in the process, Kehoe said, it would not have achieved its goal of going live on July 4, 1996. "The more compressed our time line became, the more we planned," he said, "in part because it was the only thing we could do."

Installation speed also was of the essence at Phoenix Newspapers Inc. (PNI), but for a different reason. The company's then two papers -- the now-dead afternoon Phoenix Gazette and the surviving morning Arizona Republic -- were moving to a new building, and their old pagination system couldn't make the journey across the street with them.

"If you don't break the eggs, you don't make the omelette," Howard Finberg, the company's information technology director, told the Harris session.

To replace its decades-old Information International Inc. pagination system, PNI "opened up" the selection process. Supplier demonstrations were open to all members of the staff and the company "rewarded involvement."

PNI "developed a specifics list rather than an RFP [request for proposal]," Finberg said, during and after the various supplier demonstrations; the list had "only" 148 items on it.

By keeping "the process very open," Finberg said, "all the vendors knew the same rules."

PNI concentrated its system search on two solutions: the P.Ink product then offered by Scitex America Corp. of Bedford, Mass. (P.Ink went bankrupt and Scitex no longer sells the software), and CCI Europe's package.

The PNI staff chose Denmark-based CCI, whose U.S. offices are in Marietta, Ga. Finberg, whose vision for the newsroom of the future is team-oriented, said that part of the CCI choice was related to its "publication database," which integrates content and production.

The PNI team asked itself, "Do we really want to go to pagination," Finberg told the crowd. "Pagination is an old method -- we wanted a strategy for the future."

After the system choice and initial installation, PNI began concentrating on training.

"Avoid some of the normal newspaper methods," Finberg said. "It's all a matter of money -- but you have a choice: You can pay now or pay later."

Intranet interlude
Long-time presenter Grady Cooper always shows up with new and exciting concepts -- as he did this year.

Cooper is director of systems management for the Alameda Newspaper Group, whose suburban San Francisco papers include the Alameda Times-Star, The Argus of Fremont, Hayward Daily Review, Oakland Tribune, Tri-Valley Herald of Pleasanton and The Times of San Mateo.

In years past, Cooper has talked about pagination, adapting Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) as a method for archiving stories, and using PDF and a pagination system to create pages for an on-line environment (see The Cole Papers, February 1994, June 1995, February 1996).

This year, Cooper told the group, he has become an intranet advocate. "What we're doing is only the tip of the iceberg," Cooper said in reference to Alameda's intranet.

Using the same technologies and protocols as the Internet, an intranet provides a company with a way to automatically and easily publish information beneficial to its workers.

"We have produced twin web sites that are separate from our newspapers' web sites," Cooper said. "They are designed strictly for our employees -- editorial, circulation, advertising and general management."

Cooper described how the ANG intranet works:

"Instead of putting an expensive terminal out there to see a page, we give them a web browser, making ads available so they can be called up by sales reps at any of our plants and printed out locally -- or at home or at the office of the advertiser.

"Down the road, the advertiser will be able to dial in and view the ad from his office," Cooper said.

In addition to advertising and editorial information, the ANG intranet also supplies human resources information ("You don't have to keep stacks of forms lying around") and marketing information ("Media kits are on our site").

Cooper also showed a prototype screen for an intranet-based classified front-end system.

"There's a class of people off the Internet wanting to enter an ad," said Cooper, "but also, why should the ad-taker be sitting in our offices? Why can't they sit at home?"

Cooper acknowledged that the computers now in front of most of ANG's workers don't support web browsers, but said that as machines die, they will be upgraded.

Internet investigations
Editor & Publisher magazine has taken a lead in the world of on-line publishing, hosting a popular web site (http://www.mediainfo.com/) with extensive content, and sponsoring surveys and conferences (see On-line will change industry, but we don't know how yet).

Marsha Stoltman, vice president for marketing relations of Editor & Publisher Co., spoke to the Harris crowd, rattling off a bunch of statistics culled from her company's extensive surveys of on-line publishing: