Of course, if you're doing much WYSIWYG editing in real production time, you have a serious problem upstream in the copyflow, so you can bend over and kiss that particular deadline good-bye.

In the real world, CCI supplies with LayoutChamp a no-frills text editor which also can be used for those pesky last-minute libel deletions, but most editing, the Republic editors say, is done right where it should be -- on SII, which was designed for such things.

Not yet perfection
It would be a mistake to conclude that Phoenix's CCI experiences have been a bed of de-thorned roses.

When we visited in late March, the Arizona Republic had just launched daily, zoned pages which were, of course, paginated. The PlanEdit process was busily drawing ad stacks for the new pages, and that was dragging down the rest of the system at the perfect time of day -- late afternoon, when the newsroom is just starting to get hectic.

"It's the locking and unlocking of records," sighed David Seibert, the paper's technology development manager for editorial. "It's a problem with Sybase. We're going to have Oracle 7 on the next upgrade, and we expect improvement then."

We saw a hit list of other CCI problems visited upon the Arizona Republic. Among them:

Outside of that nasty disappearing-element trick, it doesn't look to be a bad list -- annoyances, but not atrocities.

Face it: Pagination -- whether from the viewpoint of the user or system administrator -- is not a walk in the park. For these giant machines to properly keep track of all the variables that go into a daily newspaper, they have to be complex.

That complexity asserts itself all over the system, in the database administration, in workstations, networking, formatting -- and in the user interface.

The pagination learning curve -- no matter who supplies the system -- is steep and treacherous, and Phoenix doesn't skimp on training.

Bob Ogle's in charge of that department, and new trainees get two solid weeks -- 80 hours -- of CCI training before they ever touch a live page.

"Training is of huge importance," said Finberg. "It's a business proposition -- if you don't have well-trained people, you're not getting the most out of the system.

"It was a mistake not to have a trainer in the development process" for the installation of the first CCI system, Finberg said. "Fortunately, we learn from our mistakes," and Ogle is now part of the team planning for the next phase of the installation.

Once users crest that steep learning curve, they'll find that any pagination system imposes restrictions on how they can work.

Because of the complexity of the process, the path to pagination is a very narrow one -- you don't have a lot of room for side excursions.

"It's one of the biggest challenges we have with this system, because this system gives you three or four ways of doing things," Ogle said.

"For example, there are four ways to zoom in on a page," Ogle said, "but two of them are stupid. They'll see these things in the palette (on screen), and they'll ask what they do. We defuse it right at the beginning by showing them, 'It'll do this, this and this, but you do it this way.'"

The Quark question
If those strictures chafe the Quark XPress users who convert to CCI, they must be getting over it -- Seibert said most Quark XPress use is on the wane at Phoenix.

XPress is, after all, free-range chicken -- you can do whatever you want, though it's questionable whether you're taking fewer steps to do it than in a pagination system (see sidebar next page).

"You can do almost anything in CCI that you can do in Quark," Seibert said. "We discourage people from going back to Quark -- as a rule, once you leave Quark you don't ever go back."

That's just the way Finberg wants it, too.

"Quark has been the worst thing that's ever hit the newspaper industry," he said. "It gives you a false sense of security; i.e., 'I've got Quark and I'm ready to publish.'

"Quark is not a collaborative workgroup product. It doesn't allow for sharing. It doesn't allow for many people working on the same design at the same time. To me it's a [single-user] product and that's the assembly-line process that we are trying to get away from."

Coming soon
Two more CCI acts are yet to appear on stage in Phoenix, but the planning is already under way:

"It just sets up some rules -- this is a headline, convert it to HTML (HyperText Markup Language) format, a byline converts to this text, captions go over here," Finberg said.

"Then you can design some standard templates, have text and photos automatically flow onto the template page, and publish onto the Web without the hand coding we're now doing."

The idea, Finberg said, is to automate enough of it that the care and feeding of the web site can move onto the copy desk.

"Right now, we don't put the whole paper on the web site -- our purpose is to build a compelling site that uses the paper but goes beyond it," he said.

But with the MediaServer, you can do it both ways.

"A copy editor might be doing a print package, but another might be building a web package using the print package as a basis, and they're using the same tools to do it," Finberg said. "This way we don't let the tool dictate who does what job, we let the skills dictate that."

Right now it's in specification stages; expect installation this summer.

Editors will be on the CCI system, probably using Microsoft Word for editing (though, if the interface works right, they could use SII's Coyote/3 software on their PCs.)

Reporters will continue to write on SII.

The new software will enable "story branching," in which different zoned editions could use one story, each in different trims, with different lengths and headlines.

As each version is needed on the page, CCI would apply that version's editing to the single story. It's a novel idea to keep one copy of a story for archiving and HTML use, while still allowing maximum flexibility for editors and still keeping the database usage low.

This one bears watching.

Of more pressing concern, however, is the completion of the conversion to CCI that since 1995 has been quietly going on amid all the planning for the next generation.

At mid-April, Finberg said the Republic was 92 percent paginated, churning out about 1100 pages a week. May should see the paper starting the conversion of sports, its last department, and Finberg expects that to be completed around Memorial Day.

And then, at last, Karen Outland can turn off the remaining Triple I terminal, and step out of The Cave into the light.

-- John Bryan

CCI Europe Inc.,
(770) 419-1588,
e-mail: edeasley@mindspring.com;
System Integrators Inc.,
(916) 929-9481,
e-mail: sii@sii.com

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