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DIBS on low-cost images: The Associated Press is co-marketing a library of retail images, from commercial products to food, for use over and over again. From ads to funnies, papers find file-grabbing getting easyNEW ORLEANS -- How do you want to get your hands on your standing news features? You can pull 'em, or your supplier can push 'em. They can slice, dice, puree or fluff-dry 'em, folded or on hangers with heavy starch. Hell, if you want to get antiquarian about it, they can even mail 'em to you. The delivery of features is moving away from the "slicks" and brown manila envelopes and into the electronic age -- slowly. "Ninety percent of our newspaper features are still delivered by the postal service," said Stephen Tippie, marketing director for Tribune Media Services of Chicago. The other 10 percent heretofore had been snatched off a bulletin board TMS runs, which Tippie admits is "cumbersome both for us to manage and for customers to use." But all that is better now -- starting in July, TMS moved its newspaper content to its web page, in a corner called FeatureServ. You need only point your web browser to http://www.tms.tribune.com/, sign in and download any of the features you've bought, in Quark XPress or TIFF formats for graphics, or Microsoft Word for text. Coming up is a "company store" where Tippie said you'll be able to buy single cartoons -- to illustrate a story in your company newsletter, for example. But back to the weekly downloading of features: What's in it for you? Convenience, for one thing -- your zit-faced teen-age copy clerk can download a week's features when he saunters in after school, and you don't have to worry about losing stuff in the mail. Or, more likely, the mailroom. And the advantage over the bulletin board system? As Tippie said, it's less cumbersome, which means the Z.F.T.A.C.C. can pull a few horoscopes down off the Web as easily as, say, an equal quantity of pornography. Not only that, it's a local phone call. For its part, TMS gets out of the postage and handling biz, which honchos say is a lot of hassle. And they don't have to maintain a separate bulletin board, which enables them to cut their costs, and pass the savings on to you! It's true: TMS will give you a discount off its handling and mailing fees if you do it on the Web. How much of a discount? TMS folks won't say. "We can't give out our service charges," said Tippie. "That's competitive information." Wait a minute: TMS is at NEXPO, trumpeting the amount of money its customers can save using FeatureServ on its web site, and it won't even say how much? We begged. We pleaded. Tippie wouldn't budge. Oh, he was glad to talk about the savings to participating clients, which he said "will be more than just the postage." But (arrgh!) how much? No dice. "It depends on what you're buying," offered Tippie. How about a percentage? "I can't tell you a percentage." Sigh. We switched gears: How about pushing instead of pulling -- just sending the files right to the papers? "Push is a way we'd all like to do it ... you'd either have to use a PointCast-type system -- and who knows, by next year it may be there -- or you have to use e-mail," said Tippie. "It's still very difficult to push an image file across all those e-mail user interfaces. It's hard to get an image file into some of these e-mail systems." Quoth the folks at the Dilbert Zone: Oh, yeah?
Promises, yes; numbers, no
"We have a software package called Turbo Mail -- if the editor wants it, they give us an e-mail address and we shoot it out there to them," said Grimes. That's any of the 150 products United Media sells, she said, adding that "a number of papers get editorial page cartoons by e-mail because they can get it right after it's drawn." And (drum roll) how much does it cost? "Our marketing people really don't release rates because it's such a competitive market," Grimes said. Sigh. OK, how many customers does United Features have? "Thousands," said Grimes, not very helpfully. And how many of them get electronic delivery? "We have about 400 customers on the bulletin board system," said Grimes, "and probably a couple hundred on Turbo Mail because it's so new." At last, numbers! And, after quizzing a nonmarketing source deep within United Media, Grimes also was able to estimate that the cost is about 60 percent of what mail or parcel delivery would be. Whatever that is. In an effort to monetize this mystery, we assembled the Cole Papers Board of Economists and posed the following question: A train carrying a package of Dilbert panels leaves Gdansk at 7 p.m. going 45 miles per hour and another train carrying Andy Rooney columns leaves Warsaw at 8:30 p.m., going 58 miles per hour. When they meet, how much will the customer save by going electronic and skipping the whole thing? The answer: 41.379 zlotys a week, give or take. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Reed Brennan Media Associates also is in the comics-sending game. But mostly their people assemble comics panels to order as Quark XPress pages and send them to you "any way you want," according to Robert Reed, the firm's president. At NEXPO, the Winter Park, Fla.-based company was trumpeting its ability to send out daily comic strips and panels either in black and white or as colorized strips, for use in web sites (assuming you're not at one of the fortunate few papers with daily color comics pages.) The cost? About $1.50 per week for a strip that's already been colorized, said Reed without a touch of reticence. That's just for his schtick; the syndicate rights to run the strip are extra.
Images instantly available
Dibs (Digital Image Bank Service), co-marketed by the AP, is somewhere between a web site and a bulletin board system: You access the web site via the Internet through the firm's proprietary QueuePic software to search for, select and download the pictures. What pictures they are, too: Stunning visual depictions of a green pepper for grocery ads, books, kiosks -- any spot you need an incredible green pepper picture. Don't laugh: Consider how many pictures of consumer products -- things we plow through in our lives -- appear in publications, on signs, on TV, on web pages. Where do those pictures come from? Dibs hopes they'll soon be coming from its database of over 50,000 images of groceries, cars, appliances, housewares and office products. The firm hires free-lancers to shoot all the pictures with an electronic Megavision camera. That way, the bosses can control every aspect of production, including such esoteric stuff as image conversion, manipulation and compression. After you're registered and have the software, you can search the company's Oracle database for the image of choice -- say, a tube of acne cream -- and move images you like into a proof portfolio. You can download the proofs, which are watermarked, and use them in Quark XPress or Multi-Ad Creator to make a spec ad. On approval, you can get the high-resolution image for the final output. Cost? For $35, you can buy an image and use it as much as you want, according to Sholes. Why not some limitation on usage? "The images are self-limiting," said Sholes. "The companies change packaging after a few months anyway." This may be true of manufactured items, but since the packaging of a green pepper hasn't changed appreciably for centuries, a customer could conceivably salt away a truly awesome fruit-and-vegetable database. Hey, everyone needs a hobby. Can Dibs get filthy rich in the stock-photo field? At $35 a pop, perhaps. The ticket is the ability to download a good-resolution proof for layout, followed by the electronic transfer of the high-resolution photo itself. The last time we delved into this subject, stock houses were keeping proof images on-line but sending you slides when it came time for the high-res file. We thought at the time (just a few years ago) that was pretty silly. They, on the other hand, didn't want to be throwing high-res pictures into other people's computers where they had no control (meaning no royalties) over their use. By shooting its own pictures, having a one-time payment policy and especially by limiting its wares, Dibs kind of circumvents that problem. Face it: Outside of Andy Warhol fanatics, how many people are going to pirate a picture of a can of Campbell's soup?
Supplementals come of age
In fact, it's been doing that for a while, but only recently has technology -- improvements in transmission speed especially -- made it possible to realize this service's potential. The Web has made this subscription service easier to access, but you'll still want to hook up to at least an ISDN line to ensure the best possible transmission speed. A 28.8 kbps modem doesn't cut it 10 minutes before deadline. The Web, though, lets PressLink be PressLink: While the massive Associated Press pushes all manner of photos into your computer system, PressLink provides a supplement by providing thumbnails and low-res images over the Web from a huge variety of sources, including Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP), plus Bettmann Archive, Allsport and several other photo sources. You're free to browse until you find The Perfect Photo. Download the high-res file and throw it on the page. You'll be billed later. Want something from the archives? PressLink Online has a built-in search engine that finds what you want. Working in the same general way are two other providers. Both NewsCom Inc. of Coral Gables, Fla., and Wieck Photo Database Inc. of Dallas provide a web interface to a variety of picture services as well as allowing newspapers or newspaper groups to build their own picture syndicates on the supplier's web servers. This is the best way to use pull technology: You're deciding on a mix of information that varies from day to day -- you're the one who needs to browse, select and pull down pictures. By contrast, the features operations we noted above carry the same crosswords, TV listings and columns day in, day out. Why not have the company blast it into an electronic mailbox and not worry about it? Speaking of blasting TV listings, TVData, long a BBS veteran, has bitten the web bullet for delivery of its goods. Using a standard browser, you can set up an FTP (file transfer protocol) session with the TVData database and get your stuff over the Web at the speed of ... well, a computer file. It's probably a little faster, and it saves you a long-distance phone call to TVData's home in Queensbury, N.Y. Plus, again, Zit-Boy the Clerk already knows how to use it and can keep the site bookmarked. Unlike Tribune Media Services, there are no discounts for web delivery, although the figure is slightly lower than United Parcel Service delivery. Also, unlike Those Other Services, folks at TVData will tell you what they're charging -- $8 to $12 a week. Of TVData's subscribers, about 500 are still on the bulletin board system while 300 to 400 are moving to a web download. "We're switching them over there as fast as we can," one TVData executive told us. For whole TV books, the company uses push technology with its TransEdit product that arrives in your computer system overnight. TransEdit AppleScripting means your book is rough-dummied in Quark XPress, on the fly. Cut in the overset, proof it and ship it. The company also has discovered another profit center by offering its feature package via NewsCom. "This is the first time we've had a public electronic form to sell our editorial features through," said Art Bassin, TVData's president. "We were most attracted by its international connections. They also had the ability to allow users to preview the features and buy them on an a la carte basis." And it turns out there's gold in them thar hills. "We can make twice as much a la carte than with a subscription package," Bassin said. "We might charge you $15 a week for a package, but singly, we can charge $8 to $15 apiece." And he doesn't have to worry about getting product to customer.
Stress balls a-flexin'
Pull delivery, which has been there for years in the form of bulletin board systems, is getting easier and cheaper to use thanks to the Web. Push delivery, once the province of wire services, is using the Internet as well, but moving data at a fraction of its former cost. Where crossword puzzles go, features are starting to follow -- and that's a prospect that must have folks at places like the Associated Press squeezing their stress balls. -- John Bryan
The Associated Press, From THE COLE PAPERS, August 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved. |
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