Menu, please: A homegrown menu
provides access to specialized
Register-Guard menus for layout, sports
production, processing incoming news
service copy, outputting pages and
creating page elements.

Everything but the lede: With Story
Starter, a writer can put in not only his or
her byline, but name a new story, give it a
category and then drag-and-drop
newspaper-specific keywords from a
lengthy list of candidates in the
right-most window -- all to help find it in
the Digital Technology International
database.

Expedited layout: Using the "Grids"
menu, editors can select exactly the
combination of layout elements they
desire, click once and let AppleScript
do the hard work -- precisely.

Instant header: A menu choice labeled
"Business Beat" creates a four-column text
box, centers it in the allotted space,
positions it two units below the folio and
formats the text -- with one mouse click.

Oregon paper scripts its way to user-friendly pagination

Pagination came to Eugene with a script.

AppleScript.

The Oregon college town's morning daily, The Register-Guard, took a two-decade leap in technology and in the process pushed the envelope just a bit, using AppleScript and its new editorial front-end from Digital Technology International to give the newsroom staff new tools, many of them tailored to the 78,000-circulation paper's vision of pagination.

That vision included a ton of preparation, and concern about the impact of change, especially on the copy desk.

"Pagination is in your head," said Assistant Managing Editor Carl Davaz, a key player in the 222-day relay race from proprietary system to state-of-the-art production. "This is a game of psychological warfare, when you have a group of people who have done the same things the same way that their system had them do it for a generation."

Moving to DT was both culture shock and future shock.

The Register-Guard leaped from 20-year-old dull-edge technology -- a DEC TMS system running on Pdp 11-84s, widely popular when Jimmy Carter was president -- to cutting-edge technology from DT, of Orem, Utah.

"The idea that we were going to have to undertake page composition and those related responsibilities in the newsroom meant, in a copy editor's head, the potential for failure," Davaz said. "They were very good at the jobs they did and the very fact that they were having to learn a new technology is a very intimidating thing."

To counter this worrisome reality, management grasped the tools newly at its disposal; months later, "these tools have basically given the copy editor an opportunity to succeed," Davaz said. That opportunity exists as well for sports agate clerks, who benefit from visible and invisible massaging of text, and reporters, who can initiate stories with a series of choices geared to comprehensive filing and tracking of copy in the database-centric DT system.

Perhaps most important, creation of page geometry is automated, freeing copy editors to focus on content.

Three months after the old system was shut down, editors at The Register-Guard are certain they did the right things at the right time. One of them was going with AppleScript, Davaz said.

"AppleScript and these other tools we created kind of took the edge off it."

A team approach
The Register-Guard's migration to pagination was "an amazing example of how to do it right," said Managing Editor Jim Godbold. "We just did a team approach, a year-long project to try to define what the impact of pagination would be on our news department."

The project, which gave birth to a 200-page blueprint for building a pagination solution successfully, involved a survey of all users on their skills and wish lists for system features, as well as site visits and consideration of systems from suppliers other than DT.

The project began with a system audit in spring 1996. The following July, the first servers were installed, and the R-G team began preparing Macintosh clients for interaction with the DT database and applications.

Trainers were prepped in August 1996, and user training began in September. On Oct. 15, 1996, the editorial pages went live. On May 13, 1997, 222 days later, the last section -- sports -- "went live with everything -- the live news stuff plus the agate," Davaz said.

If Godbold and Davaz have one thought to share with other editors who are about to start their own slippery slide down the pagination slope, it's the T-word, the one newspapers universally ignore: training.

"The intent was to have as flawless an implementation as we could," Davaz said, so training was viewed as indispensable. DT suggests 40 hours, but "we gave our copy editors 80 hours of training -- plus any time anyone raised their hand, we gave them the training," Davaz said.

"We heard from other people: You can't cut time on training. Jim and I took it to heart. It was the one thing we were committed to."

How committed?

"We put overtime in our budget for training."

Godbold was direct: "You can have the most sophisticated, high-performance software in the universe, but if the users aren't comfortable with it, it's a worthless product."

As far as the ME was concerned, training "couldn't be cut any more than a server could be cut."

In addition to extensive preparation and their strong embrace of training, Godbold and Davaz built re-evaluation steps into their plan. They made few changes, but a major one came in February, when the initial scheme called for bringing both wire and local news pages on-line at once.

"We decided to come to our senses and split that up a little," Davaz said. "We made slight modifications in our time lines and we hit all of our marks."

An awakening
The R-G team took special care to grab opportunities as they arose. One crucial chance to learn came when a DT system engineer was installing servers and databases -- creatures not hatched in the DEC TMS era.

The engineer turned their heads, Davaz said.

"We sat down for a couple of hours and the central question we asked of him was, if this was your system, knowing what you know about databases, how would you set it up?"

After getting a tutorial in new technology, "we went back to the drawing board and reorganized our desks," Davaz said.

While the resulting workflow "is still a relatively linear model," Godbold said, processes have been rejiggered. "If we had kept the old workflow, we wouldn't have succeeded."

When the pagination team approached the copy desk for suggestions on how to configure and prep the new system, "we had a white board and we said, 'Wish for some things, folks. We don't know if we can make them come true, but we can try,'" Davaz said.

While introducing deadlines "that frankly we hadn't had," Godbold said, management worked hard to include the people with the front-row seats on possible carnage.

"We brought copy editors together and asked what improvements to make," the managing editor said. "After a series of meetings, we very dramatically changed the way individual jobs are organized and how the copy moved from one point to another."

To this day, Godbold said, "a reporter inputs text, it moves to the editing area, it moves to the copy desk production area, it moves to the design area," but the system and resulting flow "give the advantage to the copy desk."

One significant change recognized the weight of adding pagination chores to the copy desk, where each copy editor has a 21-inch Radius Precision View monitor, an Apple 7600 PowerPC with 80 megabytes of RAM and either a 120-megahertz or 132-megahertz RISC processor.

"The change is that there were more people responsible for the information in the sections," Davaz said. "Some people had to design it, some people had to rim it. These were subtle changes, but changes nonetheless that we had to make to make the whole system efficient."

Has the workload changed? Indeed.

"The wire editor's job in the TMS days was a one-person job done by an editor who came in at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and just worked furiously for eight or nine hours," Godbold said. No more.

"What we found was, one person couldn't do that job in the DT system," he said, in part because the paper wanted to edit content differently. "We wanted to divide it into subspecialties -- business, metro local news, A-section news."

Now, with DT, "we were able to tailor to personal specifications almost," with filtered directories and macro keys.

"The principal wire editor came to me at one point," Davaz said, "grinning from ear to ear, saying, 'I can put a 50-column paper up in eight hours and still have time to take a dinner break.'"

From demo to reality
Davaz recalled his first exposure to "the power under the hood of this stuff" at a demo about scripting Quark XPress at NEXPO a few years ago.

"I remember sitting through one of those one-hour seminars and could kind of connect the dots about how AppleScript could make layout easier."

Two dots he readily linked were manual tools and saving time.

"I saw how people did it and sure, they got the job done, but it might have taken them quite a bit more time," Davaz said. "When I wrote some scripts to do those kinds of simple, routine, repetitive tasks, not only was it faster, it was routinely more precise."

Many users are accustomed to having redundant tasks performed by macro keys. AppleScript is much more, according to Jenny Brandt, DT's digital tool kit specialist.

"AppleScripts and macros are often confused," she said. "Both a macro and an AppleScript provide a set of instructions for the computer. The way these instructions are performed by the computer is fundamentally different.

"AppleScript is more powerful than a macro. AppleScripts have the ability to respond to changing conditions and anticipate errors. Typically a macro manipulates the user interface. An AppleScript uses system-level commands known as AppleEvents."

The precision and power of AppleScript comes into play every day, now that newsroom staffers of The Register-Guard have their homegrown collection of menus from which scripts are called and considerable activity occurs on-screen.

Across the top of the screen on any one of the newsroom's 100 Macs are menus unique to The Register-Guard. Each has choices linked to AppleScripts, so that when a choice is made, the next step may be the first in a series needed to accomplish rote tasks quickly -- and correctly.

Under the "Grids" menu are choices for creating commonly used geometry. For example, selecting "P-Cover Column Left with 4 Columns" signals the Mac to call a script that places on a page an odd-measure box for a columnist and four equal-sized legs to the right of the columnist's hole.

A standard feature page is started with "P-Feature Cover 12p2 Column Right." At the element level, a click on the menu item "Story Elements" opens a list that includes "Business Beat." Click on that and almost instantly a four-column-wide header appears, two units below the folio, with the words "Business Beat" formatted in bold and italics, and centered in the box.

Look, Ma, no hands.

Using a product called FaceSpan, which DT acquired from Software Designs Unlimited, Davaz and his trusty "coder," Chris Meyers, the paper's assistant information services manager, have created task-specific user interfaces, such as "customized entry forms for our sports agate."

In addition to preparing virtually all formatting for production, the entry forms and the process behind them have handy tricks for users. Davaz said it was dubbed Make My Agate.

"We can put all the coding for the agate, including the tab attributes, in a behind-the-scenes place," Davaz said. "The entry form becomes just that -- a fill-in-the-blanks."

Repetitive tasks are simplified by auto-fill fields, Davaz explained: "All of the western Oregon football teams are pre-loaded. If the visiting team is Sheldon, they'll type an 'S' and Sheldon will come into the form, properly spelled and everything."

The agate clerk's life is made easier by scores that will total themselves and then sort automatically to put the winner in the paper's preferred location.

"It'll look at the 'total' fields. If the visitor is 28 and home is 27, in that 'line score' field it will automatically fill that in. The application is looking at those two fields and detecting which is greater," he said.

"With FaceSpan, we can speed things along, we can do some of the thinking for the user," Davaz said. "We're trying to think of some things that give the advantage to the user in terms of time."

The database connection
When it's time to Make My Agate, the system dances through a process that ends with copy on a page.

"There's a special code, a suffix on the name of the file," Davaz said, citing "pbfm" for "prep boys football." "When we run Make My Agate, it'll go into the database, look at all the files at a particular desk that have the suffix the script is looking for and put them all out -- story by story, including drawing the coordinates."

The volume of sports agate often means sports pages are the last to be paginated at any newspaper because producing agate "might be the hardest thing a newspaper does on deadline," Davaz said. But thanks to Apple and DT, "we eliminated a fair amount of the heartache that the agate presents," he said.

Arriving agate copy is greeted by Python, an application that takes less than a second to strip out unwanted characters and prep copy for production, R-G style. (Python, which is public domain software, was developed at the University of Amsterdam in the early '90s. It is available on the Internet for UNIX, Windows, DOS and Macintosh at http://www.python.org/.)

"The way the AP sends stuff is with a lot of fixed spaces coded into it -- ems, thins, en spaces. With AppleScript, we can look into those files and make choices about how we want to search that stuff out and pull it into a new file, with fixed spaces replaced with tabs."

The aptly named Python, which seems able to go just about anywhere, "looks at the AP header and says, OK, this is a major league baseball expanded take. I know what this file is and I'm going to do something to it" -- in this case, replace scores of fixed spaces with tabs, without human intervention.

The sports desk retains the original agate file; the manipulated copy goes to the Processed Agate Desk, where "they pick up with AppleScripts on the other side and apply the proper element construction," Davaz said.

So, when an agate clerk opens such a file, he or she is looking at a duplicate of another copy which was sent to where it could be accessed by a writer or editor.

Look, Ma, no crossed hands.

"The process is seamless to the user," Davaz said, noting that the tasks are done on a Sun UltraSPARC e3000 news server that doesn't have to huff or puff to handle such routine chores.

Computer-assisted pagination
The Eugene Story is the script of the future.

"That's what we're trying to encourage," said DT CEO Don Oldham from company headquarters in Utah. "Our goal is to move beyond electronic paste-up to computer assisted pagination, to free the users up to do the creative stuff."

DT's studies have found that "the computer can do 85 percent of the work that's currently being done by manual layout," Oldham said. Not included: content decisions, such as headline fitting, or selecting a pull quote.

While DT is committed to providing its products on more than Mac clients, Oldham is bullish on the gang from Cupertino. Some customers -- DT has more than 200 sites world-wide -- requested Windows-based clients, "but instead got Mac ones when they saw the user interface," AppleScript and all.

Others have found that the Mac platform remains dominant in the graphics zones, particularly in building ads, so it would be counterproductive to set up a composing room on PCs that would have to handle Mac-generated files in XPress and Multi-Ad Creator.

Besides, Oldham noted, no two newspapers are alike, so "we can't design one system that fits all." But the supplier can design a system that can be easily customized -- by non-geeks, using DT's digital tool kit.

Those tools include DT's Database Agent, which "gives scriptable access to everything in the database"; the aforementioned FaceSpan, for creating user interfaces, and a "menu init" that allows creation of top-of-screen menus for special tasks, such as the R-G's Grids, Agate Utilities and Templates, Oldham said.

Thus, said the CEO, sounding like a scriptwriter, the digital tool kit can automate this routine: "Go get Ann Landers' photo, her current story, bring them all in and throw them on the page -- one button can do all of that."

That one button has been hard to push.

"We're really one leap ahead," Oldham said. "You almost have to go back to SII to find anything similar," with "system-level access that's scriptable" by anyone with time, talent and determination.

Such as at The Register-Guard.

"A whole bunch is being done by non-programmers" in Eugene, Oldham said. "They've found the tools we gave them are simple enough that they are able to create and script their own processes."

And they anticipate doing even more.

"With AppleScript, the sky's the limit," said Managing Editor Jim Godbold. "That's only partly true -- you have to have AppleEvents in the software you're working with, and that's where the partnership with DT has been such an incredible professional advantage for us."

"I think that we're limited by our imaginations and by our expertise," echoed Davaz, who is quick to point out that he is a photographer first. "I'm an AME for graphics. I'm not a computer geek kind of person.

"Maybe I've evolved to that because I've let my imagination run wild with some of this stuff."

-- Pete Wetmore

Digital Technology International,
(801) 226-2984,
e-mail: joann_froelich@dtint.com.

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