Intranet at work: The Dayton Daily News has created an in-house reference it calls the News Encyclopedia, complete with biographical dossiers of people in the news.

From affiliation to intranets, papers get a new media push

Along with the customary exhibits, tutorials, speakers and workshops, Seybold San Francisco/Publishing '97 included full-day "special interest seminars." At the top of our list was a session on Newspapers and New Media, organized and moderated by the proprietor of this newsletter.

The opening session Sept. 30 was titled "Affiliate or Die?" Speaking to the question were Frank Daniels III, chairman of KOZ Inc. of Greensboro, N.C., and the newly formed web content provider Total Sports Inc., and Paul Kessinger, senior vice president of marketing for the on-line consortium New Century Network of New York.

Daniels and Kessinger presented the pros and cons of affiliating with other Internet-related companies as one path toward newspaper success -- and survival -- in the brave new world of new media.

Daniels, a longtime advocate of "doing it yourself," said, "Newspapers need the same skills in new media as in newspapers: The only way to get them is to get in the trenches and do it."

Daniels' advice derives from his founding days at Nando.net, before the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., was sold to McClatchy Newspapers of Sacramento, Calif. The success of that on-line project, which early on was an ISP for its audience, owes much to the determination to build key technical skills within the newspaper organization, Daniels said.

Not letting anyone come between the newspaper and its readers and advertisers was an underlying principle.

"Unrealistic" is what Daniels now calls his "original vision, that newspapers would become the centerpiece of new media in the 21st century." This has happened in part because the newspaper industry is averse to making the large investments Daniels believes are crucial for establishing a successful web presence.

"It's very difficult in today's environment to sacrifice one to two million dollars a year of cash flow and justify it to owners. None of us know what the business model is in new media. ... I'm not sure that we'll ever make the kind of profit margin in new media in advertising that we made in traditional media."

Consequently, not affiliating is not an option; creating affiliations is making the best of a bad situation.

"Do it right, though," said Daniels. The great threat of affiliation is that without having "a large reservoir of strategic, tactical and technical knowledge so that you're gaining something from that affiliation, you will lose control of your readers and advertisers."

Intranet-based solutions
Before the lunch break, H. Grady Cooper, systems management director at the Alameda Newspaper Group of suburban San Francisco, showed how the six Alameda newspapers -- which include the Oakland Tribune -- are using intranet technology to serve five facilities and 10 bureaus.

"It's a cohesive way of pulling together the organization and getting rid of paper," said Cooper.

Because the site is used by so many employees in so many areas of the newspaper, he tries to keep the design colorful and simple -- and more importantly, "familiar and functional."

The ANG intranet site has four components: a searchable editorial library system built on web technology; searchable archives of pages and photos; PDF proofing for editorial and advertising (accessible at remote bureaus, and with password protection at home, or in advertisers' offices), and a number of databases, including everything from ad tracking, to photos, to the systems department's purchase-order files.

Efforts are underway to bring human resource documents on-line as well. The marketing and research departments have a password-protected adjunct site for sales reps and advertisers, which is based on the same infrastructure and allows them to keep track of current activities, such as promotions.

Two people develop and maintain the ANG sites. Much of the information is static once it is set up, and at this point most of the effort is automated.

Developing the site cost about $50,000 over 18 months, Cooper said, with much of the money going toward high-end color printers for producing page proofs.

The site relies on Netscape Enterprise server software running on two Sun Netra computers, a Windows NT platform for the Microsoft Internet Information Server, the Verity search engine for stories and pages, and Adobe's Acrobat PDF application for archiving pages and ads.

"The system paid for itself in the first six months," Cooper said.

Most of the savings came through reduced staff time in the library.

The sites usually aren't any harder to set up than you want to make them, said Cooper. To prove the theory, Cole Group Consultant Garrett Queen built a site on site, using Webstar and a Macintosh running System 8.

Despite the simplicity, usefulness and low cost of the technology, Peter Basofin, research manager of the Sacramento Bee, noted that "intranets are developing slowly in newspaper newsrooms because most of them are still wedded to big mainframe systems. Reporters and editors who are sitting in front of Coyotes are unlikely to be using the Web."

Nonetheless, the intranet-in-newspapers phenomenon isn't limited to forward-thinking newspapers on the West Coast. Other tech-savvy newspapers -- such as the San Antonio Express-News in Texas, the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News and Atlanta's Journal & Constitution -- have wired their newsrooms and their newspapers.

Some of the pages they've created are mere conversions of paper-based resources to digital and hyperlinked formats -- things like style books, staff directories, and descriptions of policies and procedures. But others, like the News Encyclopedia created by Dayton's Michael Jesse, includes biographical dossiers, complete with pictures, profiles, chronologies, backgrounders and scanned clips.

Cannibalizing the news?
In a more philosophical vein, Moderator Cole challenged a panel of on-line journalism executives to explain whether an on-line edition of a newspaper "eats the young of its print parent" when it breaks a story on the Web before its print edition hits the street.

Chris Feola, new media director of the American Press Institute of Reston, Va. (and a Cole Papers correspondent), didn't hedge: The question mark "implies we have a choice. We can say this won't happen and pretend that circulation will stay where it is."

Feola chided newspapers still shy of making investments in web technology to look at their situation in historical perspective.

"You can see clearly where the technology is going. Although the technology is still nascent, it is the opportunity for us to go back to being information companies, and to deliver information in any form including print."

The Wall Street Journal, said Neil Budde, editor of the WSJ Interactive Edition, has been thinking about the balance between instant delivery and print delivery for 100 years, because it owns the Dow Jones News Service.

"This kind of thinking also flows into our thinking about the Web. It has the same key features: We're up-to-date 24 hours a day, seven days a week with the latest news; we produced the newspaper as a series of snapshots, and we use the same news judgment to organize and present our stories. What you see in the WSJ Interactive edition is much closer to what you will see in tomorrow's paper than what you saw in today's."

Budde maintains that the on-line product has to stand on its own, not just replicate what people see on the printed page. "It has to have value and utility in and of itself. The key values we offer are depth, personalization and timeliness."

Although the interactive Journal has 130,000 paying subscribers, only about 50,000 viewers hit the site daily. That has to be balanced against several million print readers.

"In the on-line edition, they can find insight, analysis and exclusive news. But we have to keep tomorrow's print edition fresh and unique. We have to decide where it will have the most impact," Budde said. "Print often has more impact. That's a marketing decision."

John Cranfill, managing director of dallasnews.com, the web site of the Dallas Morning News, made his position clear from the outset: "I'm Cannibal Cranfill."

"In Dallas, we want to put out and extinguish the idea that the web site is not the newspaper. I just don't get the idea of scooping yourself.

"Once your story is sourced and people outside the newspaper know you're working on it, your cover's blown. You can wait 18 hours until the presses are ready to crank up again, or you can take the story right to the web site and get an instant reaction from your readers," said Cranfill. "The Web gives you an alternative. It is the newspaper, but it offers another place to put it besides on the printing press."

Bruce Koon, managing editor of Mercury Center, the web site of the San Jose Mercury News, made the panel unsurprisingly unanimous in its verdict that a newspaper's web site is still the newspaper.

"There is a new competitive landscape," he said, "and this is the first opportunity for newspapers to regain ground. But there are new players on the Internet delivering news -- Cnet, CNN -- and you don't have a choice."

Finding a workable flow between the print newsroom and the on-line site remains an open question. Mercury Center has set up an on-line news desk in the newsroom, its staffers attend the 5 p.m. news meeting where decisions are made about what will go on the web site, and the web site is included in the paper's daily self-critique.

It also has set up scheduled on-line "news programs" -- an idea that originated with people in the print newsroom. Traffic for the site peaks when the program goes up, but if readers miss it, it's still there later, said Koon.

"It's similar to having multiple print editions. If a reporter has to stop periodically to think through the story in order to deliver pieces for the news program, what he knows and what he doesn't becomes clear much earlier. He has an idea of where the holes are much earlier, and you end up with a better story for the print edition."

Front-ends for the Web
In the last session of the day, executives and experts talked about a webmeister's dream system: a front-end capable of handling a variety of content -- text, images, audio, video -- for production and for serving out of a database.

Two panelists, James Calloway, general manager of Nando.net, the new media arm of McClatchy Newspapers based in Raleigh, N.C., and Steve Yelvington, editor of startribune.com, the on-line enterprise of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, created home-brewed systems after dismissing what the market had to offer.

When Yelvington went looking for a system in 1995, his key requirements were for dynamic pages, templates and a usability that would let people focus on content, not the technology. Back then, Yelvington said, "We had few options. We built a system to provide a service, not just to publish pages."

Startribune.com now has a staff of 15 editorial content folks, 15 ad creators and more than a dozen technical people, a third to a half of whom are programmers.

In the future, Yelvington would like to see systems that can push the structuring of stories "upstream" into the newsroom -- for example, all the header information necessary in the on-line environment that wasn't even envisioned three years, two years, even a year ago.

"It has to be a flexible environment because there's no way we can predict the future environment," he said. "We need a sound foundation to build toward 2010."

Another dream Yelvington has is software that facilitates the gathering and organizing of multimedia content. It's a lot to keep track of: "We need this from vendors."

Yelvington also would like to see a system that offers a centralized process -- for print, on-line, books, magazines, whatever -- for building "utility journalism" products -- movie guides, state parks guides, golf guides.

In Raleigh, Calloway runs the central staging area for all 10 of the McClatchy newspapers' on-line efforts. Now on its second home-brewed system, Nando.net gets 22 million hits per week and works on a six-minute update cycle.

Many of the suppliers Calloway visited had web solutions of sorts, but "they were print oriented, and you had to buy the full print system to get the web tools. That didn't work for us."

Among the key needs Calloway defined was "the ability to publish from the database both dynamically and statically," because of the amount of traffic. This page-caching technology is a must, Calloway said.

Much of what Nando.net is now running was provided off-the-shelf by Vignette Corp.'s Story Server. The system, built in a year by a team that at one time had eight programmers, has been designed to allow integration of off-the-shelf products -- which currently include Personal Library Software for indexing and Sybase for database management.

A new era for suppliers
Print front-end suppliers, said Stephen Nilan, principal in Nilan-Sanders Associates of Sacramento and Englewood, Colo., have a point of view and a history that hinders their ability to respond to the new needs newspapers have as they enter the web world. The loss of $400 million in newspaper capital spending between 1989 and 1993 led to a bloodbath that cleared the playing field of all but the strongest competitors, and even in those companies, R&D areas were left decimated.

"At the tail end of that cycle, traditional vendors didn't have the capacity to compete," said Nilan. Aside from that, he continued, they were stuck in a mindset: "Vendors were caught in the idea of The System. That doesn't cut it anymore. The solution has to be more direct than a new interface or an enhancement.

"Instead," he continued, "vendors have to realize that the world has changed forever. Expertise and service are at the center, not The System. They have to learn to treat the Web as a new business and dedicate the resources to making it work."

Don Oldham, CEO and chairman of Digital Technology International of Orem, Utah, disagreed with Nilan, touting the possibilities for publishing a web site with existing print front-ends (as long as it's the right front-end, of course).

Such a system can "enable efficient departments to treat the Internet as just another edition." The comment was coupled with an onstage demo in which one database provided content to two style sheets, producing a visually different but basically identical print and web product.

-- L. Carol Christopher

KOZ Inc.,
(919) 832-8926;
Digital Technology International, (801) 226-2984, e-mail: info@dtint.com;
Seybold Seminars,
(650) 578-6900.

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