Proprietary or off-the-shelf? Both system flavors win favor

Consider: If you were about to launch your paper on a journey that would lead to pagination, what would be the first question you would ask yourself?

For many in the newspaper business over the last decade, the question has been, "Should we go proprietary or off-the-shelf?" Unfortunately, just asking that question reveals an unrealistic expectation, because there are no longer "proprietary" systems and no one has developed a truly "off-the-shelf" system.

Pagination is a complex process. Words have to be written, photographs have to be digitized, pages have to be designed, ads have to be created -- and then the whole mess has to be turned into one file that can be output on film or directly to a plate.

Newspaper technologists have known all about the problems of pagination for decades -- the first papers were paginated in the mid-'70s -- but it took the introduction of the Macintosh personal computer in the mid-'80s to make pagination attractive. A publisher could be given a demonstration of page makeup on a Mac -- running maybe Aldus' PageMaker, maybe Quark's XPress -- and he could see that making up a page was, well, simple.

Unfortunately, few publishers understood that making up a single page and making up an entire newspaper were two distinct kettles of poisson, one far larger than the other.

A simple truth was missed: When pages were made up in the composing room, there were physical items to touch and check off a list -- stories in galley type, veloxes of photos, graphics, ads. If something was missing, someone went to the engraving department (or the copy cutter's desk) and tracked it down.

The need to track stories, pictures, graphics, ads and pages was only the first thing that neither the Macintosh nor Quark XPress did "out of the box."

At the same time, the promise of a ubiquitous, user-friendly graphical user interface was tremendous. The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems announced in 1987 that the "fourth wave" had arrived (the first wave was hot lead, the second was cold type and the third was the dedicated publishing systems of the 1970s and early '80s). With Seybold's encouragement, the industry began to think that personal computers could and should replace the dedicated systems of the third wave.

So, over the course of the next decade, newspapers and their suppliers began to build hybrid systems that included some "off-the-shelf" components (meaning they came from the general computing industry) and some "proprietary" components (meaning they were written specifically for the newspaper industry).

Pretty much everyone agreed that newspaper systems suppliers would no longer build hardware, but the question of where on the scale between proprietary and off-the-shelf the software fell was answered individually. Some suppliers wrote virtually all their own software, from word processor to page layout program. Taking this route were such suppliers as Unisys Corp. of Blue Bell, Pa., Harris Publishing Systems Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., Digital Technology International of Orem, Utah, and CCI Europe of Marietta, Ga., and Højbjerg, Denmark.

Other suppliers hewed to a different line. Dewar Information Systems Corp. (which was purchased in 1995 by Sysdeco, then the owner of what is now known as Atex Media Solutions Inc. of Bedford, Mass.) wrote "glue" software that linked a popular off-the-shelf word processor for Intel-based personal computers (Microsoft Word) to a popular page-layout program (Quark XPress). Atex itself had taken a similar tack with its Press2Go product, which performed much the same task on the Macintosh platform.

Competing systems included a Mac-and-Quark solution from Baseview Products, of Ann Arbor, Mich.; PC-and-Quark products from Advanced Technical Solutions Inc. of Wilmington, Mass., and Advanced Publishing Technology of Burbank, Calif., and the PC-or-Mac-and-Quark system from Agile Enterprise Inc. of Nashua, N.H. Not to be outdone, Denver-based Quark itself released a workgroup solution called Quark Publishing System.

Today, the world has two hemispheres: "use Quark for page layout" and "don't use Quark for page layout." Unfortunately, nobody seems to grasp this division, and the "proprietary" vs. "off-the-shelf" labels persist.

So, from that perspective, is one easier to implement than the other? Do newspapers find benefits in taking one of these directions not found if they took another? To answer these questions, we talked to a group of newspaper systems managers who have installed pagination at a range of papers.

Rough spots
Travail always accompanies the installation and early implementation of any system -- whether it's largely proprietary or largely off-the-shelf. Equally inevitable is that many publishers believe they won't encounter these rough spots and thus see no need to plan for them.

Publishing executives who have adopted off-the-shelf systems seem to suffer a nagging notion that going the other way might have been easier.

"The fundamental problem with off-the-shelf is its 'one-offness,'" said Charles Fertig, publishing systems manager at The Sun of Baltimore. In a previous life, Fertig helped design and install a complete pagination solution for the News-Press & Gazette in St. Joseph, Mo., a 42,000-circulation morning paper. It was based on the Mets off-the-shelf system marketed by Freedom System Integrators of Wichita, Kan.

Fertig asked three questions specific to the off-the-shelf environment: "How do you end up with a system [that's] more than a collection of networked parts? How do you support it over the life of the install? What is the cost of ownership?"

At the News & Observer, the 151,000-circulation morning daily in Raleigh, N.C., Bradley Zohn, director of newsroom computer systems, offered answers based on his experience, in which Quark Publishing System (QPS) -- the epitome of an off-the-shelf solution -- plays a large role.

"Obviously there were technical rough spots that would have taken place regardless of whether we used an off-the-shelf-solution," said Zohn. "Now, there's stuff we've just learned to live with; with a proprietary solution we might have gotten the vendor to accommodate our needs."

One of the first papers to adopt the pioneering product DewarView was The Herald in Everett, Wash. The 54,000-circulation morning paper had the Dewar company itself install its basically off-the-shelf system in 1993 and has been producing the paper with it ever since.

Lisa Friedman, the paper's systems project manager, concedes that the biggest problem she's encountered has been in the software "that links Word and XPress." A proprietary solution would have done a better job of "integrating the writing and layout and design functions," Friedman said.

Another paper to venture onto new turf with an off-the-shelf system was the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. After more than a decade of paginating with Atex News Layout, the 387,000-circulation morning paper decided in 1995 to adopt Press2Go.

"Our pagination project turned into an informal co-development when we hit the main rough spot," said Daniel Barnes, the newsroom technology director of the Star Tribune. "The product we purchased was far rougher than we had thought."

The supplier provided some of its own rough spots as well, Barnes recalled. "Atex's seemingly permanent state of reorganization and the resulting on-again/off-again commitment of resources to Press2Go" were big problems for Minneapolis, he said.

"These scenarios have played out many times in our industry," Barnes said, involving both proprietary and off-the-shelf solutions. Consequently, he doesn't feel that the choice of one direction over the other "really makes any difference."

Training issues
Whether they're using "off-the-shelf," "proprietary" or anything in between, for many papers the biggest systems issue isn't hardware or software. It's training.

"Early on, we told [top management] that we needed training to go beyond the implementation of the system," said Jeff Adams, who was the systems editor at the Dayton Daily News in Ohio when it began installing a proprietary editorial front-end that included pagination from Digital Technology International. "They didn't believe us, but now understand that training is an ongoing process. We now have a full-time trainer in the editorial department."

Everett's Friedman certainly finds training easier in the world of an off-the-shelf system. "No one ever says, 'Oh, good, I'm glad we're going to SII because I use that at home,' which is what they say about Word."

Barnes agreed: "Mac training and Quark training are ubiquitous and cheap. Training for the Press2Go XTensions is not difficult once Mac and Quark are in hand."

Conversely, the perspective of the manager of a newly installed proprietary system is that a proprietary system makes training easier. "We were offering editors more shortcuts because of the customization," said Tim Benjamin of the San Jose Mercury News, where a CCI Europe NewsDesk and Layout Champ system was installed this fall.

Falling squarely in the middle is Raleigh's Zohn.

"It's somewhat easier in some areas and more difficult in other areas," Zohn said. "Someone coming to [QPS] from an old editorial system will experience a little bumpiness. Some people have a stronger aptitude in learning the graphical user interface.

"Some people who have to type anything, they're going to have difficulty."

Supporting pagination
The experience in Dayton seems to be typical of many paginated newspapers. Support, said Adams, "is harder than my bosses thought."

Not understanding the issues of client/server technologies, top management assumed the paper could run the extensive DT system with the same scale of support staff that had been used to run its Atex predecessor. "We now have added additional support staff," said Adams.

The 290,000-circulation morning Mercury News also finds its proprietary system hard to support. "Every time we get in a new version of the software, we fix two things and break one thing that worked before," Benjamin said of his CCI system.

This is not to say that off-the-shelf solutions are easy to support. "There are so many things that can go wrong," said DewarView user Friedman. "But many of them have to do with the ability to add lots of new and different applications to the PC."

However, she explained, adding Netscape Navigator to a PC that's already running DewarView, e-mail, Word and other applications can be painful. And that's not to mention those little surprises. Friedman asked, "What about when someone brings in a new game from home? Is [a crash] the fault of the editorial system?"

The fact the paper is using desktop computers -- as opposed to proprietary terminals -- "causes most of our headaches," she said.

The "sprawling" nature of the Star Tribune's Press2Go system gives Barnes some problems -- "it's hard to avoid relying on single individuals for in-depth knowledge of some system components" -- but he believes that overall, support is easier. "The openness of the off-the-shelf components -- Quark XPress, the MacOS and AppleScript, UNIX -- makes it easy for us to add enhancements on our own," Barnes said.

Supporting a system like QPS has its advantages, said Zohn of the News & Observer.

"If you encounter some weird problem, there is usually somebody out there who's encountered it before and you can get a solution. Ninety-nine percent of the time we fix it here ourselves," he said. "We don't even have a [supplier] support arrangement for QPS."

In his job as pre-press superintendent in Missouri, Fertig said he believed that support would be a "joint discovery process" between the newspaper and the supplier.

"We would gather raw data at the site, winnow at the chaff and let the vendor deal with the coding and bug fixes," Fertig said -- "while continuously publishing, of course."

Few kind words for suppliers were heard among the publishing systems personnel. "Early on we looked to the vendor for solutions, but they didn't have the answers. They ... don't understand fully how we work," said one executive.

"Overall," Friedman said, "I've had lousy support from all types of vendors."

Would you do it again?
Reservations aside, all the executives interviewed believed that they would again follow their chosen path -- be it proprietary or off-the-shelf.

"I haven't heard anyone in the editorial department wish that we could go back to the 'old days,'" said Dayton's Adams. "We are now fully paginated and benefit a great deal from a digital newsroom."

"We're very happy with our solution," said Zohn. "QPS is only one piece of that solution, but we'd probably do it again."

At The Herald, the question isn't whether they would do off-the-shelf again -- "I think we would," said Friedman -- the question is which product. "Whether we'd choose DewarView today is a whole other matter."

"We made the right technology choice to support the business needs," said Barnes. The Minneapolis paper achieved its goals, which were to efficiently put more color in the paper and support a redesign, on a tight schedule, while remodeling the building and reorganizing the staff, he said.

"It was more difficult than we hoped and we might have looked harder before we leaped. But given the options we had at the time, it was the right technology for the mission."

-- dmc

Atex Media Solutions Inc.,
(617) 275-2323;
CCI Europe Inc.,
(770) 419-1588,
e-mail: edeasley@mindspring.com;
Digital Technology International,
(801) 226-2984,
e-mail: joann_froelich@dtint.com;
Freedom System Integrators,
(316) 722-8100,
e-mail: info@fsi-ipa.com;
Quark Inc.,
(303) 894-8888,
e-mail: quarktech@aol.com.

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