Right hardware may be costly but the alternative costs more

"An army marches on its stomach."

-- Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon's observation about military logistics can be applied to a variety of endeavors:

It's difficult to accomplish the task at hand if you haven't prepared correctly.

Within the world of late 20th century newspapering, nowhere does this stand out quite as much as on the battlefield that leads from paste-up to pagination.

The experiences are clear: If you don't devote the time and energy to properly document your workflow, you will not be successful in implementing full-page output with all the elements in place. A lack of understanding about workflow is the biggest mistake North American newspapers have made over the course of the last few years in making the transition to digitized makeup.

But, arguably, the second biggest mistake is that of underconfiguring hardware. Although industry experts have preached their concern about understanding the production process -- how a photograph, for instance, gets from the assignment to the page -- newspaper executives want to focus instead on hardware and software.

As a consultant, I get frequent phone calls and e-mail from newspapers asking extraordinarily specific questions about hardware and software. "We want to use this application and that box," say the missives. "What else do we need?"

My usual answer is: How about a plan?

Nonetheless, it frequently turns out that once a plan is in place, the workflow documented, the software chosen and the system budgeted, the finances begin to fall apart. Whether it's bad planning on the part of the newspaper or just a bunch of unforeseen expenses, publishers moving toward pagination frequently end up with the need to tighten the budget somewhere.

And that somewhere is almost always hardware.

There are certain trials and tribulations that newspapers go through to get pagination up and running, and skimping on hardware is frequently chosen as the place to make up a budgetary shortfall.

"Our biggest problem wasn't skimping on the server hardware; they just didn't want to buy enough workstations," said Tim Benjamin, manager of publishing systems at the San Jose Mercury News in California, where a new pagination system from CCI Europe was installed in 1997. "We couldn't convince them that we needed some extras for training and systems."

The irony, Benjamin said, was that once the paper ran out of workstations and was forced to buy 10 more, it found that its software suppliers -- System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento created the editorial front-end, while CCI Europe of Marietta, Ga., and Højbjerg, Denmark, is the supplier of the pagination system -- were willing to license the workstations for less money than anticipated, because they were not going to be used in production.

"The price was right," said Benjamin.

Conversely, some papers apparently do try to skimp on the server hardware.

"I had one site that had [Apple's personal file] sharing enabled on every ad [composition] station so the users could get to each other's machines," rather than buying a machine to use as a server, said Jack Rosenzweig, editorial product manager at Baseview Products Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich. "We showed them how much faster it was with that turned off, but they refused to budge. So you have users that hate the system because it is slow all the time when it doesn't have to be."

Rosenzweig said pieces of a system that inevitably don't get purchased are digital audio tape (DAT) machines for storage backups and universal power source (UPS) devices for handling power outages and brownouts.

Output is another area where systems can be underconfigured.

"We feel we were undersold on the OPI/ad tracking system and we've had to throw a lot more money than we'd planned at it to get to the system we thought we were buying," said Gary Ward of The State in Columbia, S.C. "We're still not there."

In asking around the newspaper industry about specific instances of poor configurations of pagination hardware, we heard a couple of stories we'll repeat, but only using that hoary Dragnet convention of "changing the names to protect the innocent."

We believe these stories in their entirety; we just can't tell you names or places, lest someone lose a job.

Apocryphal story No. 1

The publisher of two small adjacent dailies decided to combine production at one plant a few years back and to paginate both papers for the first time.

"We got prices to do the job right," said the former production director. "Then we got our capital equipment budget."

Since the budget just did not provide enough money, the former production chief said, "we had to totally eliminate the most important part -- the ad-building machines."

They cobbled together some Macintoshes for the task. "Do I even have to tell you about the IIcx we were building color car ads on? We had to start printing the ads at the end of the day and hope they had printed by the next morning."

The paper ended up buying underconfigured Macs for the newsroom and classified advertising, the erstwhile production director said, because they were "being unloaded by MacWarehouse" at a cheap price.

What he typified as "the worst thing that happened" was the purchase of a $1500 35mm scanner incapable of doing the job the paper needed.

"Naturally, the photos were terrible," he said.

The irony, he said, was that rather than returning the $1500 scanner and spending another $500 to get a good machine, the Powers That Be decided it would be better to pay to have color prints made outside and scan them in on a flatbed scanner.

Since this happened a few years back, the former production director said, the bulk of the capital equipment budget went toward imagesetters and a Windows NT server. "Of course," he said, "two years ago servers cost about three times what they cost now and today you get way more power."

When the former production director was all done? "The publisher wanted to know when I was going to fire half my staff because I had gone electronic."

Today, our hero relates, he helps publishers with workflow problems.

"The first thing I tell publishers is that fixing things and getting paginated costs money. You can be cost-effective, but you can't evade the fact that moving to total pagination is expensive, with a long-range return on investment."

Apocryphal story No. 2

Described as a potential "urban legend kind of tale," our second skimpy hardware story concerns a medium-sized newspaper that purchased a whole bunch of AP-Leaf Picture Desk equipment from the Associated Press of New York.

In the early days of the Leaf Desk, the only AP-Leaf system connectivity option available was a double Token Ring requiring coaxial cable using a special type of connector called a "BNC."

The cable was quite expensive. The newspaper's Powers That Be balked at the cost.

Although AP had delivered the equipment, several weeks were to pass before AP technicians could arrive to install it all. So, some self-elected techno-whiz at the paper took it upon himself to go down to the local Radio Shack and, after some effort browsing in the adapter section, returned with a series of adapters which, when hooked to one another, enabled the BNC connectors to be physically hooked up to standard telephone wire with RJ-11 connectors.

Technology digression: Token Ring networking requires a shielded coaxial cable to work. If there is no shielding -- standard two-strand telephone wire doesn't have any -- then interference (such as radio waves or even electrical waves from power supplies in fluorescent lights or computers) will prevent a Token Ring network from working.

In spite of this, the paper wired the whole newsroom with two-strand telephone cable and its techno-whiz's custom-rigged RJ-11-to-BNC adapters. Then the techies proceeded to connect up their AP-Leaf edit stations and server with their brilliant wiring workaround.

Much to their surprise, it did not work.

The Powers That Be then complained bitterly to the AP. It took some weeks to convince the newspaper that mere physical connection did not guarantee a technically robust connection. For the longest time, the newspaper thought it was all another deep dark plot by the AP to extract more money from a member.

This same site also balked at paying extra money for "plenum-grade" wiring -- special fire-retardant wiring required by all building codes when placed in ceilings or open ducts; you can use non-plenum cable as long as it's in its own conduit. Apparently sensing yet another dire plot designed to extract extra dollars from their budget, the Powers That Be ordered the installation of standard cable.

All told, this newspaper ended up spending about four times what it should have, when you add up the wasted time and money for three cabling jobs: