New goods, updated thinking are seen and heard at Seybold

NEW YORK -- It has become a cliché: Spend days stomping up and down the floor of some giant tech trade show. Stuff several canvas bags -- tastefully billboarded with company logos in subtle screaming pink -- full of free mags, free CD-ROMs, free mouse pads, free T-shirts, more free mouse pads, free pens, even more free mouse pads. ...

Did we mention you can get free mouse pads?

Where were we? Oh, yes -- return to the office, dump all that stuff in a closet, put your weary feet up on the desk and proclaim that there just isn't anything new at trade shows.

That old song wasn't playing at Seybold New York 98. From the keynote speeches to the booths, the show stank of the shock of the new. The conference itself used a new format: Monday and Tuesday were co-sponsored by Hot Wired, the on-line arm of Wired magazine, while Thursday and Friday were devoted to traditional publishing systems issues.

The trade show floor introduced new types of software, such as Trellix, Dreamweaver and Fireworks (see sidebar).

Monday's keynote speeches by Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab and John Gage of Sun Microsystems Corp. were fairly predictable, but Tuesday's keynote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs had not only the usual amount of theatrics, Jobs also demonstrated a 400 mHz PowerPC-based Macintosh. (The Mac performed some Adobe Photoshop-scripted functions at least twice as fast as the latest-and-greatest Dell computer running a Pentium II chip.)

Then there was the bomb-throwing keynote speech delivered by James Adams of United Press International.

One could make a case that it is not exactly shocking and new to get up in 1998 and say that newspapers are in trouble. But a business deal with bete noir Microsoft? Now, that'll make 'em sit up and listen.

Adams began by arguing that newspapers just don't get new media.

"Two weeks ago, I attended a conference in Washington where I sat on a panel with representatives from the Washington Post, People magazine and the Washingtonian magazine," Adams said. "Inevitably, the question of the Web and the future of the media came up. Among my colleagues on the panel, the word 'Internet' was received like a bad smell, a passing inconvenience that no members of polite society would wish to discuss in public.

"It is that attitude that has contributed to the current sorry state of the traditional media.

"It is also clear that the business model that has sustained newspapers for 400 years is changing. According to research conducted by William Bass of Forrester Research last year, by the year 2001, newspapers will lose 40 percent of their real estate advertising, 30 percent of help-wanted and 20 percent of auto ads."

Newspapers will lose this revenue-making content to the new Internet on-line markets, he said. "Almost at a stroke, the business model that has kept the industry fat and happy for years is in ruins."

You may or may not agree with Adams' analysis -- indeed, the Wire Service Guild popped a gasket over the UPI executive's comments that he had inherited a "sclerotic, corrupted organization" which he was reforming by "destroying the inert bureaucracy and replacing it with a machine fit to fight future wars."

The part that really got the Guild's dander up, though, was Adams' statement that his plan "... meant replacing the tired hacks with a new generation who understood not the history of the global news wire but the opportunities of the Knowledge Age."

Tactful or not, Adams is trying to take advantages of those opportunities. He described a series of UPI initiatives: