Thoroughly modern Bee: The ModBee
web site uses programs written by the paper's
publishing systems manager to take stories
out of the front-end system
and move them to the Internet.
Planetary collaboration: The PioneerPlanet site tested and improved work initiated at the Knight-Ridder New Media Center.
Sites seek shovelware,
straining suppliers' sufferance
Lunching on fast food ... taking the elevator, not the stairs ... staying up to watch Jerry Springer's talk show ... shoveling newspaper content onto the World-Wide Web.
We know there's a better way to live, but we do it anyway.
The shoveling, that is.
Why? Because it's there, it's easy, it's cheap.
Because if we don't, someone else will.
And it's not brain surgery: The people on whom you rely will make it so simple -- if not your favorite technology supplier, then an enthusiastic staffer or local on-line purveyor.
Newspaper executives know that daily news and advertising lineage are resources whose cash value is offset by the cost of newsprint and delivery.
Enter the Web, with its bargain basement costs.
Moving the entire paper verbatim onto a World-Wide Web server is a technical cinch, thanks to shovelware. It is shovelware that has wired hundreds of newspapers to the Web, as shown by the fast-growing Newspaper Association of America list (http://www.naa.org/hot/index.html).
So what's the harm in shoveling, in just moving ink-bound data into cyberspace? In the experimental stage, not much. On-line readers keep coming back, at least until something better woos them away.
But on-line experts warn against shoveling, pointing to emerging competitors to on-line newspapers who are putting sizzle -- and value -- into new services.
And there's this: Thanks to fast-and-cheap start-up strategies, pioneering newspapers have become do-it-yourself integrators, moving away from their old, faithful product stewards.
Those stewards, traditional pre-press and archive suppliers, now without a whiff of profit or a clutch of customer needs, are either reluctant to develop products, or are seeking new markets.
That's where there's potential for harm.
When it's time for Paula Publisher to step up to sophisticated applications, will the supplier industry have stepped away?
By then, will shoppers have only expensive -- or dis-integrated -- solutions from which to choose?
Why shovel?
What drives a newspaper to pick up a shovel? Money limitations, labor constraints, lack of tools, popular demand -- it ain't pretty, but it works.
James Calloway, general manager at McClatchy's Nando (http://www.nando.com/), said automating copy flow between production and on-line systems is essential. Most newspapers have enough in-house systems skill to automate for themselves, he said.
"One way to keep your costs low is to do as little as possible," he said. "If you can get it out of your legacy system, you can automate it as much as possible."
For some, that's not enough.
"I think the shovel approach is inadequate or inappropriate," said James Jackson, on-line director at the Cincinnati Enquirer and Cincinnati Post. "But the reality is that the shovel approach is an intermediate step that allows a paper to offer a low-cost product in a timely fashion. That becomes important in protecting a newspaper's franchise."
That franchise starts with capturing current readers when they venture on-line, and meeting their basic expectations.
"The starting point is the complete newspaper. I think subscribers expect it" to be on-line, said Chris Jennewein, director of Knight-Ridder's New Media Center. "Our traffic [in news directories] is growing between 20 and 30 percent a month. If they aren't reading the stories, I don't know what they are doing. ..."
McClatchy Newspapers' new media strategies chief agrees -- on where to start.
"I think that that is essential but not sufficient. The news contents of the daily paper must be on the site because people expect it to be," said Howard Weaver. "That's not what's going to bring people back again."
They'll return for interactive content or a different spin on the day's news, or useful computing tools. When visitors can retrieve just the content they want, illuminated with extra background information, shoveling becomes mining.
So says Rusty Coats, on-line news manager for the Modesto (Calif.) Bee (http://www.modbee.com/), owned by Sacramento-based McClatchy.
"I honestly think the road to that Valhalla is paved with shoveling," said Coats. "Our content on-line is different from the stories in the paper. Stories are played differently.
"We're using the newsroom as raw materials now. ... I want to put more raw data in the hands of people so they can do what they want. I want them to be able to customize what they see every day ... I want them to be able to do what our newsroom can't do because of all the overhead."
Even now, some sites give a higher priority to depth and interaction over posting the complete publication on-line.
"At the Gazette, we don't have any plans to put up the whole newspaper, although at some point archives will be available," said Jim Debth, vice president and general manager of Interactive Media, a subsidiary of the Gazette Co. of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
"Navigationally, being on-line is different from reading the newspaper," he said. "We are working at understanding how people surf a site. That's different from what a newspaper print product is. It's different from a contextual standpoint."
Over time, Debth said, "this site is going to be some shovelware, and as it moves forward, some original content as well."
Hilery Livengood is putting some of that disparate content up there now. The on-line managing editor for FYIowa and GazetteOnline (http://www.fyiowa.com/) said her focus is packaging information that has the broadest audience -- illuminating selected topics rather than just taking a bulk transfer.
One example is the presidential caucuses and election coverage in a state that's as passionate about politics as it is about sports. For the latter, she's building a temple to the Iowa Hawkeyes, with team statistics, photo tours, game information and cooperative links to the University of Iowa.
"You can't pick up the paper on any given day," Livengood said, "and find all the information that's in the on-line publication."
Missed opportunities
While building, publishers weren't buying.
Thus, some observers believe that pre-press and production system allies have missed the boat to become significant on-line suppliers.
Why were they left standing on the pier? Lack of market agility, high prices, proprietary solutions and misunderstanding the medium are offered as reasons.
There's one other: It may be that traditional suppliers failed to forge ties with the new technology decision makers as they took on their new roles, literally just months ago.
"A lot of the traditional vendors are discounting the new media teams that are working at the newspapers," said Roddy de la Garza, founder and vice president of affiliate relations at AdOne Classified Network. The New York on-line content aggregator (http://www.adone.com/) positions itself as an extension of the new media department.
Knight-Ridder's Jennewein suggested that long-time suppliers have established relationships with information and publishing systems managers who may or may not have roles in on-line projects.
System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento agrees.
SII executives have contacted the same newspaper managers as they did a few years ago, said Steve Nilan, SII vice president of marketing, but the conversations are different. There's more talk about business models and how to make money than chatter about technology issues.
"What we have found is that we still talk to [old contacts]," said SII's Nilan. "And in come cases they are involved, but we find we are talking to a whole new set of people as well at those sites.
"They have more marketing background than technology background, and they are more open to new ways of conducting business."
Before automation
In 1994, pre-press and production system vendors weren't even thinking about the Web when Mercury Center and NewsHound were developed, Jennewein said.
"We were building it pretty much from scratch," he said. Traditional suppliers helped with some programming details from time to time, but no products -- or strategies -- were forthcoming.
"What we were doing was seen as very experimental and not at all clear it was mainstream," he said.
NewsHound, a personal news agent, was considered by many industry watchers as more a curiosity than a forerunner of mainline thinking. Mercury Center, the on-line presence of the San Jose Mercury News, now has a subscriber base in the thousands.
Similarly, when FYIowa started on-line, noted Livengood, many automated systems weren't available. "They've come a long way in a year," she said.
In less than two years, novelty ideas have matured into baseline features. The start-ups that created Internet utilities and HTML tools also matured into competitors to industry standard-bearers such as SII, Sysdeco Media Group, Digital Technology International and Harris Publishing Systems Corp.
"It's not the big guys that are coming up with this stuff, it's Firefly and Mercury Mail and people you've never heard of," said Melinda Gipson, director of new media business development at the Newspaper Association of America's New Media Federation.
Why? "This backward compatibility stuff," she said, referring to suppliers' focus on making sure new products fit with their predecessors. "If they were adopting tools that are completely portable, that would make a hell of a lot more sense."
In addition, web suppliers are "becoming more interested and more aggressive," said Jennewein. "I hear much more from start-up companies -- companies in different fields -- than I do from traditional vendors."
The newspaper "used to be limited by products by a particular vendor, but you aren't any more," Cedar Rapids' Debth said. "Now there are more third-party vendors with much better products. InfiNet uses various vendors, Pottsville has a product, Excaliber has a product. All of them are doing some of the things we want to do.
"It will be important for SII and Atex and other companies that provide front-end systems to offer more open systems if they're going to survive in the Internet/intranet world," Debth said.
While some long-time suppliers have interesting pieces, "for what you end up spending ... we can do it ourselves," Nando's Calloway said. "We have very strong opinions about what we need and it's not what we see any of the vendors can provide" for the right price.
Ah, price. Asked if he contacted pre-press suppliers, Modesto's Coats said, "Yes, and they said $45,000, and we hung up. ... What we ended up doing is better than we could have bought off the shelf."
Mixed messages
Generating new income plays a big role in on-line purchasing decisions because, unlike front-end and pagination systems, there are few savings in labor or materials to justify the expense.
Thus, technical advantages often must translate into marketable, revenue-producing services. The challenge for suppliers now is targeting the next need, the right product and the right price -- or deciding whether to stay out of the game, for themselves and their customers.
"We've seen the phenomenon where the tools -- HTML-type tools, the integrated web services on Windows NT or whatever it might be -- they are so readily accessible, that I think there's a sense from the [information technology] staff that they want to do it themselves," SII's Nilan said.
Listening to customers doesn't always help gauge needs, said Eric Phillips, marketing manager at Synaptic Micro Solutions (http://www.smsc.com/) of Appleton, Wis.
"I'm dealing with papers down south that are just starting their Internet pages," he said. "For now, they just want to get their pages out there and don't want to get into comprehensive searching.
"Once you get something up on the Internet you always want to change it eventually," he said, and then customers start asking for more sophisticated features.
FYIowa's Livengood agrees.
"Honestly, we are on the short side of the learning curve. Until you are in this business, it's hard to know what you need or what you want," Livengood said.
"If someone had come to us six months ago and asked us exactly what do we want for site management software, we would have said we weren't sure. We knew the issues, but we weren't sure of the specifics."
Lead dog experimenters, like Nando, LATimes.com, Boston.com and DigitalInk, are pushing for sophistication. Nando's Calloway dismissed several systems he looked at this year as "strictly print-centric."
"They had addressed where the Web existed two years ago," he said.
As always, the market is a moving target.
"When the News & Observer [Raleigh, N.C.] went through its front-end overhaul two years ago," Calloway said, "none of us were far enough along to know what our needs were."
Such vagueness makes cautious those suppliers who have survived the Fourth Wave and pagination wars.
"It's interesting, we don't have a [new media] product with a Harris name on it," said Russ Latch, product marketing manager at Harris Publishing Systems Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., maker of a widely popular pagination system.
Most Harris customers have bought from web software industry suppliers and integrated their systems themselves, Latch said. Those who have approached Harris ask about customized classified reports to call out content, and "no one is asking for the same thing more than once."
That lack of "market stability" discourages developers from jumping on needs they hear from customers at trade shows, sales calls and private talks.
"When we cycle back and say, 'What are the requirements,' they say, 'Well, we're not sure yet.'" Latch said. "It's a chicken-and-egg situation."
For on-line products and other evolving areas, Harris executives are looking for "a high degree of market interest ... in line with our current product capabilities." On-line needs pose a particular problem for suppliers like Harris, whose business strategy "is to invest in products where the requirements of the market are well-defined," Latch said.
On-line products being considered for release in three to six months will relate to existing pre-press lines -- that old blessing or curse, backward compatibility.
"Our company philosophy is to take customers along from legacy products to new products; we don't want to leave them hanging," Latch said. "I think that's one of our strengths."
Harris is not alone in this delicate dance with customers and profits.
In the face of inexpensive off-the-shelf products, Associated Information Systems International of Auburn, Calif., stopped work on a PostScript-to-HTML converter this year and aimed its customer at an Adobe solution, said CEO Jan McDonald.
In Reston, Va., profit margin on the cutting edge is on the minds of MediaStream's decision makers when they size up requests for new features. (MediaStream is the confluence of Knight-Ridder's old PressLink and Vu/Text digital pioneers.)
"The process of developing new services definitely has the corporate mission of turning a profit, but the technology we need to develop now has to have both innovation and reality," said Steve Messere, MediaStream's marketing manager.
At SII, Nilan said, "we're still promoting that ... direct correlation between time, if not money, in upfront analysis" of customer requests for features. This comes as SII shifts toward consulting and integration services, away from original development and software sales.
"It's a bit of a hard sell. It's an unconventional way for suppliers like us to do business," the veteran SII executive said. "In my experience, it's an unconventional way for newspapers to purchase technology.
"We're growing out of it, but we still have the RFP [request for proposal] approach to problems," in which the supplier is asked to provide specific solutions for definitively described needs.
As new media shoppers look to other markets for new tools, suppliers are working to repurpose their newspaper expertise: Two of SII's first three MediaBridge customers are outside publishing.
Other suppliers mention pitching services to retailers, catalog and directory printers, and magazine publishers.
In Cincinnati, on-line maestro James Jackson said he will stay tuned to traditional providers' offerings, but he thinks better ideas may originate outside the friendly, indulgent arms of newspaper suppliers.
"On the other hand," he warned, "we may find some better Internet ideas elsewhere, but the lack of familiarity with the newspaper industry has made it very painful to deal with other vendors and contractors."
Inside technical talent
The early success of in-house integration -- shovelware -- and the lag by newspaper developers to put new products on the market puts a premium on in-house technical talent.
That weighs on the weak area of on-line units: income, the money needed to keep good talent.
Can most newspapers afford to be their own integrators? Pioneers like Jennewein and Calloway think you can't afford not to.
"The days that a newspaper can sit back and wait for companies [like SII and Atex] to provide solutions on a platter are over," Jennewein said.
"Netscape Communications Corp. isn't newspaper-oriented. InfiNet can put a package together, but it currently isn't complete," he noted. There are many pieces that are good, but there isn't a one-size-fits-all.
"You can put together a powerful web site with off-the-shelf (pieces by) rolling up your sleeve, doing the integration and taking some risk," Jennewein said.
In that situation, many people on staff would be excited about doing the on-line project, he said. If not, a potential staff is as close as the nearest university, even on a part-time basis.
That's just what the New Horizons Group at the Pottsville (Pa.) Republican did, creating Info-Connect Web Publisher with Calliope LLC, a software development company founded by students at Duke University.
In Knight-Ridder's case, the New Media Center work is tested and improved at the chain's newspapers, such as a recent collaboration with the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press (http://www.pioneerplanet.com/). "When you have a network and you have on-line staff increasingly proficient at newspapers, it works both ways," Jennewein said.
In-house talent launched Modesto's ModBee in less than six months, said Coats.
"To get us on-line, we were like a shipyard in wartime. You want to do it, and you want to do it right ... and we figured we were late getting in, but we have talented people throughout the building," he said.
"My biggest coup was that we had on staff a wonderful publishing systems manager who runs our SII side, dabbles in C [a programming language] and was interested in web stuff. So we got married in a hurry."
Modesto Publishing Systems Manager Wayne Jeffries' homegrown programs push material off the editing and classified systems into the web server, add HTML on-the-fly, update pages, roll old copy into an archive, index everything and monitor visitor activity.
Almost all newspapers we talked to used in-house programming skill to launch on-line. This investment of time and talent may pay dividends to their publishers, but one supplier waved a bright red flag.
"Every year, newspapers run another five vendors into the ground and then turn around and bitch because nobody wants to help us solve our problems for the future," said Glenn Cruickshank, director of Tribune Solutions.
"We eat our young."
The research and development division of Kearns-Tribune Inc. of Salt Lake City, Tribune Solutions -- led by Cruickshank -- developed the NewsView archiving products sold by Lexis-Nexis of Dayton, Ohio.
On-site customizing seemed like a great idea when Cruickshank began writing those programs at the Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune.
"Now I know, being a developer, how expensive it is to develop software and how to keep programmers paid and how to develop for the future that will meet perhaps 95 percent of the customer's needs so that we can develop ongoing business and continue to be in business."
He doubts that most newspapers can afford adequate staffs. "At some point, somebody's going to say, 'I don't have the in-house resources, I have to buy it.'"
That's when the crunch will come.
"What's the application worth for you? What are you willing to pay? Either develop it in-house, and that will cost you a minimum of $100,000 a year just to put two programmers on staff and to get the tools that you need to develop that," Cruickshank said.
"Or, do you want to buy from a company that has a product that meets 95 percent of your needs and pay a fraction of that? That's what newspapers have to be willing to look at."
Swift simplicity
Inside newspapers, a collision appears inevitable between start-up and continuing costs.
Take web page design costs. Nando's Calloway observes that on-line layout, since it is different from the newspaper page, requires time, talent and tools.
Executives ask "where's the return?" when content managers want to experiment "just because we can," he said.
"Then you start seeing the battles between on-line people and upper management," Calloway said. "That discussion is being carried on at every single newspaper" with an on-line service.
Those worries seem distant at one 55,000-circulation morning daily with one technical staffer, one on-line full-timer and two part-timers.
The 'Net stakes are intentionally small, the web site is simple and the shoveling is done by sneakernet at the Pueblo (Colo.) Chieftain (http://www.rmii.com/). Two part-timers move all classified ads and the headline stories via diskette from a seven-year-old Harris system to the Mac web workstations.
"We decided we should put up a small site on the Web, because we needed to get that presence out there and we needed to explore what the possibilities were," said On-line Manager Jane Rawlings.
It's swift simplicity: mostly text, few graphics, no searching. Most of the average 1800 hits a day are from out-of-staters.
For a low-tech readership, it's the way to beat the local television and radio stations onto the new medium.
"That's why we wanted to do it now, because we wanted to make sure we had a presence there and the readership knew they could come to the ... trusted newspaper they've always come to, and that's where they would find what they were looking for," Rawlings said. "That may sound like a dichotomy because we don't have a lot on our site, but we're building it.
"Within the next year, we may need to do something that has more technological features in it," she said, "but the culture here is not to be on the cutting edge."
-- Marion J. Love
AdOne Classified Network,
(212) 431-3303,
e-mail: info@adone.com;
Associated Information Systems International,
(916) 888-6459,
e-mail: aisi@psyber.com;
Harris Publishing Systems Corp.,
(407) 242-5330,
e-mail: jfitch@harris.com;
InfiNet,
(804) 628-1020,
e-mail: www@infi.net;
Netscape Communications Corp.,
(415) 937-2555,
e-mail: info@netscape.com;
New Horizons Group,
(717) 622-3456,
e-mail: sesmith@pottsville.infi.net;
MediaStream,
(703) 758-1756,
e-mail: smessere@krmediastream.com;
Sysdeco Media Group,
(617) 275-2323,
e-mail: lburke@sysdeco.com;
System Integrators Inc.,
(916) 929-9481,
e-mail: sii@sii.com.
"If we can get people to crawl on the web right now, which is hard enough, we'll be there when they're ready to run the marathon."
-- AdOne's Roddy de la Garza.
See also InfiNet shifts development gears
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