NAA task force picks language for all on-line classifieds to use

(Editor's note: When we assigned Chris Feola, director of the Media Center at the American Press Institute of Reston, Va., to cover the Newspaper Association's classified task force, we knew he became a member of said task force at its inception, and therefore must be said to be fairly optimistic about its prospects.

(Further disclosures: Various members of The Cole Group write for various NAA publications, and, as Feola says, "There is strong evidence that David Cole and NAA Senior Vice President for Technology Eric Wolferman are really the same person. Think of it: Both are bearded newspaper industry technologists who appear at every single industry forum. Have you ever seen the two of them together? And then, of course, there is the infamous Danish Incident, and the thing with the freeze-dried ... oh, never mind.")

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The Newspaper Association of America has assembled an industry task force to set standards for the transmission and exchange of on-line classifieds.

Its first act was to select a language.

The task force was formed this spring, met in Houston in May and here in June, and is scheduled to reconvene in Denver in August. The 40 attendees at the Houston session chose Jack Stanley, vice president of operations at the Houston Chronicle, to be task force chair.

NAA staff on the task force include Senior Vice President Eric Wolferman; John Iobst, director of advanced computer science, and Kevin McCourt, director of real estate advertising and on-line classifieds.

In picking a language for communicating the content and business data of a classified ad, the Houston attendees wanted a technology that would allow the free flow of data between incompatible systems and media, allowing ads to flow from one order-taker to print, on-line and audiotext.

They chose the Extensible Markup Language for its flexibility. XML is sort of a lightweight version of the Standard Generalized Markup Language. SGML and XML are metalanguages -- universal languages used to create specific languages. Each specific language is defined by a Document Type Definition. Any program that understands the DTD can read and write these files. (Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, is nothing more than an SGML DTD.)

SGML was designed for handling things like the documentation for a Boeing 777. We're talking about the type of documents that can be hundreds of pages long, heavily laden with footnotes and cross-references. XML has almost all the power of SGML but considerably less overhead.

Much of the computer industry has announced support for XML. Microsoft, for example, has some XML support in Internet Explorer 4.0, and has announced full support for XML in IE 5.0 and the next version of Microsoft Office.

XML's flexibility makes life much easier for the task force. Any effort to set standards eventually runs into a cold fact of life: Different organizations have different needs. XML's ability to support multiple DTDs -- in other words, multiple sets of rules -- means that everyone need only agree on a common set of definitions.

Those definitions allow your system to know what is in the data coming to you and use those data as you please. For example, say your newspaper is in a classified consortium. Another newspaper sends you an ad defined as Bicycle. If your system knows what a Bicycle is, it can then move it into whatever category you deem fit -- transportation, general merchandise, whatever.

"Unlike the wire header, you can have a million tags, and you don't have to define them all up front," said Stanley. "It's OK if 10 get used 99.69 percent of the time. You're happy because you have what you need, and it doesn't matter that some other guy has what he needs to sell a hot pink DeLorean with a fifth door."

Iobst is developing the XML DTD for the classified standard. Such a standard will offer newspapers two clear business advantages, one internal and one external.

Internally, such a standard will allow classifieds to be flowed from one production system to another -- between pagination and audiotext systems, for example.

Externally, such a standard will enable newspapers to quickly and easily form consortiums to face the emerging competitive realities of the 21st century, such as a group of newspapers uniting to offer a regional real estate product. That, said Wolferman, is the reason for the task force -- to make newspapers more competitive in the critical area of classifieds as the Information Age matures.

The task force is an open standards group, Wolferman noted. Everyone is invited -- indeed, encouraged -- to participate. The group is already a fairly eclectic mix of newspapers and suppliers, technologists and consultants, executives and classified managers.

The group has been divided into four subcommittees, each of which is working on the data definitions for one area of the standard. The four areas are real estate, transportation, employment and the header, which contains things such as billing information (Iobst said the standard will probably support Electronic Data Interchange, or EDI, for the header format).

The subcommittees have spent much of their first two meetings working on the data definitions.

The transportation subcommittee, headed by the NAA's Melinda Gipson, offers this set of classifications: automotive, commercial vehicles, aircraft, motorcycles/all-terrain vehicles, marine, recreational vehicles, bicycles, and parts and service.

The field set for transportation includes year, make, model, type (such as auto, pickup or sport utility vehicle), price and features (which would include a broad array of items such as warranty, miles per gallon or mag wheels).

The real estate subcommittee's proposed data set includes location, number of bedrooms, number of baths and price. Location could be defined as broadly as city or county, or as specifically as the exact address.

The employment subcommittee decided to start by defining the job fairs category. Data fields for this category include specialty/industry, location, dates, times and newspaper classification.

The group decided early on that there would be no mandatory fields because, as one wag put it, no newspaper would reject an ad just because the advertiser didn't know or didn't wish to reveal, say, the price.

All the subcommittees are struggling with the trade-off between extremely detailed ads, which would improve search capabilities, and not having telephone ad takers spend an hour completing each ad.

Going swimmingly
Sounds like everything is going swimmingly, does it not?

It had better be, said participants at NAA's Connections '98 conference, where the task force came up for discussion during the technology panel June 19.

One of the most vocal attendees was Chris Gulker of Apple Computer Inc. Noting that "at Apple, we work for years on a product that has a shelf life of six months," Gulker said he's afraid the newspaper industry won't -- or can't -- compete at that pace.

Your obedient correspondent, Gipson and others associated with the task force assured the gathering that we are committed to a six-month time frame to reach our goal.

Gulker, however, has roots in the newspaper industry -- he was an executive at the San Francisco Examiner and a photographer at the late Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, among others. He pointed to earlier bids to set standards in the newspaper industry, such as the effort to set new standards for wire story transmission, whose progress was slower than the growth of glaciers.

That won't work in the Information Age, Gulker told the group at Connections -- whoever controls the standard controls the market. The market won't wait a couple of years for newspapers to set a classified advertising standard -- and for a standard, being second to market can be just as good as not making it to market at all.

Gulker even brought up the dinosaur metaphor. He feared that a market that required products with a shelf-life of six months would turn newspaper companies into slow-moving dinosaurs that would watch, helplessly, as the new, fast information companies scurry through their legs to gobble up all the revenue.

Gulker made it clear that he hopes the task force succeeds. But success requires involvement from across the industry. The accompanying box has links to the latest task force information, plus background information. Take a minute and read it. Stay up to date.

Join the task force, if you have the time. If you don't, send your comments to the NAA -- or to me, and I'll take them to the task force.

Alternatively, ask yourself this: How healthy would my newspaper be without classified revenue?

An empty scare tactic, you say? Consider this: Auto-By-Tel sold $500 million worth of cars on-line in 1997, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. That shows that serious competitors are emerging.

The market will not be kind to those who cannot evolve. Nature is red in tooth and claw, Kipling wrote. Business is no kinder.

-- Christopher J. Feola

See also: Task force's work, other information on-line

From THE COLE PAPERS, July 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.