Burrowing deep: The Needham page at Townonline
offers news of the community residents would be
hard-pressed to find anywhere else.

Outsourcing, new media savvy foster a community on-line

NEEDHAM, Mass. -- As John Glenn, an "American legend," hurtled into the heavens Oct. 22, Townonline's opener hailed, "Natick Labs cater Glenn's historic ride."

Of course.

Elevating Natick Labs, the peanut butter-and-jelly spacewich purveyor next door, to the local on-line front page is why Community Newspaper Co.'s interactive media division gets invited onto thousands of computer screens in eastern Massachusetts.

Townonline (http://www.townonline.com/) is the digital echo of Community's 115-plus nameplates; they all deliver next-door news, from Cape Cod to the New Hampshire border. In the shadow of the Boston Globe and Boston Herald, Community's pulp patchwork of 90 weeklies, two dailies, 19 shoppers and a number of targeted specialty products scores 946,873 total circulation.

On the Web, Townonline attracts its 30,000 visitors a month one neighborhood at a time.

"We're much more of a locally focused site, town by town, rather than a nationally focused site," said Kirsten Alexander, interactive media marketing director. "Townonline has coverage of 140 or so communities, and people are ecstatic to find it, because they can't find it anywhere else."

Although it features metro neighborhoods as well, "I think of Townonline as suburbs.com," quipped Eric Bauer, Townonline's executive editor. "Our print niche is local news, and we're the people [providing] the super-local information that you need to function in the community every day."

When it comes to technology, however, Townonline is anything but small-town. Community revels in its "think small" content and advertising concentration while choosing on-line tools that rival the big guys for leading-edge gusto.

Already live are KOZ Community Builder from KOZ Inc. of Durham, N.C.; Electric Classifieds Inc. of San Francisco; Ipix 360-degree images from Interactive Pictures Corp. of New York, and directories from Switchboard Inc. of Westboro, Mass. Coming on-line this month are web creation tools from FutureTense of Acton, Mass.

Townonline's duet of content and horsepower have won industry favor in the form of awards from the likes of Editor & Publisher Co. and the Newspaper Association of America's New Media Federation. That's a treat for Community's parent, Fidelity Capital, the Boston-based venture capital arm of Fidelity Investments.

Fidelity first set foot in the newspaper business 12 years ago with a minority stake in the Northshore Weeklies. Since 1990, Fidelity has built up Community with 29 acquisitions.

Newspapers take a second seat
With a parent who thrives on networking, transaction processing and fast-paced business, Townonline gets lots of encouragement to apply technology.

Evidence of this is in the equipment layout. Among the office checkerboard are empty cubicles, pre-loaded with Fidelity hand-me-down PCs, awaiting staff moves to come. Then there are the cross-platform network, where Macs and PCs work hand-in-hand, and mentions of technical assistance from Fidelity for system planning.

Encouragement extends to money-making ideas, such as on-line-only classified buys, which have the potential to cannibalize print liner sales. "There is not the same interest as at other newspapers ... in protecting the mother ship," the traditional pulp products, Bauer said.

Only a handful of the 37 interactive media staff have any newspaper experience, hailing instead from multimedia, broadcasting and high tech. That includes General Manager Howard Schultz, a former vice president of Maynard, Mass.-based Monsterboard, one of the early on-line recruitment sites.

In the interactive media publisher's chair is a fusion veteran, Charleen Li, who previously was new project development manager at the San Jose Mercury News.

The Fidelity touch couples aggressive application of technology with patience for profits. In return, Fidelity benefits from Townonline's roles as talent scout and proving ground, and it invests in some companies eyed by Community's interactive media unit, such as KOZ.

Nascent technology is discovered via trade shows, magazine articles, Forrester Research, collegial grapevines and sampling off the 'Net. "We try things out. We're web people; that's what we do," Alexander said.

Catchy software undergoes informal group scrutiny, and depending on how far-reaching the functions are, is paraded past a management committee.

Although there are no firm selection criteria, successful technology candidates share some general characteristics. Selections lean toward outsourcing and service bureaus, companies that can sustain the great ambitions for this small team -- which has no dedicated techies.

"We have a talented staff that has a great degree of technical expertise," acknowledged Gordon Kent, business development manager. Even so, "we try to outsource as much as we can. A lot of the time we are better suited to understanding strategies and tactics rather than building the tools.

"Our goal as a company is to be in the business of connecting advertisers with consumers, and vice versa. We don't want to be in the business of developing software."

KOZ, ECI, Switchboard and several other on-line partners are service bureaus, supplying the software and maintaining servers, then attaching a private label to Townonline's design. Little of Townonline's technology is chugging at Community's headquarters in this Boston suburb. Technical support for its content workflow system is handled by its creator, TVisions Inc. (http://www.tvisions.com/), conveniently located a few miles away in Cambridge. Mass.

Where some companies shudder at losing technology control or handing over a customer database, Community's decision-makers weigh getting the most benefit for the fewest resources.

"We don't have to say, 'The new upgrade we did requires a new server, or needs a new Informix upgrade, and that's going to blow our profits for the quarter,'" Kent said. "We do maintain control through our relationships with our vendors."

Townonline stays nimble by running light on hardware and software. For example, after an 18-month run with CareerSite, it swung the job ads and recruiting features to ECI. "We felt we had a closer relationship with ECI, and we felt they were more in tune with where we wanted to go," Alexander explained.

And since demand from advertisers and readers drives their fortunes, Townonline also values responsiveness in suppliers. This puts some traditional newspaper suppliers under a cloud. Newspapering's reputation as an elephant, not a hummingbird, has stuck to industry-dedicated Internet software providers in some minds.

"A lot of times, we find those companies suspect," said Project Manager Tammy Langmeyer.

Said her boss, Gordon Kent: "I don't want to be driven by what other newspapers want, I want to be driven by what the Internet wants. Vendors that only work with newspapers make me timid."

Instead, they look for track records with other Internet-based operations. Prerequisites are fast product cycles that keep up with the web development curve and "companies that can help you see new possibilities," as Alexander put it, along with financial stability, good pricing models and solid, realistic contracts.

Ultimately, Kent said, the answer to any investment in technology proceeds from one question: "How do we make money here?"

Payback: people, flexibility
Community seeks labor payback from what Schultz calls "enablers," tools that pump in efficiencies so that Townonline can reapply staff to cover more towns, add compelling features and attract more advertisers.

That's the kind of payback Bauer expects from FutureTense when it's fully operational. While TVision's system automates the majority of on-line pages, converging the content and building feature pages still occupies lots of time.

"We're the first institution [within Community] to draw from all the company's newspaper systems," said Bauer, which includes an "antiquated" Tecs/2 classified front-end from Information International Inc. (now Autologic Informational International of Thousand Oaks, Calif.), NewsEdit by Baseview Systems Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., and homegrown workgroups based on Microsoft Word.

Fortunately, the process ends at six production centers, where final copy resides in Quark XPress pagination folders. Townonline's four content coordinators and five on-line editors reach across Community's wide area network to fetch the stories.

"We know where they are," Bauer said. "Thank goodness we don't have a hundred dailies."

The editors leave stories fairly intact, but rework headlines and accessory text to fit the on-line realm.

"We don't worry so much about cuts" made in XPress pages, Bauer said, "and there are some editors who actively take advantage of that" to release more details of a story through the 'Net.

Once the on-line team has stories in hand, filters and Microsoft Office '97 macros remove typesetting commands and convert codes to metatags, which TVision scripts then read and flow into hard-coded web server templates.

Restructuring these links and tweaking designs isn't entered into lightly.

"One of the nice things about FutureTense is that the fairly minor changes to pages will be scads easier and scads cheaper than it has been," Bauer hoped aloud. That leaves five or six index and home pages to be written by hand.

All the staffers are trained in HTML, while designers use Hot Dog Pro, Fusion, Macromedia DreamWeaver and a smattering of other Html-generating tools.

Daily planning and interacting with print-side editors isn't as simple. "There's no way to communicate in a coordinated way," Bauer said, because the group is still growing a companywide network.

Classified liners are posted in a more automated fashion. They pass through a batch dump from the Tecs/2 system to ECI, where IsoQuest's NetOwl parser normalizes abbreviations, dissecting data into fields and an index. Banner ads rotate courtesy of Accipiter, which recently succeeded ClickWise in Community's quest for more placement capacity.

The thorny task of converting print display ads to web display is handled with a module that Kent developed in-house. His progeny is called the Multipurpose Internet Display Advertising System (Midas), which he devised using Perl, VisualBasic and technology from British innovator Iceni.

Midas dissects text from EPS files. Once they are RIPped to Adobe Portable Document Format files, Iceni applies structure to the nonstructured files.

"We take all the display ads for real estate, parse and break them apart, field the data and normalize it, and then we put it on the web site," said Kent. The day's display census takes just two hours to post under Midas's touch.

Low demand for on-line images forestalled writing an automated pass-through. Instead, real estate offices can add their own through a password-protected gateway, where they also can modify listings on the spot.

Channeling more to revenue
Aside from process enablers, Townonline is looking for "things that will help increase traffic, increase awareness and increase revenues," Alexander said.

Last summer, on-line personals were added to match Townonline's Micro Voice personals. This fall, attention was turned to e-commerce (electronic transaction processing) and personalization.

"The end all and be all is [newspapers'] ability to connect advertisers with consumers," said Kent. "It's always been our domain, it's always been something that we could do traditionally. We need to make the leap from the newspaper to the on-line world."

Taking that leap, newspaper companies can enable web users to sell directly to each other, by installing mechanisms to complete exchange of goods and cash. Town on-line's first step is developing a more flexible infrastructure, based on ECI's Internet Classifieds Engine and expected to launch in early 1999.

Personalization and agent technology should shorten paths between readers and content.

"What happens is, you become a really big site with a lot of content, and the bigger you get, the harder it is for people to find it," Alexander said. "You need to come up with alternate ways for people to get what they want."

Personalization tools help convert on-line's equivalent of single-copy buyers into subscribers who get hooked on the site and rack up visits. "We know how to put up more towns and we know how to get more community groups on-line," Alexander said. "But you still have to investigate what you can do next to keep your traffic growing."

One product under scrutiny is Interest!Alert, now testing on Newton's town pages. Beyond story selection by preference and dynamic page creation, its features support content syndication, guiding appropriate stories to other web sites that crave content and are willing to pay for it.

It's one more name in the vocabulary of software and services used by Townonline personnel, evidence of their unceasing prowl for new, now tools. A few false starts and technology U-turns are part of the process, Schultz said, and parent Fidelity Capital is committed to a long-term vision, one of "integrated, converged media that can give the best service to readership and make money."

As yet, Townonline isn't profitable. Schultz mentioned patience as an important ingredient in finding "a strategic direction that makes sense for the newspaper and the community." Thus far, that direction is Community's parochial focus, supported by laser beam-like delivery technology, matching customers with advertisers.

"What we can offer people that the Globe can't or the Herald can't, or any competitors -- print or on-line -- is that we can target your ad more granularly than they can," Bauer said. "[Readers] come and look for other reasons than they do Boston.com or Sidewalk, and we can offer the advertisers a little or even a lot more targeted market than the big guys can."

They also can offer a neighborly hand to local commerce.

"Yahoo may be good," Kent said, "but they don't come to your business and say, 'What can we do for you on the Web?'"

-- Marion J. Love

Acuity Corp., (512) 425-2200, e-mail: sales@acuity.com;
AdKnowledge Inc., (650) 842-6500, e-mail: support@adknowledge.com;
CareerSite Corp., (734) 213-9500, e-mail: info@careersite.com;
Classified Warehouse Inc., (212) 965-2900, e-mail: busdev@classifiedwarehouse.com;
Electric Classifieds Inc., (415) 284-5300, e-mail: info@eci.net;
Engage Technologies Inc., (978) 684-3884, e-mail: kathleen@engage.com;
Fidelity Capital, (617) 563-9106;
FutureTense, (978) 635-3600, e-mail: info@futuretense.com;
Interest!Alert Inc., (916) 985-4445, e-mail: mail@interestalert.com;
KOZ Inc., (919) 767-1061, e-mail: info@koz.com;
Micro Voice Applications Inc., (612) 373-9300, e-mail: contact@mva.com;
Switchboard Inc., (508) 898-1122, e-mail: ehaney@switchboard.com;
TVisions Inc., (617) 441-8330, e-mail: info@tvisions.com.

See also Web sites for everyone

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