The start of digital: The AP Leafax 35, a scanner in a suitcase, was the first real method for newspapers to create digital photos. (Photo courtesy of the AP.)

It's hard to keep digital pictures in strips and glassine sleeves

In the mid-1980s, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans was using a state-of-the-art Crosfield digital picture desk to process photos. Of course, the pictures came in on the same old slow analog Associated Press lines and went out to an Autokon image recorder. But, for a few moments, those pictures were digital.

That digital nirvana was all too brief, with the Crosfield holding photos for about six hours before they were purged. If editors wanted to use a picture at 8 p.m. that came in at noon, they had to print it out just as if it came in before the dawn of the digital age. Archiving the photos wasn't even on the radar. Anything that needed to be saved went out to the old AP receivers and from there into folders in the library.

But with digital cameras now falling under the $5000 mark, newspapers that had remained analog are moving rapidly to a digital world. And they are finding that they desperately need to find a way to deal with all the digital images.

"With digital cameras, we'll have to archive a lot more stuff," said John Meyer, news editor of the 50,000-circulation Wilmington, N.C., Morning Star. "We used to [digitally] archive just the shots we used. If we needed more shots, we just went back to the assignment, got the negatives and printed what we needed."

What Meyer and many other editors across the land have discovered is that with digital cameras, there are no negatives to which to returnUnlike the days when Meyer could go to a warehouse and get negatives from 15 or 20 years ago, if something is not saved digitally now, it won't be available in 15 years.

In the not-too-distant past, photographers saved everything that was shot. Negatives were cut up in strips, stored in glassine sleeves and envelopes and filed away. Most newspapers entered them in an index, recording -- at the least -- photographer, date, subject and assignment. Years later, editors could cull through them to illustrate stories, bringing depth that would otherwise be missing.

"When Michael Jordan retired," Meyer recalls, "I was able to go dig out pictures of when he played high school basketball by asking for all the negatives shot on Tuesdays and Fridays for those years when he was just another high school star. I probably wouldn't be able to do that now."

What Meyer has run into is a side effect of going digital. Like front-end systems in the 1970s and '80s, digital photography has been embraced because of fiscal and deadline pressures. Digital photography allows photographers to cover events closer to deadline and, now that camera prices have dropped out of the stratosphere, the cost of the equipment is more than offset by the savings in chemicals, film and disposal costs.

Lost in that switchover is the need to preserve pictures for posterity. Since most pictures didn't go digital until it was decided to use them in the paper, the previous system of filing negatives remained in place. But now that there are no more negatives, papers need to decide what should be saved. Along with that are the questions of how and where things should be saved, who will control the archives and who will have access to them.

What to save
Bill Phillips, photo editor of Florida's 279,000-circulation Orlando Sentinel, does not think it is necessary to save every picture shot by every photographer.

"You get the most interest in a photo shoot right after it's shot," Phillips said, "and then it wanes. It's proportional to the amount of time since the assignment."

Phillips has his staff save everything that is shot on film, but not everything that is shot digitally.

"If you burn CDs," Phillips asks, "who is going to maintain the archive, who is going to index it, will it be available 24-by-7 or just 9-to-5, who is going to have access? I say save a few more than you otherwise would and toss the rest. Unfortunately, that gets howls because of the Monica factor."

The "Monica factor," as Phillips puts it, comes from the pictures of President Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky in a crowd, outtakes from another assignment. That picture is used as Exhibit No. One by everybody who wants to save every picture, and goes back to the film standard when it was easier -- and cheaper -- to save everything.

The question of what to save is just one of many questions facing newspapers. Pressures brought about by the Internet, traditional newspaper newsrooms merging with TV, cable and Web operations and a multitude of vendors all go into Phillips's mix of access, maintenance and control.

These questions all fall into an area known either as digital asset management or -- a term more popular in the publishing industry -- media asset management.

"The publishing industry was looking at point products to solve particular problems," said Larry Jones, co-founder of New Jersey-based Atrinity Corp., a consulting firm dealing in asset management issues.

That method, though it works, is short-sighted, Jones said, locking companies in to decisions that may hinder an organization's overall goals.

"Departments can make the decisions on asset management, but organizations need to understand that it is an organizational decision," Jones said. "The right technology often requires a change in the organization and can alter the way business gets done."

With management of digital files, Jones said, "you can get into knowledge management, knowledge learning," which can be more important than just converting pictures from film to ones and zeros.

Jones said that media asset management is not just saving pictures on disk or choosing hardware or software, but looking at how it's organized.

"You can always buy hard disks and just add more," Jones said, "so storage is not a problem. And you can set up a folder system so you can actually find the files. But if you try to link a database, it's different. Picking SQL or Oracle is easy. But deciding if you want a filename in the metadata and what other information you want, it gets tough."

And that is just part of the problem, according to Jones. Figuring out what a department wants to do, and then deciding where that fits in with the organization's long-term goals is even harder.

"When you get to the point of how you want to use the pictures, and serve them to the different people who need them, it really gets hard," Jones said. "When you get to the different audiences, the information you need changes. The products you choose early on have long term implications."

'There's a real business'
The New York Times, like many papers, is dealing with those implications. Although the 1.1 million-circulation paper is not completely digital in its photo department, 12 of the paper's photographers shoot most of their work with digital cameras. All the photos that come in from the wire services, as well as bureaus, come in to its digital editing and archiving systems and a mix of other systems downstream.

"While everybody talks about repurposing, we really are doing it," said Terry Schwadron, senior editor for information and technology at the Times. "There's a real business with all these pictures. We're doing books, selling photos to our readers, making posters and sending pictures to the Internet," he said.

Unlike Orlando's Phillips, the Times is archiving everything. Its digital photographers hit the road with Apple PowerBooks and CD burners in their camera bags. The photographers dump their images onto the PowerBook, onto a partition that is the size of a CD-ROM. When that partition is full, they dump it onto a CD, which is then loaded into the paper's T/One Merlin system, which sucks everything off, indexes it, and sends it off to an archive.

The Times is looking at a grand asset management strategy to help deal with all these photos, the places they are being used, as well as trying to make them more readily available in the newsroom, Schwadron said. "We'd like to make it as commonplace to look at picture clips as it is to look at text clips before going out on an assignment," he said. "It makes good sense to have this information available throughout the building."

To do that, the various newsroom departments need to work together and find common ground, keeping in mind the overall organizational needs. A picture desk or archiving system is not just the sphere of a photo desk or library, though they will have significant input.

"Everyone who is interested should get together and decide what is needed," said Nora Paul, formerly library director and editor of information services at the Miami Herald and now on the faculty of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Poynter Institute. "All the decisions about how you are going to store other people's images and what you are going to store in your database have to be discussed."

Paul said she expects that not everything will be in one database. Rather, she said, there will be different databases that contain different information for use inside and outside the paper, along with different mixes of stories, photos and other information. "What you'll see is a meta search engine, a portal. It takes your search and lets you go into several databases."

Paul, like Atrinity's Jones, said there is much that has to be done before those databases can be put into place. "There is so much pre-decision decision-making," she said. "Decisions on the things that have to be with the pictures. ... There is so much prep work and internal information that goes along with the workflow. But if everybody waits until there is that perfect database, you'll be so many months and years behind, or as often happens now, nothing is saved."

AP's digital puzzle
Papers that think they have all this under control can be blindsided by the changing mix of vendors and their plans.

The Associated Press, for example, kickstarted digital photography and digital delivery with products such as the Leafax, the LeafDesk and its digital cameras. Every paper that subscribes to AP's photo service has at least an AP receiver in house, often surrounded by other pieces of AP's digital puzzle. AP's Preserver, marketed by the association's PhotoTechnology Marketing Group, was well-received and is in use at more than 40 papers. Like everybody else in the newspaper community, those papers had banded together to form a users group -- Appug, the AP Preserver Users Group -- and had high hopes for the product.

Unfortunately for them, AP announced in October, at the very first Appug meeting, that the phototechnology marketing group was being disbanded and the Preserver would be phased out.

Karl Kuntz, deputy managing editor of Ohio's 250,000-circulation Columbus Dispatch, was caught flatfooted by AP's announcement, having chosen AP's Preserver over the competing product from Quincy, Mass.-based T/One.

"We have 250,000 images in our old archive, which AP isn't going to support," Kuntz said. "We're now looking at a new archive system, which we had not planned to do."

Whichever supplier Kuntz and his team choose, there is a lot of work to be done, and work that had been done on the AP system has to be saved.

"The new vendor has to pull the old archive over, and retain all the editing," he said. "We don't want to lose all that work.

"It's funny," Kuntz said. "We're now looking at T/One. One of the reasons we went with AP was we knew they would be around. We didn't know if T/One would. Now, we're just looking to cut our losses and move on."

The Times-Picayune is moving on, too. The 278,000-circulation Picayune has been shooting digital photos for some time now, and -- aided by the drop in pricing -- is rushing to convert to an all-digital photo operation. Storing the photos has been somewhat of a problem, though.

"We have been storing the images to a Zip disk," Nancy Burris, the Picayune's librarian said. "Right now, without an archive, they are storing what ran and some outtakes, but if it's a special project, or something they think is significant, they'll store more."

The Picayune's Zip disk archive system was based on its negative archive, with an text-based index. "We continued to file a reference as if it were a negative number, and we could locate the Zip," she said. "It's not ideal, but we were not going to invest a lot in it."

Burris and Photo Editor Doug Parker, working with other members of newsroom management, spent quite a bit of time looking at various photo archiving systems and deciding what they needed.

"We looked at options for almost five years, seriously for the last two," she said. "We would almost buy and back off and almost buy and back off."

Burris said they looked at companies that started out with photo archiving and grafted on text archiving, and companies that did it the other way around.

"We wanted something that did both," she said. "We also needed a strong tracking system. We wanted it to flow from where photo assignment requests originated on into the archive. We wanted a modular system so we could add as needed or as things were modified without rebuilding everything. We wanted open architecture that we could control here. And we wanted to move things easily in and out again."

Now that the Picayune knows what it wants, Burris is eager to get moving.

"We're hoping to buy in the next week or so and be running by March," she said.

-- Steven E. Brier

The Associated Press,
(212) 621-1500;
T/ONE Inc.,
(617) 328-6645,
e-mail: pleabo@t-1.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, February 2000, Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved.