Track and field of dreams: Left, photographers point their lenses at competitors during the first day of track and field events at the Summer Olympics. AFP Photo via PressLink: Gabriel Bouys.

Phone home: Right, Seth Pancoast, a technician with Bell Atlantic, checks one of the 1800 phone circuits that were installed for the press at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. AFP Photo via PressLink: Tom Mihalek.

Quadrennial news events are opportunity to experiment

The newspaper technology establishment would have you believe that change in the way we work comes upon us like a herd of wild stallions thundering through some picturesque Southwestern desert canyon.

Actually, technological change is more like a battalion of cockroaches -- gradually taking over the place while you're sleeping, ready to skitter back under the fridge at the slightest hint of trouble.

Which is why the wonderful sea changes are trumpeted in the trade press years before you ever see them in your newsroom. But once they're there, like a roach infestation, you just can't get rid of it.

That said, the quadrennial hemorrhaging of travel budgets known as The Presidential Election/Olympics Year can teach us a few things about what flies and what crashes out there in the real world, because only then do newspapers field so many wordsmiths and photographers (picturesmiths?) to produce so much content for so little newshole.

Ah, but what about the Web, the 24-hour cable TV outlets and the ravenous convergence beast that will suck in every scrap of information we can produce?

Not this year, Chester -- as an industry we just passed the stage where the repurposing light bulb goes on over our collective head. We still haven't figured out how to put it all together, though a lot of media conglomerates are doing some interesting experimentation.

No, this ElexOlympics, it's incremental change that holds sway.

Some specific areas of interest to well-connected journalists, their bosses and bean counters follow.

The Internet
Ka-Pow! Just when the hype finally reached neck-level, the 'Net actually started living up to its promise. Who'da thunk?

VPN (virtual private networking) is bidding to take over all those proprietary networks that correspondents have had to utilize to file from all over the country and world.

It works this way: Hook up to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) of your choice just to get on the 'Net. Once connected, you launch some software application that encrypts the hell out of your data and hooks you into a server that in turn connects you to your newsroom's network.

Bottom line: Two sign-ons from anywhere in the world (maybe fewer depending on how it's set up), and you might as well be in the newsroom, with full access to goodies like e-mail, the library and the expense accounting system. And wherever you are, the coffee is probably better as well.

When you're done with company stuff, one click disconnects the VPN and you can go back to your cheesy chat room where you pretend to be a 16-year-old ingenue.

Bean counters at your shop positively gush at this prospect (VPN, not the chat room) because they don't have to pay for proprietary nets like Western Union, Uunet (formerly CompuServe) or InfoNet. Nor do they have to pay for continent-wide 800 numbers (or other toll charges) where the meter spins while you check your mail, read the wires and file a story or two.

The bean counters at the aforementioned private networks are probably having a succession of Bad Days while they figure out how to get their own VPNs up and running. Holy aging infrastructure, Batman!

Apart from the connectivity issue, there's the rest of the Web, and it's mighty indeed.

"Nineteen-ninety-six was supposed to be the Web year, but 2000 really is," allowed Terry Schwadron, editor for information and technology at the New York Times. Not only are the usual web pages available to reporters and editors, Schwadron said, "we have a web page in Sydney for the staff to be able to follow and share as much information as they need about who's at what venue, where the equipment is, things like that."

Interesting. The URL?

"That's the whole point -- it's on an intranet, so it's private," Schwadron said.

Fair enough -- however, you can get a taste of this kind of treatment at Presslink's Sydney site (http://online.presslink.com/ and click Sports and then Sydney 2000 to get there). You won't be able to get any further unless you're a member, but check out all the choices. Because of the 15-hour time difference between much of the United States and Australia, not only the press, but many fans, took to the Web for results that were actually news, not Olympics-on-tape.

Cellular phones and pagers
Sure, these have been around, but never before have they been this light, small, powerful and downright useful.

"Cell phones were there in 1996," recalled Phillip Ruiz, lead for national and foreign bureaus at the Los Angeles Times (and a well-traveled colleague of the author's, we should disclose).

"But they were big and clumsy," Ruiz said, "only geeky-type people would carry them on their belts. The battery life was so short you also had to carry a pager, and people would page you on that. Then you'd turn the phone on just to answer the call and turn it back off again."

Ruiz marvels at what four years has wrought: "The standby time on the Nokia I have is several days," he said. "You can easily leave it on all day and throw it in a charger overnight."

And you set up your mail system so you can get pages and e-mail on the little puppy as well. So who needs a pager anymore?

Not Ruiz and his Washington, D.C., cohorts, it turns out -- they're turning in their pagers in favor of carrying small cell phones all day.

(Back on the Left Coast, his less-advantaged peers are hobbled by ancient buildings, fortress-like earthquake-resistant -- we hope -- walls, cloistered, underground offices and other architecture that sucks the life out of any cellular signal weaker than the Death Ray.

(Which means L.A. geeks tend to set their pagers to vibrate and use land-lines the way Alexander Graham Bell intended. It's retro, but kind of peaceful.)

Returning to the bleeding edge, Ruiz has noticed a new wrinkle in convention coverage this year: the combination cellular phone and two-way radio built by Motorola and popularized by Nextel.

"I've seen photographers from other papers make use of it -- you can talk to a group of photographers on the convention floor and ask all of them at one time who is close to this person they need a picture of," Ruiz said. L.A. Times photographers use walkie-talkie radios, but that's one more belt-hanging box. "What's nice with the Nextel is the fact that it's an all-in-one unit," he added.

But what about web browsers being built into the newest models of cellular phones?

"It's still pretty new," cautions New York Times' Schwadron, "and I think a laptop would be better. But having said that, obviously some people are using this -- political reporters, photographers and sports writers tend to be early adopters of new technology. It may be a direction we're moving in."

Digital photography
Electronic cameras have been around for so long they're almost boring -- even Grandma is getting into the fray with $400 cameras that deliver surprisingly good results, and the trips to the one-hour processor for prints are becoming antiquated -- now you just dump the shots off to the Web and tell family members to log on.

But the quality action, as always, has been in the professional arena -- the capabilities, range and reach of digital news photography has redefined the art and finally has mated speed with quality. In 1996 photographers pretty much had to choose one or the other.

"In 1996," Ruiz estimated, "we probably did one-third digital and two-thirds chemical [film] photography at the conventions."

"This time around it's all digital. I didn't see a chemical processor anywhere."

Wireless filing
First, there was the satellite phone, heavy, bulky and capable of transmitting so slowly that monks could send illuminated manuscripts and not fall behind. But when you had no phones, it was all there was.

In fact, "satphones" remain all there is, in places like Nairobi, Kenya, Jakarta, Indonesia, Kosovo and Yugoslavia, said Ruiz.

"The power in Kosovo's off more often than it's on. I was just talking this morning with our correspondent, and they have a gas generator there powering a light, a refrigerator and the satellite phone. That's how they get their stories in, check the wire, pick up their messages, talk on the phone."

No Web, though -- the data speeds have evolved up to 9600 bits per second, but that's below the usable threshold of browsers. On the other side, the satphones are now much lighter -- about the size and weight of a small laptop. And their cost has plummeted from about $10,000 to $2000 apiece.

So has airtime.

"In some areas of the world there are circumstances where satphones are the most economical alternative," Schwadron said. "Sometimes when you're calling from your hotel room it actually may be cheaper to use the satellite." So, all NYT correspondents are issued satellite gear along with the usual laptop and cell phone.

Back on terra firma, wireless transmission of data has been huge -- the umbilical connection of a cellular phone to a laptop is almost quaint by 2000 standards.

Now we're hooking into proprietary TCP/IP networks like Metricom's Ricochet, which promises ISDN speeds via telephone-pole transmitters in major cities. But not all cities are covered yet (Philadelphia didn't have it for the Republican Convention, Ruiz reported), and when you can get it, the transmission speeds may be 28,800 bits per second. Four years from now, the new BlueTooth consortium's wireless technology -- now just appearing on laptops -- could well be the norm, and everything will be wireless. Right now, it's as spotty as cellular coverage was in 1996.

But the fact that it's there at all is noteworthy.

"The wireless LAN [Local Area Network] didn't exist at all four years ago," Ruiz said. "It just was not there."

Among the speedier wireless schemes is Apple's AirPort, which requires only an interface card and a transmitter to achieve speeds up to 11 million bits per second, fast enough for sending photos from a convention floor up to the photo desk, as both Agence France-Press (AFP) and Reuters did this year. (Psst! It also works with one of those nasty PCs.)

Crowding of frequencies is going to be a problem, though -- one of the LA Times' tech wizards plugged in an AirPort transmitter for testing and was asked to unplug it by Reuters, whose photographers were already using that channel. C'est la guerre.

Ruiz points to an ironic twist when it comes to filing electronically: More is less.

"It was actually easier and more reliable to send stories into the system years ago than it is now," he said. "The systems were character-based, and you just had to send plain text and slow speeds, and the system took it in character by character.

"Now those technologies have gone away -- the newer systems are server-based and you need a minimum of 9600 baud [bits per second], and ideally people like speeds of 19.2 [kilobits per second] before it really gets useful. But the bandwidth hasn't gotten any better to support that amount of data."

So the industry's in limbo -- using analog lines to communicate with digital systems, waiting for both wired and wireless technologies to catch up to the insatiable data appetites of the new gear. Stay tuned, with any luck this will be something we'll laugh about in 2004.

-- John Bryan, jwb@colepapers.net

Agence France-Presse,
(202) 414-0535;
Metricom Inc.,
(408) 282-3000;
PressLink,
(800) 888-6195,
e-mail: info@krmediastream.com;
Reuters,
(703) 471-2243.

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