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| February 2001 |
SuperConference topics range from multimedia news to PDFLAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- The Newspaper Association of America's annual newspaper production conference and respite from the cold winter -- it's called SuperConference and it was held here on the grounds of Disney World on Jan. 8-12 -- may have had the newspaper stuff right, but the weather was still colder than Florida should be in January. Nonetheless, more than 500 people attended the four-ring circus -- over the five-day period, four conferences are held, some concurrently -- which included segments on health and safety, press and materials, packaging and circulation, and pre-press. Approximately half the attendees were at the pre-press meeting, whose keynote address was delivered by David Underhill, vice president for intergroup development at Chicago's Tribune Co. Underhill -- a longtime broadcasting executive with experience in all facets of radio and television, including news, management, sales and engineering -- coordinates all the print, broadcast and multimedia initiatives within Tribune. Naturally, Underhill's presentation was heavy on Tribune's experiences in convergence. The product of its recent merger with Times Mirror Co., in addition to its 11 newspapers -- including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday and Baltimore's Sun -- Tribune has 18 television stations and four radio stations, as well as stakes in two 24-hour cable news channels. Calling it "24-hour publishing," Underhill said that Tribune's multimedia initiatives have a "local touch but a national reach." He said that there is a "compelling strategic combination of major media assets" and that the future portends for new products, services and platforms because of broadband delivery, digital television and wireless. "Our strength is the local communities we serve," said Underhill, citing the notion that cross-ownership of print and broadcast entities "creates new value." He said that there are benefits to both quality and lowering costs with content-sharing between media, and that cross-ownership builds brands and audiences through cross-promotion and satisfies the emerging demands for multimedia marketing solutions. Underhill acknowledged that there are "significant differences" in how TV and print cover stories, but that the company has print and broadcast newsrooms working together in markets such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Hartford, Conn., South Florida and Orlando, Fla. The Tribune executive said that multimedia was "not just in the newsrooms." Tribune does cross-media advertising sales, cross-platform marketing and promotion to build and launch brands and that the company can serve clients who seek a mass-media reach that's combined with electronic targeting. Consumers benefit through the "most dependable source of up-to-date and comprehensive news and information," said Underhill. The news is available 24 hours a day, with an enhanced multimedia experience, including video and audio on the company's local web sites. The changing workflow at newspapers and broadcasters will create "challenges everywhere," said Underhill. In addition to the newfound 24-hour, seven-day-a-week deadline structure, the news operations will have to support databases for multiple platforms (he cited calendar sections as an example) and centralized web publishing (which he called a "shared news service"). In the arena of graphics and photography, Underhill envisions cross-media file sharing with the same artwork for the Web and broadcast, cross-media advertising make-up and animation available to both Web and broadcast. "Still photographers will begin videography," said Underhill, and he pondered the "ultimate camera" that could shoot video and still images with equal quality. Shared editorial front-end systems will begin with news budgets being shared between newspapers and broadcast, said Underhill, with a marriage of "print, broadcast and Web content becoming technically feasible." In the multimedia world, said Underhill, a reporter will file the top of the current story to a "multimedia news desk," that will dispatch the information to the Web, broadcast and cable. Then the reporter would build an audio news story, then a video news story and would finally write a piece for the newspaper. Underhill's vision of the future includes technology such as the company's video file-servers that are already in place at Chicago's WGN-TV (and elsewhere) and a move toward broadband asynchronous transfer mode networks replacing frame-relay (see The Cole Papers, December 2000). Utilizing bandwidth-on-demand, a news executive could "drag-and-drop video" from one station to another, assuming proper security authorities were met. Tribune's multimedia chief hit upon a theme that ran throughout the remainder of the two-day conference, wrapping up with a quick discussion of metadata, eXtensible Markup Language (XML), rights and permissions "challenges" and the movement to get technology standards from broadcast and print to synch up. "Please support standards inoperability," Underhill urged.
Hot new technologies
The highlights of the "hot new technologies" in the pre-press conference included:
One of these technologies, GoCode, from GoCode Products Corp. of Charleston, S.C., is being utilized by three newspapers, including The Gazette of Colorado Springs, Colo. Gary Blakeley, the paper's vice president of operations, gave the SuperConference crowd a presentation on GoCode and how The Gazette is utilizing the system. Blakeley explained that GoCode consists of three basic components -- the GoCode "symbology" (or the miniature bar codes), the GoCode Pen Reader and the GoCode application software. The symbology is a bar code that can be reproduced in 5-point type on newsprint and has built-in error correction. The Pen Reader is a non-contact device that can read the GoCode symbol in any degree of rotation. On the horizon, GoCode envisions cell-phone or hand-held computer integration and anticipates a wireless version available before spring. The application software will integrate into a newspaper's editorial, classified and pagination systems and there is a Quark XPress XTension for display ad make-up (which currently is available only for the Windows version of XPress; a Macintosh XTension is expected to be available before spring). "GoCode is the only technology that is small enough to fit into classifieds without any significant layout modifications," said Blakeley. He said that GoCode can link classifieds to photos and supplemental on-line information, as well as provide a link to a seller's e-mail anonymously. Other applications, said Blakeley, include e-commerce through publishing GoCodes in display advertising and instantly linking readers to audio or video clips on-line in editorial. Blakeley said that The Gazette's main goal in adopting the GoCode pilot project (which started in September and runs through the end of this month) is to "provide our customers with the opportunity to test unique, cutting-edge technology." He said that the paper had distributed between 1500 and 2000 Pen Readers for testing and that it has conducted monthly surveys with test markets to determine the viability and value of the product. And while the usefulness of the Pen Reader might be debatable, Blakeley emphasized that the future of the technology really lays with wireless technologies, where GoCode "provides a more convenient way to enter long, cryptic web addresses" into wireless application protocol-enabled cellular telephones and other hand-held wireless devices. Blakeley cited the Web Developers Journal, which predicts that by 2003 "as many as 525 million" wireless application protocol-enabled cell phones will be sold in the United States and Europe.
"Teal to one person is not teal to another," said Bill Owens, X-Rite's product marketing manager of printing and imaging for the Americas. "A press operator should not rely on visual inspection alone." X-Rite's ATD will scan a double-truck newspaper page in five seconds, said Owens, allowing for fast changes in press inking. The ATD is simple, said Owens, with a touch-screen monitor for data entry and a graphical color gauge for each ink zone as well as an out-of-balance indicator. Owens, a longtime executive with PrePress Solutions Inc. and its predecessor company Varitype, said that the system is versatile, in that it can scan either a "gray bar" (a printed control strip that has a balance of cyan, yellow, magenta and black inks to make a perfect 50-percent black tone) or a continuous color nameplate. The device helps press crews increase their productivity, said Owens, as well as providing data to evaluate press supplies and materials. "Color ads run on track without costly make-goods," said Owens.
A group of four engineers at the Rochester, N.Y.-based company were given the assignment of creating a tool that would demonstrate Kodak's new image sensor assemblies. These assemblies feature complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (Cmos), rather than charge-coupled devices (CCD), to capture light and turn it into digital signals. Cmos imaging technologies use less power than CCDs and are cheaper to manufacture. The engineers quickly came to the realization that the image sensor assemblies -- when coupled with a small hand-held computer, such as those from Palm Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif. -- would make a nifty consumer-quality digital camera. They sketched the idea out on a napkin in the cafeteria one day over coffee and worked nights and weekends to build a prototype, which they demonstrated to top management, winning support for the project. The camera, called the PalmPix, shipped last May. Gary Hallenbeck, a project manager at Kodak, demonstrated both the original PalmPix and the newest model, which connects to the new Palm m100 computer. Both cameras make images that are 24-bit color, 640-by-480 pixels, which create a file a little less than 1 megabyte. The four-element fixed focus (point-and-shoot) lens is 2.0, with a focus range from 36-inches to infinity. The resulting files can be "beamed" using the Palm computer's infrared networking technology or can be "hot-synched," using Palm's standard personal computer connectivity system. Like most accessories for Palm hand-held computers, the PalmPix retails for less than $100. Though there was no attempt at directly relating this "hot new technology" to the newspaper or pre-press industries, Hallenbeck did make a pitch for developers to build applications on the Palm to utilize the PalmPix and said that "the evolution of integrated camera solutions in hand-helds will occur as technology costs decrease and consumer demand increases."
Ad file formats
In the spectrum of digital display-advertising formats, with application files at one end and copydot (raster) files at the other -- with encapsulated PostScript (EPS), PDF, PDF/X-1 and tagged-image format files (TIFF/IT-P1) in the middle -- application files provide the most flexibility, while copydot files provide the most reproduction reliability. Application files, said Bailey, are the least reliable, because when they're opened on another computer, text may reflow or the receiver may accidentally change the file when preparing it. EPS is slightly more reliable than application files, but some applications that are used in display-ad make-up do not allow for fonts to be embedded in EPS files, thereby reducing their reliability. In addition, while many applications apply color profiles while creating EPS files, other applications may ignore those color profiles when outputting an EPS resulting, said Bailey, "in spectacularly bad color in the final printed ad." And, of course, EPS -- as a subset of the PostScript display programming language -- is just that, a programming language that allows "over-clever application developers" to try to do different things with different output resolutions or color environments, resulting in inconsistencies. PDF is not a programming language, said Bailey, but creating a PDF file is confounding with its "bewildering array of configuration items." In addition, PDF has been weak in the exchange of partial page ads and their positioning marks. And while TIFF/IT is "extremely reliable," as a raster format, it doesn't scale well and files must be made at the correct resolution for the output device intended. This means that the files are "tens of megabytes" and don't transmit quickly over data lines. "An outsider coming into this situation and examining currently available alternatives would conclude that what this industry needs is a format that combines the robustness of TIFF/IT with the flexibility and compactness of PDF," said Bailey. Into this maw comes PDF/X-1, which has been proposed by the Digital Distribution of Advertising for Publications Association and the NAA. The idea behind PDF/X-1, said Bailey, is to provide for a "blind exchange" of digital advertising material. In other words, "no technical discussion" is required between the sender and the receiver of the file in order for the sender to build a file that the receiver can reproduce in a reliable manner. While PDF/X-1 is a subset of the PDF specification -- meaning that for all intents and purposes, virtually any application that can read or manipulate a PDF file can read or manipulate a PDF/X-1 file -- it also requires that all colors are defined in cyan-magenta-yellow-black (Cmyk) only. Bailey pointed out that while the PDF/X-1 specification has been adopted by many of the "high-end" pre-press suppliers -- including CreoScitex, Dalim, Enfocus and OneVision -- "I've been receiving a large number of requests for sample files from [suppliers] recently -- I think we're going to see quite a few more applications supporting PDF/X-1 in the near future, including more at the lower range." -- dmc
Eastman Kodak Co., From THE COLE PAPERS, February 2001, Copyright © 2001, All Rights Reserved.
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