The objective is objects: Under theories developed by Belo Interactive, a traditional newspaper production system moves articles on a one-by-one basis through various "baskets." A content management system introduces the concept of "rules" and allows content to be published in two places at once (zoned editions). A content operating system not only understands content and rules, but is designed to output information in a variety of formats simultaneously.

Rethinking the way news is processed through systems

The tug chugged steadily down Long Island Sound toward Hell's Gate carrying a Mad Hatter crew if there ever was one. A well-dressed man wrote steadily in long hand. As he finished each page, it was carried back to a gang that recreated the words by picking pieces of metal out of a case and placing them in a chase. As each full newspaper page was set, it was set-aside until the tug reached New York City and the waiting presses of the New York Herald Tribune.

Those 19th-century journalists were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to get the news to their readers first. The event on that occasion was a boxing match in Rhode Island, and the tech people of that day conceived of a cutting-edge method of getting the news: send an entire composing room crew and set-up to Rhode Island on a boat, and use the trip home as time to both write the story and make up the pages.

In many ways that has been the story of newspapering. Today's legacy system was yesterday's cutting edge technology, a breakthrough that changed the way we delivered the news.

That's generally a good-news story. Growth means life, and it's good to know we're in a vibrant industry. But lately the change cycle has shortened to the point that 1994's cutting-edge pagination system is 1995's legacy system that can't be connected to the Web. As the channels proliferate, dying or exploding often before we can even learn their names -- PointCast and Wireless Application Protocol, Palm VII and Avant Go, XML and XSL -- exhaustion can set in, especially for the guys who build these systems.

There's nothing like the feeling of hearing something scorned as a legacy system while you're still building it.

This is a story about a bunch of those guys, and the VelocIT content operating system, built by Belo Interactive of Dallas -- the new-media arm of Belo Corp., publisher of five daily newspapers including the Dallas Morning News and the Providence (R.I.) Journal and owner of 17 television stations -- to be the solution to channels past, present and future. Full disclosure: two of us in this effort -- Garrett Queen and myself -- have deep and long-standing ties to The Cole Group, while others on the team have written for Cole publications.

It is also futile to maintain any pretense of objectivity. I have spent years on this project and will spend years more finishing it because I believe in it.

On the other hand, we have had a bit of validation. The Newspaper Association of America's 2001 Best Practices Award for New Media was awarded to Belo's VelocIT Content Operating System at January's SuperConference (see story Page 4).

That said, here's the story. We were caught in a vicious cycle. We built production system after production system, and every time we finished another, what was needed would change and we would start over.

What was needed was a system based on the content, rather than the production.

The result was the VelocIT Content Operating System. Belo Interactive has four patents pending on versions of VelocIT, including one called Reaper, which puts all of the Dallas Morning News' classifieds -- liners and display -- onto the Web with advanced search capabilities.

Content OS
So what is a content operating system, and how is it different from, say, a content management system?

Today's content systems can be divided into three broad categories: production systems, content management systems, and content operating systems. Production systems -- think of, for example, the old TMS systems running on DEC PDP11-84s -- were custom-designed to efficiently produce a single product, such as a newspaper. Content management systems added database functionality to allow the production of multiple versions of a product, such as zoned editions of a newspaper.

Content operating systems, such as VelocIT, are based on an object-oriented information architecture, allowing the production of any type of product in any medium. To date, VelocIT is the only content operating system, and Belo Interactive has patents pending on object-oriented information architecture.

Production systems, like other assembly lines, were (and at some papers, still are) the epitome of Industrial Age manufacturing. A single copy of each newspaper is laboriously produced by hand every single day. That master copy is then unleashed through the assembly line of the production system into tens of thousands -- sometimes millions -- of copies, which then roll off the presses, go through the folders, are loaded into the trucks and rolled out to cities and into the suburbs.

It's hard to conceive of a more effective, more efficient process for mass-producing a single newspaper. The model begins to break down, however, when you want to change the process in any way. Produce a second, zoned edition, for example.

In broadcast properties, the titles change, but the assembly line remains the same.

Content management systems replace much of the assembly line with a matrix of interlocked databases. Some contain works in progress. Some contain already published data: text, graphics, photos, sound, video and data models. Some contain research data: The census, crime statistics, voting results and similar source information. Other databases contain finished data waiting to be published.

The database also contains production rules for publishing. Production values are merged with the content in a modular fashion, allowing the easy output of multiple versions of a product: multiple zoned editions of a newspaper, multiple web sites and multiple cable feeds.

Because the systems are designed around this idea of modular production, it remains difficult to handle more than one type of production -- Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) or video output from pagination systems, for example.

Enter the content operating system.

The VelocIT Content Operating System is based on the concept of totally divorcing the content from the production. Instead, every piece -- whether it is content or production value -- is turned into a standardized part.

There are two enormous benefits to be gained from the standardization of parts -- a concept that is one of the pillars of Industrial Age mass production. First, production becomes simpler, more efficient and therefore less expensive. Second, parts can be so standardized that manufacturers gain a competitive advantage, moving rapidly to market with new products based on new combinations of existing parts.

Under the sheet metal, a Lexus RX-300 is a Lexus ES-300 is a Toyota Camry.

Interchangeable parts
VelocIT is our attempt to bring this revolution to the media industry. For example, instead of painstakingly hand-fitting stories in a newspaper over and over, from one edition to the next, or editing video as run-lengths change from broadcast to broadcast, VelocIT uses object-oriented information architecture to create, on-the-fly, all possible versions for all possible channels.

Object-oriented information architecture is based on the philosophy of turning content into interchangeable parts. All parts of the content are separated into discrete objects, each of which is capable of interacting independently with other objects.

This has several advantages over previous architectures. First, any set of objects can be combined in any fashion, allowing the system to be infinitely modified without rebuilding. Second, new objects -- say, a new channel object to provide broadband wireless output for the Palm Xcvii that's the must-have techno toy in 2008 -- can be added without having to rebuild or rewrite any of the old objects in your system.

VelocIT currently has channel objects that allow publishing to the Web, WAP phones, text e-mail, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) e-mail, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and other wireless devices. Pagination and high-end video channel objects are in research and development.

Third, and most important for the long-term, object-oriented information architecture objects can operate outside the confines of any publishing system. Objects will be broadcast out into the network cloud, where they will live and work in everything from local servers to hand-held wireless devices.

VelocIT's design allows it to create and manage objects at the edge of the network cloud as well as objects on central servers.

A secondary design objective for VelocIT was to reduce or -- better yet -- eliminate client support. Belo Interactive provides interactive products for all the properties of Belo Corp., so like its parent it stretches from Seattle, Portland and Riverside, Calif., in the West across Texas and the center of the country to Providence, R.I., in the East. A proprietary program with a custom client that would have to be installed and maintained at more than 20 properties across the continent would be a nightmare, as well as terribly expensive.

So VelocIT is clientless, or as close as is possible. There is no client-side software. Users need a working computer, a late-model Web browser, a 'Net connection and a password and logon. Logging onto a VelocIT server loads a set of applets that run inside the web browser. It even runs over a dial-up connection, albeit slowly -- we're working to put some of those applets through a diet regime.

This set-up leaves no need for client-side support. No special training; no on-site technicians; not even a need for users to have specific computers. In this set up, computers become edge-of-the-'Net appliances -- one breaks, drag it off to repair and plug another one in. All of the user's profiles and data are stored back in the cluster -- boot up the new machine, fire up the web browser, log onto VelocIT, and go back to work as if there had never been a problem.

Reaper
By definition, a content operating system is content-agnostic. That is, a content object can contain any kind of content and still operate on it, whether the content contained in the object is plain text or high definition video. That has allowed us to build VelocIT installations that handle advertising, such as Reaper, which is a VelocIT installation optimized for automatic publishing of classified advertising, and high-end searching and delivery.

Reaper automatically publishes 10,000 to 12,000 classified ads daily from the Dallas Morning News -- all of the paper's classifieds, liners and display. This version of VelocIT is optimized for heavy user loads from the Web and high-speed searches by thousands of simultaneous users.

Because Reaper is actually just another flavor of VelocIT, all VelocIT modules run on it without further development. That means that high-end output channel objects delivered for content delivery, such as those for WAP phones, PDAs and e-mail-notification of events, can be wired to Reaper without modification and used to deliver classified ads.

That, obviously, changes the shape and scope of the classified business. Ads can be delivered anytime, anywhere to anyone using any device. For a price, of course.

Premium delivery channels and premium access give us the opportunity to develop multiple revenue streams for our companies, on-line and in print. It gives us the opportunity to sell the database by the slice, and to price it accordingly. We can sell surgical slices, only showing ads that meet highly specific criteria -- say, four-bedroom homes with pools listed for $175,000 to $200,000 in that certain well-regarded community with the terrific schools that is somehow just a 15-minute drive from downtown.

We can sell surgical access. For example, we could offer instant notification on your WAP phone that someone has just listed a four-bedroom home with a pool for exactly $185,000 in just that certain well-regarded community with the terrific schools that is somehow just a 15-minute drive from downtown -- the one you've always dreamed about.

It's fun to go on and on developing new ways to deliver classifieds, but there are also new tricks for our other old friend, the straightforward business of delivering eyeballs to advertisers. Think of it this way: If car dealers will pay extra to have their ad in the auto section by the Click and Clack column, what will they be willing to write in their checkbooks when they can place their ad in an e-mail notification going to a specific person, who is searching hard for a late-model Lexus RX-300?

The future
VelocIT development continues at Belo Interactive. We've got plans, ideas and ways we think it will go. Truth be told, though, the point of object-oriented information architecture is that modules can be added at will, then snapped together with existing modules in any way imaginable.

It's like placing a firm bet that you can predict the future, then putting all your money down on the fact that the future will be different than today.

-- Christopher J. Feola, cjf@colepapers.net

Belo Interactive, (214) 977-4057.

From THE COLE PAPERS, February 2001, Copyright © 2001, All Rights Reserved.