Multimedia systems:
'Been there, done that, stepped in it'
DALLAS -- In an afternoon of war stories and tales of technological terror, the message that kept coming home was a simple one: how can we talk to our audience if we aren't talking to each other?
It was a message repeated throughout the opening technology session at the Editor & Publisher 12th Annual Interactive Newspapers Conference and Trade Show held here Feb. 21, part of a four-day event that attracted about 700 executives from the newspaper industry.
Session moderator Steve Yelvington, manager of web site development for Morris Digital Works of Augusta, Ga., said that many of the problems that a web site experiences happens because, "Geeks and journalists speak a different language ... geeks and journalists have different priorities."
The session, "Bridging the gaps -- How to develop and manage multimedia, 24/7 publishing platforms for news and multimedia content," was graced by a shorter -- and perhaps more to the point -- title by Yelvington: "Been there, done that, stepped in it."
The four-hour session, which attracted about 50 newspaper professionals, was broken into two sections: the first section focused on content; the second session took a look at the technology underneath that content.
"I want to be the first person to say at this conference that these are the bad times, and this is going to be a morose and somber conference because of all the 'dot.bomb' coverage you've been seeing in the media," Yelvington said. "But the fact is, the Internet is doing pretty well ... more people are using it as a news source."
He referred to a study released the week before by The Pew Internet & American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=30), which shows that the number of Americans with Internet access grew from about 88 million in the first half of 2000 to more than 104 million in the second half of that year. In the second half of 2000, 63 percent of those with Internet access say they went on-line to get news.
"Most people are on-line, period. Get over it, it's a new day," he said. "Newspapers and TV are losing eyeballs to the 'Net, and on-line sites are regarded as more believable than off-line media, which is a message that print really needs to take home. Newspapers for years have said that their real stock in trade is credibility, and voila, it turns out that the Web is highly credible."
But while national sites are attracting customers, local newspaper sites are not, "and it's our fault, and we've got to do better ... local news sites aren't well done. We've failed to provide good reason why these web sites should be used instead of another medium."
Understanding business
Newspaper companies are equally bad at trying to explain their needs to their own technicians or to vendors when they choose to move out-of-house for web site development. "A common complaint is that our vendors let us down," Yelvington said. "They didn't understand our business, and created either a product that was really specific and inflexible, or they created a product that was so generalized that it didn't do anything."
But some of those problems could have been avoided with communication, he said. "We didn't explain our business, and maybe that's because we didn't understand our own business."
Bob Benz, director of on-line content development for the E.W. Scripps Co. of Cincinnati, described his company's experience with developing and launching their web-based publications as "a tragedy in three acts."
After almost three years of meetings with suppliers, consultants and stakeholders from throughout the various Scripps properties, they bought and installed a system from Vignette Corp. of Austin, Texas, that didn't fit their needs.
"Vignette was not as advertised. We thought we did due-diligence, but it didn't work for us. All we've got left of Vignette is their caching mechanism. Everything else we've developed in-house," Benz said.
"I'm not feeling too good about the process, but I've learned a heck of a lot. Being able to talk to the technicians certainly helps. We're working on bridging the gap between content and technology."
Elaine Zinngrabe, executive producer for the Los Angeles Times' latimes.com and calendarlive.com, said her company's needs were simple, "We wanted the best technology, we wanted it to be easy to install and we wanted it to be free."
Since free wasn't going to happen, they began discussions with suppliers, and then experienced their own problems with miscommunication. "Vendors didn't believe us when we told them what we wanted ... they thought we meant 20/5 when we said 24/7," Zinngrabe said. "The sales people didn't know what they were getting into when they tried to sell us a system."
Part of the problem was in-house, she said. "We don't give ourselves enough credit. We're bold enough to ask city commissioners the hard questions, but we're not bold enough to ask our vendors hard questions."
Zinngrabe said the lesson learned at latimes.com was, "If you can't push a system out in six months, you have to wonder why you're not doing it in-house."
Christopher Feola, vice president for technology at Belo Interactive, warned of the dangers in letting technologists dictate the construction of content management systems: "You'll never successfully install a content management system designed by engineers, because engineers do not understand content."
(Conflict-of-interest alert: the author is an employee of Belo Interactive; Feola is a contributor to both this newsletter as well as its sibling, NewsInc.)
"Engineers don't know a lot about news," he said. "But we do, so why do we let engineers [tell us] how to build our news and how content should be designed?"
Jan Oldenburg, project manager and consultant with Evantage Consulting of Minneapolis, offered project management as a way to avoid the pitfalls of miscommunication.
"Project management is the art of organizing resources and tasks to produce a defined result within a specific timeframe -- usually in a politically charged environment," Oldenburg said. "A multimedia project is particularly challenging to manage ... there are diverse and numerous stakeholders, there is new technology and partners working in new ways, there are complex dependencies to achieve completion, and there are new competitors and new rules to deal with. Each component in a project multiplies the project risk."
"The more you know about what you want and need, the better your results," she said.
Chris Caldwell, chief technology officer for Morris Communications of Augusta, Ga., said "Our problems weren't with vendors, because we mostly do everything in-house ... we started as an engineering house, and we moved from software to journalism. We made our own tools because there [were] none available," Caldwell said.
"Engineers really want to be told exactly what to do. What we've learned to do is get the engineers in to ask questions ... we're trying to do a better job of thinking about what journalists really want."
Caldwell said, "Newspapers tend to be technologically poor, and that's not an engineer problem, that's a newspaper problem."
Alan Karben, vice president of product development for ScreamingMedia Inc. of New York City, harkened back to his days as a techie with Dow Jones Interactive as he described what he called his XML mantra: "Embrace the transformation."
"You have to get comfortable translating your data into many different formats," Karben said (see The Cole Papers, February 2001). His advice for newspaper companies trying to avoid data problems: "Tag tightly. Start with industry standards, train your people in-house and extend the tagging as needed."
Erik Jones, a senior technologist with Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive of Arlington, Va., advocated what he called the advantages of going with open-source platforms and developing products in-house.
"There are no proprietary languages to deal with," Jones said. "It's faster than depending on a third-party [platform] and there's no waiting on a vendor to deliver functionality ... you need it, you build it."
That's not to say that systems don't have a fair number of drawbacks. "You need to hire/build/buy your system component by component, which takes real planning," he said. "And you'll need a good tech staff. There's no white knight out there to come in and fix bad code."
Avoiding problems is a matter of proper communication and engaging the technical side from the beginning, Jones said. "Come to us with problems, not solutions ... don't tell us 'We bought this solution, make it work.' When that happens, we're integrating systems we didn't ask for. We're spending millions in backfilling to make sure things work."
Short messages explode
While newspaper companies search for a breakthrough product in the interactive world, companies in Europe and Asia may already have found one. In a session called "Wireless Case Studies: Where We Are Headed," representatives for a pair of European companies described a technology called Short Message Service that has exploded in popularity.
Arne Krumsvik, chief executive of DB MediaLab in Oslo, Norway, said that 95 percent of Norwegians own a mobile phone, and like much of Europe, Norway has seen a dramatic increase in the use of the wireless Short Message Service (SMS) that is a feature available in most modern digital phones.
SMS allows users to receive and send messages (up to about 160 characters) to other cell phones, typically limited to phones activated on the same network. To use SMS, phone users usually have to pay a monthly fee to their service provider or a small fee for each message sent and received (about 20 to 25 cents is typical).
"Every second a person 14- to 30-years-old sends and receives SMS messages," Krumsvik said. "More than 1 billion SMS messages were sent last year."
Newspapers aren't a major player in SMS yet, but the Norwegian national newspaper Dagbladet (founder of the DB MediaLab) is stepping in with a series of SMS-based features at its web site. Krumsvik said some of these features include the most popular song of the day, soccer scores, the poem of the day, poetry on demand and a dating service.
On some phones, users can receive new ringing tones or replacement background logos via SMS after placing an order on a specialized web site. Dagbladet is offering this feature, as well ... when a new user registers with the paper's web site, they get a free logo and a free ring tone each day.
By comparison, the WAP phone has been a failure in Norway, Krumsvik said. "There is no content, and no business model so far."
Monique Van Dusseldorp, founder and chief executive of Van Dusseldorp & Partners, an Amsterdam-based research and development company, said the explosion in SMS service was completely unexpected. Limited to 160 characters, it was established as a message service for mobile-phone users to tell them "you've got mail," or "you have a message.
"It's incredibly cheap, using network overcapacity to provide the service," Van Dusseldorp said. "Nobody foresaw what this would turn into."
Five percent of the mobile phones currently in use in Europe are WAP phones, Van Dusseldorp said, "but 100 percent of the phones can receive SMS messaging. It costs about 1¢ cents to send a message, and the charge is about 20 cents per message."
Van Dusseldorp said that in Europe during the first part of 1999 about 1 billion SMS messages were sent. Later in the year, it was 2 billion. By September, SMS messaging had increased to 3 billion. In December 2000, 20 billion SMS messages were sent.
"In the United Kingdom, there were 750 million sent, and 11 million of those messages were sent on New Year's Eve, with people wishing each other a happy New Year," she said.
New SMS-based services are starting to emerge, Van Dusseldorp said. In Germany, some companies have started SMS-based stock price notifiers, and fire departments have installed SMS emergency notification services for the deaf.
Norm Cloutier, business development director for Nando Media, the Raleigh, N.C., division of the McClatchy Co., said that his company is developing SMS capabilities. "SMS is limited to 70 to 100 characters in the United States, and we have editors re-writing headlines and stories for this format.
"Here in the United States, we are behind the curve in the mobile phone market," Cloutier said. "They [Norway and the Netherlands] have a[n] SMS market we would kill for."
Cloutier outlined three technological goals for the newspaper industry: If you're not doing a PDA channel, do one; build or buy a WAP service, and build or buy an SMS service.
-- David L. Swint, dlswint@colepapers.net
"It sounds silly to charge for things like rings and logos, but people are paying for it. Revenues for [short message services] in the United Kingdom in 2000 were US$1.45 billion and US$28 million in Norway."
-- Monique Van Dusseldorp
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