What about the benefits? Steele said broadcasters get access to a much broader pool of newsgathering resources, and newspapers get access to rich media content -- plus one other benefit:

"A helicopter, if you're lucky."

Wireless wisdom
No matter how good the audio/visual equipment, you still need one key element to demonstrate wireless technology properly: a stable wireless connection.

Just ask Vance Gorke, the business development manager for CBS Switchboard.com, an on-line business directory and mapping service that counts Florida's St. Petersburg Times, Indiana's Indianapolis Star and America Online among its affiliates. Such directory services are often referred to as "on-line Yellow Pages" because of their similarity to that advertising medium.

In a session called, simply, "Wireless Publishing," Gorke wanted to show the interfaces to his company's directory service using a cellular telephone and a wireless-modem-equipped Palm handheld computer.

Unfortunately, in the relatively isolated chocolate capital, Gorke could find no suitable wireless link. Minus a show, it was time to tell.

"The way we see these directory searches done in the future will be a little different from today's on-line," he said. "Today a user will say, 'Show me restaurants in Hershey,' and most directories produce a list. Some will also produce display ads sold to certain businesses."

"On wireless ... you may not have display ads to differentiate some businesses, and you won't necessarily have predetermined search criteria," Gorke said. "The device will identify where the user is, via the nearest cell tower or connection device, and will geographically center the search."

Gorke hypothesized that users of such proximity-based searches will then be able to initiate some form of conversation with matching merchants -- via either voice on a cellular phone or e-mail on a handheld computer.

Further, he said, proximity searches can also be correlated with users' stated preferences to further refine the results. For example, if a wireless-device user stores cuisine preferences as part of registering a profile with the directory service, the directory can send more specific restaurant matches. If your device knows you're in Hershey and you've already told it you like Italian food, it can give you a list of restaurants that are simmering the marinara within a 10-minute central Pennsylvania drive. (It could, that is, if you could get a wireless link in Hershey.)

Norm Cloutier, business development director of Nando Media, focused on the types of publishing news organizations can initiate themselves in the emerging wireless world.

Nando Media, a Raleigh, N.C.-based subsidiary of The McClatchy Co. of Sacramento, Calif., began in early 2000 to develop a custom channel for handheld computer users, working with AvantGo Inc. of Hayward, Calif.

AvantGo provides software for Palm OS or Microsoft Pocket PC handheld computers (in many cases, the client software comes installed when users purchase the devices). The software allows device users to subscribe to AvantGo "channels," essentially World-Wide Web pages that have been specially formatted for streamlined viewing on a small screen. The selected channel pages are refreshed on the device every time it is synchronized with its host computer.

Or, in the case of wireless-ready handhelds, that freshening can occur over the airwaves, with no PC required. Content prepared for AvantGo distribution can also be filtered and ported for other means of wireless distribution, including cellular phones that support the Wireless Application Protocol.

Cloutier said Nando Media wanted to take advantage of the news organization built to support its Nando Times web site when creating its AvantGo channel and other wireless-ready content.

"We're capitalizing on what we do that a lot of newspapers -- particularly small- and mid-sized papers -- don't do," he said. "We have a 24-hour, seven-day newsroom. We go through multiple wire services, edit the stories and make sure the wire headlines match up and make sense.

"And we make sure all the story link lists are filtered by editors, not just presented as 'last in on top.' It's what someone in our newsroom has decided is important," he said.

He said that when users register for the Nando Times channel, they are presented an opportunity to choose news topics that interest them. Once they make selections, the site gives them an estimate of how much device memory the resulting articles will fill, and they can fine-tune to suit the capabilities and limitations of the device.

Tag, you're it!
Wasn't eXtensible Markup Language (XML) supposed to be the glue that finally held together the idea of "create once, publish anywhere"?

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to finding that Holy Grail. The news industry realized that XML itself is not an all-inclusive standard for content interoperability. It is simply a framework that allows, in turn, development of many different markup standards for different purposes.

John Iobst, vice president of newspaper operations and research for the Newspaper Association of America, has heard this music before.

"Why do standards? Specifically we do them so it is easy for two newspapers to exchange information, or a newspaper and a wire service, or wire services and many newspapers, or newspapers within their own organizations," Iobst said.

Iobst's session was designed to clear up confusion about emerging XML-based news markup standards, specifically the News Industry Text Format (NIFT) originated by the International Press Telecommunications Council, and NewsML, originated by Reuters. Though built separately, the two XML "document-type definitions" dovetail well.

"NIFT is designed for news stories ... and NewsML is designed for managing multiple pieces of what I'll call media formats," Iobst said. "An NIFT story would typically be inside a NewsML wrapper as part of a group of content -- but NIFT can also stand alone under certain circumstances."

He said, "There is a relationship but it isn't exactly parent-child." NIFT gets into the nitty-gritty of different types of content within, and immediately tied to, individual articles. NewsML doesn't get into that detail at the article level, but helps to package the article with other media elements.

Still sound nebulous? Maybe Iobst's beverage analogy will help.

"NewsML is intended to be a mechanism to carry multiple media objects," he said. "If you think about an old-fashioned Coke case, a NewsML document might look like one of those, and you'd put different stuff into different slots in the box.

"NewsML has metadata for the whole case, then a little piece of metadata that describes what's the nature of each little box," he said.

And all this moves us closer to "create once, publish anywhere" -- if that's where the industry wants to go.

"What we found is this is great in theory but in practice it has certain drawbacks," Iobst said. "If you're talking about photos, in some environments you may want to use a TIF-format file, if you want the highest quality at the expense of file size. In other cases, you might want to use a Jpeg-format file and take a hit on quality for a big advantage in file size.

"What we've done is to say we have to support that kind of mixed environment," he said. "These photos are legitimate alternatives for each other ... the resolution differs, the quality differs, but they're all really the same photo with the same caption."

From the show floor

-- Jay Small, jaysmall@colepapers.net

GDT-Nova,
(866) 443-8462,
e-mail: marketing@gdtnova.com;
Nando Media,
(919) 836-5700,
e-mail: jcallowa@nando.net;
Newspaper Association of America,
(703) 902-1600;
Sonic Factory,
(717) 628-6076,
e-mail: info@sonic-factory.com;
Tera U.S.,
(603) 624-9160,
e-mail: tim@tera-us.com.

See also New media at small weeklies

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