Next NEXPO

The 73rd annual newspaper equipment exhibition and conference -- the ninth time it has been called NEXPO -- will be held June 15-June 19 in New Orleans.

Newspaper Association of America planners expect more than 200,000 square feet of exhibits and 10,000 participants. The five-day session will be held at the Morail Convention Center on the Mississippi River, and walking distance from the French Quarter.

The conference will have sessions every morning with the trade show being open in the late mornings and afternoons.

Conference session topics will include color-quality management, Web-and-print integration and the side benefits of Web technology.

William Dean Singleton, chairman, president and chief executive of MediaNews Group of Denver, publishers of papers including the Denver Post, the Salt Lake Tribune and the Los Angeles Daily News, will give the keynote address of the meeting.

Special events will include a hosted tour of two departments at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the pressroom and the packaging center, as well as a welcoming reception.

Newspaper Association of America's NEXPO, (703) 902-1880, e-mail: NEXPO@naa.org.

-- dmc

Bit bucket ...

"It's so hard watching the giants of UPI die."
-- Posting on the United Press International alumni e-mail list following Peter Willett's death.

Thirty, Take One: When others had strange ideas about how to transition wire-service news delivery from Teletypes to computers, Travis Hughs of United Press International, had a vision: 1200 bits per second (blazingly fast in the 1970s) directed to electronic selectors driving high-speed teleprinters that would allow the wire service to tailor the news it delivered to publishers and broadcasters. Hughs's ideas eventually won out and became the service's DataNews. Hughs, who spent 23 years with UPI as a reporter, editor and sales executive, moved on to a five-year stint with Reuters, and in 1990, partnered up with James Wieck to found Wieck Photo DataBase Inc. of Dallas. (Wieck, also a former Unipresser, says that Hughs -- the company's chairman -- told him, "Let's put your name on it. They may not be able to spell it, but it'll stand out.") Wieck Photo DataBase provided digital methods of exchanging pictures -- among its first clients was the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group, which built a group-wide photo-sharing system with Wieck technology. The pioneer media-services company now distributes many types of multimedia files as well as designing and maintaining databases and web sites for some of the world's largest corporations; it recently rechristened itself Wieck Media Services to reflect its wider range of services. Hughs, 64, died of complications from a lengthy battle with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in Dallas in March. ...

Thirty, Take Two: With a childhood growing up as an "army brat" in China and Hawaii, Peter Willett was destined to become, as one colleague called him, a "once in a lifetime experience." When he was 12, Willett was among a group of Boy Scouts who rowed small boats into the Pearl Harbor Bay on Dec. 7, 1941 to help rescue sailors bombed by the Japanese. Later, he was a copy boy at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, allegedly because a freighter he had jumped in San Francisco (to get away from his studies at Stanford -- apparently a woman was involved) cut its journey short. After serving the U.S. Army in Korea and Japan (he was a reporter for Stars and Stripes), Willett became a reporter at United Press International in Atlanta. Willett's UPI career spanned 23 years and encompassed not only reporting, editing and sales, but also computer services. In addition, Willett jump-started a service that provided audio for fewer than 60 radio stations and turned it into a business that served more than 1700 clients. Eschewing a service of "dulcet tones blathering on without having the foggiest idea of what they were talking about," Willett, acting as news director, sales manager and, at times, technical wizard, enlisted regular Unipressers as "talent" regardless of the quality of their voice. In 1972, Willett -- who was then a vice president of the wire service -- donned a tracksuit and masqueraded as an athlete during the Israeli hostage crisis at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Munich, filing eyewitness radio accounts. Following a dustup with his UPI superiors shortly thereafter, Willett went to the New York Times Syndicate. Toward the end of the decade, Willett was peddling TV listings for an upstart company, Torrington Tribune (later to become wholly owned by Tribune Media Services). Willett said at the time that the owner of an upstate New York cement plant had mistakenly purchased an IBM computer dozens of times larger than he needed: Willett showed the guy how to make it into a TV listings system. Willett semi-retired in the '80s to fly-fishing in Martha's Vineyard, Mass., but was full of ideas about how news operations could use databases into the late '90s. Willett, 72, died in March from a sudden deterioration of his long-standing bout with leukemia. ...

Vendor vibrations: At Atex Media Solutions of Bedford, Mass., Reiner Ebenhoech has been named vice president for Asia-Pacific; with the company since 1984, he previously held the title of regional director. ... At Mactive Inc. of Melbourne, Fla., Bob Magliozzo has been named an implementation specialist; previously, Magliozzo had been with Heidelberg, Cybergraphic and Crosfield/CSI. ... At Xitron Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., Karen Crews has been promoted to vice president of operations; Crews, a 15-year company veteran, most recently had been vice president of finance. ...

Confabs: "Exploring Technologies for Cross-Media Publishing," sponsored by the International Prepress Association (IPA), will be held May 15-17, in Chicago. The session will offer a dual track of technical and management sessions, and panel discussions. For more information, contact Steve Bonoff of the IPA at (952) 896-1908 or steve@ipa.org ... The E.now E.commerce Summit will be held May 20-23, in Orlando, Fla. Keynote speaker for the session -- co-sponsored by the RIT Research Corp. (wholly owned subsidiary of New York's Rochester Institute of Technology), the Printing Industries of America and the Cahners Printing, Packaging and Creative Group -- will be Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. Other speakers include Frank Romano of RIT, Colin Phelps of General Motors, Jim Mikol of Leo Burnett Advertising and industry consultant and author Thad McIlroy. (Another version of this meeting will be held in Los Angeles, Oct. 21-24.) For more information, call (800) 962-8859. ... Creating for the Web, co-sponsored by Apple Computer, Adobe Systems and the American Graphics Institute, will be held May 22-24, in San Francisco. For more info, call (800) 851-9237. ... #

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