Faces of Asian publishing: Tariq Ansari, left, managing director of Mid-Day Multimedia Ltd. in Mumbai, India, said the reader, "has many information needs and he gets it not by reading alone. To the reader, news is just one story that he gets throughout the day from a variety of sources." Thomas Jacob, below, managing director of IFRA Asia, the sponsor of the event, said, "The feedback from newspaper executives and exhibitors confirms that our objective of providing a turn-table for ideas and for sharing of experiences from all over the world has been well received by the Asian newspaper industry." Photos by Ed Kohorst.

Asian publishers ponder multiple-product businesses

SINGAPORE -- The theme was overwhelming. Newspaper Asia 2001 was in full swing and Singapore's Raffles City Convention Centre hummed with approximately 760 attendees from 32 countries. Nearly everyone wanted to discuss one common challenge: Asia's burgeoning media convergence and the technology needed to achieve it.

One of the most insistent voices belonged to Tariq Ansari, managing director of Mid-Day Multimedia Ltd. in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India. Media convergence is just a convenient way to describe Mid-Day's strategy to distribute information through newspapers, radio stations, satellite television, cable, outdoor advertising, a physical delivery service, phone-based delivery, magazines, web sites, broadband and wireless. Mid-Day publishes Mid-Day and Sunday Mid-Day, a 45,000-circulation English language newspaper.

"The reader is really not what we think of as the reader," Ansari said during a presentation at the conference, sponsored by IFRA, the Dusseldorf, Germany-based international organization of newspaper and media technology. "He has many information needs and he gets it not by reading alone. To the reader, news is just one story that he gets throughout the day from a variety of sources."

Mid-Day wants to be the provider of as many of those sources as possible. To Ansari, meeting the readers' needs and delivering the city's more than 15 million potential customers to advertisers comes down to two basic strategies: unifying content and unifying ad sales to create a total brand experience.

"Everything we want to do hinges on finding a good content management system," Ansari said after his presentation. "We have been looking at a number of systems, but none of them seem to have all the components we need."

In setting the tone for the conference, IFRA leaders acknowledged the increasingly complex needs of the Asian media market. In his welcoming address, Günther Böttcher, Ifra's chief executive officer, outlined the objectives of Newspaper Asia 2001. Technical convergence topped the list, followed by internationalization and globalization, mergers and acquisitions, new competitors and quality, driven by customer choice and technology.

"What matters is 'How do one-product companies change into multiple-product businesses?'" Böttcher said.

One answer
Murdoch MacLennan offered an answer to Boottcher's question. MacLennan, group managing director for Associated Newspapers in Britain, said that in recent years, Associated has deployed several technologies to lower costs and improve efficiencies. Among those is a new Lotus Notes-based media-independent creation system co-developed with Net-linx Publishing Solutions (the company formed by last year's merger of CText Inc. and System Integrators Inc.), which allows content to be created independently of the output platform.

Associated also uses AdDesk Sales from CCI Europe of Demark, and on the circulation side, the company has initiated PressLogic, a project to develop a new browser-based application that will allow profiled access internally and externally.

MacLennan said in his conference presentation that while the 1990s were about improving process efficiency and product innovation, the 21st century requires a new mindset. He said the Web has brought a shift toward personalization and a much tighter focus on the customer.

"We are beginning to think much more in terms of customer relationship management, and adjusting to its implications," he said. "At the heart of our future strategy lie three key portals. The first of these is a media content portal. We will continue to automate, and to move toward an environment in which all content assets can be accessed by editorial or knowledge workers from a desktop portal."

MacLennan said the content archives will maintain the legacy system, storing and indexing data, including text and pictures. The second portal is built around business information and brings together accounts, finance, production and marketing. The third portal is one he identified as key: customer data. Associated Newspapers publishes 24 million papers each week under titles such as the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the Evening Standard and Metro.

"Better customer knowledge is one of the clear imperatives for success in the future, and we intend to collect and rationalize the fullest range of customer data -- on subscribers, wholesalers, retailers, advertisers and all print and Web customers," MacLennan said. "All three portals -- media content, business information and customer data -- will, in turn, be integrated into what we call the enterprise portal.

"The ultimate goal, of course, is the world of e-commerce, where we can address and support the widest range of customer requirements, through a broad package of strongly branded cross-media products."

Newsplex
According to Kerry Northrup, executive director of the IFRA Centre for Advanced News Operations and a speaker at the conference, most of the newspaper companies he works with are wrestling with the same questions and needs outlined by Ansari, MacLennan and Böttcher.

However, in Asia, like the United States, many are reluctant to actually buy technology or change newsroom workflows until they see a working model of the completely convergent newsroom.

That's why IFRA is teaming with the University of North Carolina to build the Newsplex, a micro-newsroom to demonstrate how the cross-media newsroom would look and work. Northrup presented the Newsplex project during a conference session.

"It's clear to everyone that tomorrow's newspaper is going to be different," Northrup said. "The question is how is it going to be different? How do we get from here to there? The vital piece that's missing is a good content management system."

Northrup is hoping the Newsplex project will be a catalyst for research in building effective systems and reporting tools. "Hopefully, that will be a big step in the evolution process."

In spite of the seemingly universal desire for media companies to see a convergent newsroom in action, Northrup said Asian newspaper companies are different from their counterparts in the United States.

"With the easing of the competition from the dot-coms, a lot of U.S. papers are relaxing, taking a wait-and-see attitude," Northrup said. "Asia sees this time as an opportunity to make strategic moves so the industry can come out of it with some momentum."

The supplier community is banking on that momentum. Among the 53 exhibitors displaying a variety of wares from printing press systems and color management tools to newsprint, were more than 10 companies showcasing content management products.

Tera S.p.A., a publishing software company based in Milan, Italy, was one of several companies that have recently established offices in the Asia Pacific region. According to Tera Executive Tjasa Pogacar, the decision to open an office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, hinged on the demand for new publishing technology from all the region's largest publishers.

"Very few of them have upgraded their systems because of the millennium bug, amid the economic crisis that slammed the region in the late '90s," Pogacar said.

That means it's the perfect time for suppliers to pitch end-to-end solutions. Asian media companies are not just shopping for web-publishing solutions to be "bolted on" to existing print systems.

"Most of the Asian publishers that I have met in the last six months are looking for new publishing systems with a strong content-management approach. They want one single platform/set of applications to handle both the traditional and on-line publishing."

Pogacar said the publishers say there is no more room for the waste of time and money of different newsrooms for different media. "They understand that content is the most valuable asset that they own."

A study released last month by management consulting firm A.T. Kearney Inc. underscored publishers' concerns. The study found that lack of efficient publishing capabilities for digital content costs organizations $750 billion annually in wasted work time. Workers waste 15-25 percent of their time in non-productive publishing activities, compared to other workers who waste two to three percent of their time.

According to the study, integrated media workflows and effective repurposing technologies will reduce costs associated with work duplication and recreation of existing content.

A.T. Kearney said the technologies to achieve efficient digital publishing will be dominated by the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) family of standards, including eXtensible Markup Language (XML), eXtensible Style Language (XSL), Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (Smil) and Portable Document Format (PDF), along with technologies such as Java (a cross-platform programming language) and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP).

Content management
Many of those standards were prominent in the products on display in Singapore. The content management issue was such a hot topic at the conference that an entire session was devoted to companies who wanted to pitch their systems.

Harald Ritter, Ifra's chief information officer, led the session with a challenge to the system supplier community. He described the driving need for newspaper companies to follow the lead of consumers who have already adapted to a mix of sources for getting information.

"This is a completely new situation for most editorial departments. ... There are hardly any systems in existence that are consequently geared to satisfy the multimedia needs of an editorial department. System suppliers are working full out on such solutions. But for most of them this is just a continuation of their old philosophy."

Ritter said that in addition to the regular and widely known functions of an editorial and production system, there are a number of key features that systems of the future will require. His list included: