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Hershey heroes: Clockwise, the AdsUp advertising order entry system from Managing Editor Inc. that runs on Palm hand-held devices, the ActivePaper digital microfilm archive from Olive Software that displays actual headlines in search results and the QuickTrack advertising tracking system from QuickWire Labs that includes tearsheet management. |
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Editorial perquisites, Part 1: The new editorial front-end from Brainworks, Ed.Perks, was written in the Java programming language, making it cross-platform compliant. The work areas are displayed, allowing journalists access to stories and other elements. |
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Editorial perquisites, Part 2: Brainworks new editorial front-end, Ed.Perks, uses Quark Copy Desk as a writing and editing tool. Here, a story and its associated headline are displayed. |
Archives, PDAs, on-line profits
-- ideas spring at America East
HERSHEY, Pa -- It may have been winter's last gasp outside the Hershey Convention Center, but inside at America East, spring was in the air.
Between the seminars discussing concrete ways to make money on-line and the exhibit hall where publishers were discussing concrete delivery and expansion plans with systems manufacturers, a refreshing feeling of rebirth and renaissance permeated most of the conversations.
Yes, turnout was down, but regardless, the booths were always busy and most of the people were casting off the winter doldrums.
"It's a good show for us," said Bill Muir, whose booth for QuickWire Labs of Hamilton, Ontario, was routinely crowded. "A lot of the people I talked to were spending real dollars," said Muir, the company's product manager.
Muir's sentiments were echoed by other folks, including Lynn Yawn, sales director for Mactive Inc. of Melbourne, Fla. "We like this show. It costs us than less than NEXPO, you need less space and we generate more leads."
One booth that was consistently crowded was that of Olive Software Inc. of Denver, makers of ActivePaper, which takes archives on microfilm and digitizes them so they can be used like any other electronic archive.
"We give existing newspapers the ability to monetize archives, to use them for research and to preserve them for the future," said Shaun Dial, executive vice president. The company can digitize microfilm archives so they can be searched, so special packages can be prepared and resold, and so the information on aging archives can be preserved.
"Did you ever open a box of microfilm and it smells like vinegar?" Dial asked. "That's the microfilm decomposing."
Olive is in the process of converting the British Library's newspaper archive, dating back to the mid-1800s, and the company uses some of that for its product demos. One demonstration, a search of News Of The World issues (available at http://www.uk.olivesoftware.com/) for 1918 for the word "Kaiser" brings up 111 items, ranging from stories to illustrations.
Want to read a report about Hindenburg's death after a stormy meeting with the Kaiser? Or reports of his abdication in November 1918? It's all on-line. No more trips to the library, fumbling through microfilm and getting bleary-eyed hunting for the phrase you want.
For those who need to know the geeky stuff: "We scan microfilm to TIFF [Tagged Image Format File] and convert the TIFF to [Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format] PDF," Dial said. "The PDF is then distilled and put into an [eXtensible Markup Language] XML repository. We know where every piece is and what it is, and what the associations with other page elements may be."
With the user interface -- currently Internet Explorer 5 and up, using Active X controls -- you can plug in keywords or items to look for. Hit the search button and ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, up pop the results, all from the comfort of your own little reporter's cubicle.
"We can show just headlines, preview a small section of the story or show the full page where an item is," Dial said.
The search term is highlighted so you can find it easier, a nice touch given the small type used in earlier years. If you choose to show a full page to get some context for the item, that also opens the entire issue so it can be browsed.
By tracking all the associations, the software can save some steps down the line for researchers. "If a photo goes with a story, it opens with the story, even if it's on a jump," Dial said.
Lest someone think this is only good for older issues, the software allows papers to rapidly put the current paper on-line. "The Readership Institute has proved very clearly that people buy the daily newspaper for ads," Dial said. "This can put your paper -- ads and all -- on-line."
Olive is doing just that for the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz. (http://epaper.aztrib.com/), giving the Freedom Communications paper the opportunity to do a quick upsell on display advertising as well as easing the path from print to Web.
There are other advantages to this type of software, too.
"If you archive today's paper and your old paper," Dial said, "you can serve today's paper alongside an old paper when someone does a search," which opens more opportunities to make money.
"Another cool thing this does is, it builds collections," he said. "Here's the Great War. I can package that and sell that package to institutions."
The British Library, for example, has used its newspaper archives to create collections on such things as the building of the Crystal Palace, the China-Taiwan conflict and the Russian economy. Similar gems probably reside in most newspaper archives.
Like most things in life, your cost to digitize archives will vary. "It depends on the quality of microfilm, the size of the project, if they have to do restoration and the term of the project. If they want to do the conversion over one year, it costs more than if they want to spread it out," Dial said.
From wire input to tearsheets
Over at QuickWire, Muir and his group were busy showing off products that grew out of the company's original wire-input product.
The original QuickWire product gave editors a handle on the myriad wire feeds coming in to a newsroom; now the company is adding on to that management and expanding beyond just wires, moving into story-tracking, ad-tracking, on-line ad proofing and electronic tearsheets, one of the latest hot buttons for the newspaper industry.
QuickTrack is the ad and production tracking package.
"Our proofing system is real simple," Muir said. "If you're a client and in our database, and if you have an e-mail address, our system or a sales person can contact you, send you an e-mail with a URL [Uniform Resource Link]" when the ad is ready to be proofed. "You click on the link, log in -- it's secure, so your competitor can't see it -- open the ad, make comments and send it back to the ad maker."
The tearsheet function builds on that, Muir said. "When the ad is approved and the page is ready, if there are 15 ads on the page, we send out 15 copies and say, 'Here are your tearsheets.'"
These tools have the potential to be real cost savers, Muir said, in addition to speeding up the turnaround time. "I know sites that have two or three leased cars running copies around town," he said. "If you can cut that out, you can save money."
As for the other new tools, "We've built in a lot of workflow this year," Muir said. "If someone opens a story and wants to flow it on a page, we can track all that. We also have WireWatch: If you have some stories you want to watch, you submit what you want to Watch Editor. When stories coming in meet that standard, we can do anything with it. We can watch your e-mail, an FTP [File Transfer Protocol] port or wires. When it comes in, we can move it to your database, we can move it to Quark [XPress] or whatever.
"We've put more integration into [Microsoft] Word. If you use Word on your desktop, we can check it out to Word, edit it, and we have macros to check it back in."
Muir said that what he's doing "is slowly migrating this to become a modest editorial system. For smaller sites that don't need a half million-dollar QPS [Quark Publishing System] system, they can get by with QuickWire, Word and [XPress]."
For those sites that do need more, Muir said his goal is to integrate with everybody. "You see a lot of small systems -- especially from Europe -- coming in here. I want to partner with these people so that whenever they sell a system, it's bundled with QuickWire."
New frontier for Atex
Industry veteran Atex Media Solutions Inc. also has moved into the electronic tearsheet market, using some tools from Innovectra Corp. of McLean, Va., which tie the electronic tearsheet to the invoice.
"We've married the bill presentment to the tearsheet," said Atex's Pete Lewis. "From the bill, I can go to the ad and see what it was and I can download info off the invoice into an Excel spreadsheet. If I have the appropriate third-party plug-ins, I can even pay the bill on-line."
Atex, based in Bedford, Mass., is also building on some work it did for Dow Jones & Co. Inc., publishers of the Wall Street Journal, adding web portals to legacy advertising systems. "We'll go to customers with a legacy system and say, we'll put on a web front-end," Lewis said.
"We want to make things as efficient as possible, while retaining the ability to do an upsell," he said. "For good customer service, we can give access to contract information, show stair-steps -- if you buy X more inches, your rate goes down -- and give access to bills."
Lewis, a longtime Atex sales executive, said that it was originally designed to work with Atex's Enterprise system, but that the company had incorporated pieces of Enterprise directly into it so it could be married to other legacy systems.
"We use your rate tables, your contracts," he said. "You can click on the calendar, schedule ads, and the same ad composition system that is being used in the phone room."
PDA as sales assistant
To SFA -- sales force automation -- and CRM -- customer relationship management -- you can add PDA, or personal digital assistant.
Looking for tools to cut down on the amount of time salespeople spend managing paper and thereby increase the time they have to sell ads, Mactive and Managing Editor Inc. have turned to the PDA.
Managing Editor's offering, AdsUp, works on any Palm OS-based device. Unlike a laptop, PDAs don't need time to boot up, rarely crash, and don't run into problems when the latest version of Quake III conflicts with your proprietary SFA product.
"The concept," said Managing Editor's Richard Kitzmiller, "was to take information from the existing system, move it to a server and make it available, through data synchronization, to a sales representative on a Palm. Let sales reps take an order and sync it back to an advertising database. We can maintain a sales rep's customer list on the Palm, as well as insertions and account history."
Lest a salesperson get carried away, "we have the standard rules loaded so you can't take an order for a day when a section doesn't run, and that sort of thing."
A sales representative uses the standard Palm sync function to load current customer information, sales schedules, products and related information on the PDA, then hits the road. While with a client, the rep can take an ad, create multiple insertion dates, discuss billing and contract stair-steps and be on his way, often before a typical mid-level laptop could boot up.
The next time the rep synchronizes his PDA with the home office, the information is passed back to the server and then on to wherever it needs to be.
"These are not laptop computers," Kitzmiller said. "You make a choice. Do you want to load all that software and support it, or take a simple approach?"
Managing Editor, based in Jenkintown, Pa., also was showing AdWorks, a new ad management system. Fully buzzword compliant, it runs on both Macintosh and Windows and uses SQL Server or Oracle for the database; it can be used for classified, display advertising or both. It tracks customer history, receivables history, insertion history, payment history and probably even Roman history.
Designed for smaller papers -- weekly, multiweekly and small daily titles -- it has the standard ability to define run dates and insertion rates, and allows the ever-popular upsell. For billing or for credit card processing, Kitzmiller said, it has an interface to EdgCapture from Edgil Associates Inc. of North Chelmsford, Mass., or it can hook to whatever you want to buy.
"This also improves reporting for these papers," he said. "We're building an SQL report on back-end, but we have tools on the front end so the average person can run quick reports, accounting and advertising can run the reports that have the information they need to have."
Mactive is taking a slightly different approach, said Steve Roessler, the company's vice president of marketing. Though sticking with the Palm platform, Mactive is using more expensive units with wireless Internet capability, allowing sales reps to connect directly to the database while out of the office.
"We kept talking to sales reps, and they were spending their time creating paper. Less than two hours a day was spent with clients," Roessler said.
"For me, as a salesperson, you can spend more time in the field, with customers. You get real-time pricing, and ads are entered immediately in the ad system. When you log in, you can get your customers, place an order and review orders. If you sell a position, you know if that position is open and you can block it out."
Mactive, too, is adding tools to the rest of its product lineup. AdLink hooks Mactive's existing products into Quark XPress or Multi-Ad Creator from Multi-Ad Services Inc. of Peoria, Ill. When an ad order is taken into the front-end system, AdLink creates the appropriately sized ad in the production tool, cutting down on those little surprises that pop up when an ad is made up the wrong size.
The initial release of the tool also adds some tracking capabilities to the programs, "I can track how long it takes to edit an ad and which user did it," said Mactive's Yawn. "I can track opening an ad, closing an ad, importing an EPS, changing status or creating an EPS. This allows a supervisor to assign workloads and track them, to see who the good workers are and who needs help."
With systems like AdLink and AdsUp, Roessler said, someone back at the office could be starting to work on an ad while the sales rep was still in a customer's office.
A new editorial front-end was just blossoming at Brainworks Inc. of Sayville, N.Y. Called Ed.Perks, it's the first new editorial product since the company bought Freedom System Integrators last year, arriving just in time for spring. It, too, is buzzword compliant, having been written in Java, running in either a client-server or terminal services environment, and hooking to Quark XPress and Quark Copy Desk.
The back-end is one of the ubiquitous databases, currently either SQL or Oracle. Long-time users of traditional front-ends should be comfortable with the way it handles notes, deletions and the like, and various color codings indicate status and priority.
John Berry, Brainworks president, said the first installation will be this month at a chain of weekly papers in New Jersey.
Profits bloom on-line
As if all the growth on the show floor was not enough, rumors of growth, new efforts and -- brace yourself -- even profitability were coming from the related conference on new media.
Panelist after panelist stood and said that though things had been dark and dreary, it was the dawn of a new season, life would be wonderful and, yes, income was growing.
Steve Yelvington, vice president of strategy and content for Morris Digital Works of Augusta, Ga., said his group of sites had about a 40 percent profit margin.
Chris Jennewein, Internet operations director for the San Diego Union-Tribune, expects to be in the black by August.
Gerry Barker, general manager of Dallas web operations for Belo Interactive, listed a host of profitable e-commerce opportunities he's put in place.
Mike Blinder, president of Multimedia Sales Specialists of Naples, Fla., outlined a number of ways to promote cross-media ad sales and significantly boost revenue.
It was enough to make a publisher swoon.
Blinder doesn't run a newspaper web site. He does, however, show people how to sell ads. He pictures his promised land as a place where all ad sales people are motivated, where they show an advertiser the value of print/web combinations, where advertisers -- new and old -- willingly spend extra money on campaigns.
How does he do it? He reminds sales teams that ads, especially on-line, need to offer immediacy to a prospective customer -- an item available for a short time -- and offer the advertiser reach and frequency.
Ads in a June bridal section for print should be cross-sold for the Web, for example. The advertiser can't put off a decision. When it runs, the ad has to appear in the appropriate spots on-line and in print, it has to offer a specific deal, and the ad has to link to the appropriate spot on the advertiser's site. For example, an ad promoting a half-price sale for a gown should link directly to the page with the gown, not to the bridal store's home page.
Together, the on-line and print ad team can offer new products and open new markets to advertisers.
In San Diego, Jennewein is offering his advertisers much greater reach by catching consumers in a new locale.
Research shows the web site draws about 100,000 regular visitors a month who do not read the daily paper. How does Jennewein snare them?
He grabs them where they work.
"Seventy percent of SignOn[SanDiego]'s traffic occurs during workday," he said. "In this environment, TV, even newspapers are inappropriate. With PCs in cubicles, it looks like work."
While news sites must have world and national news, in-depth local news and breaking news are what differentiate SignOnSanDiego from everyone else in the market. Jennewein's goal is to have new headlines on the site every time someone visits it in the course of a workday.
Advertisers like those extra 100,000 readers and pay to reach them, coughing up an extra $2 per column inch on print retail ads which also go on the Web, running on-line for three days. With 60 to 70 ads a day, it starts adding up -- and far from cannibalizing the paper, stories on-line have been prompting single copy sales, he said.
Yelvington had his own path to the promised land. With newspapers descending a staircase into irrelevancy, as he put it, we need to look at other things.
Morris has created a web of sites that break out of the traditional newspaper circulation footprint. RockAthens builds on the Athens, Ga.-area's university and music traditions to keep readers up to date with everything music. RockKansas does the same in Kansas, branching out far beyond the Topeka Capital-Journal's traditional circulation area.
Features on both sites, such as the beer-o-meter (how much beer you can buy for $5 at area bars) probably wouldn't make it in the daily paper.
Throw in the college and sports-related sites (HawkZone, CatZone, PrepZone and others), and you have lots of extra ways to put your advertisers before new audiences and to try new things. RockKansas has been so popular, Yelvington said, that it's probably going to become a print publication circulated around the state.
In Dallas, Barker is looking for e-commerce solutions, beginning with archives. "Archives are the low-hanging fruit," he said. "People who won't pay for today's news will gladly pay for yesterday's news."
He's in the process of converting the paper's microfilm archives into something that can be searched on a computer and resold just as the more recent electronic archives are. Throw in the special packages on CD-ROM from the archives of the Dallas Morning News and Belo's Wfaa-TV -- packages where the paper has a unique angle, such as the Kennedy assassination, or the annual Top Businesses in Dallas-Fort Worth -- and you start talking real money.
"Archives are approaching a seven-figure business for us," Barker said.
Ah, spring. A walk back outside the Hershey Convention Center found a day that was cold, dark and rainy. But look closely, and you could see flowers poking up from the ground.
-- Steven E. Brier; seb@colepapers.net
Atex Media Solutions Inc.,
(781) 275-2323,
e-mail: info@atex.com;
Brainworks Inc.,
(516) 563-5000,
e-mail: info@brainworks.com;
Edgil Associates Inc.,
(978) 251-9932,
e-mail: jkosiorek@edgil.com;
Innovectra Corp.,
(888) 734-2299,
e-mail: info@innovectra.com;
Mactive Inc.,
(407) 435-0215,
e-mail: info@mactiveinc.com;
Managing Editor Inc.,
(215) 886-5662,
e-mail: info@maned.com;
Multi-Ad Services Inc.,
(309) 692-1530,
e-mail: corporate@multi-ad.com;
Multimedia Sales Specialists,
(727) 847-2464,
e-mail: mike@mikeblinder.com;
Olive Software Inc.,
(720) 474-1220,
e-mail: info@olive-soft.com;
QuickWire Labs,
(905) 526-3217,
e-mail: bmuir@quickwire.com.
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