Illinois prairie paper provides fertile ground for CText seeds

DECATUR, Ill. -- "A bad day on CText is better than a good day on Harris," proclaimed the red letters trudging across the blue screen-saver display.

The sentiment crawled across a monitor in the newsroom of the 38,000-circulation Herald & Review, the morning daily rooted here in the heart of America's soybean country.

From January to September 1998, the Herald & Review was busy installing a suite of applications from CText Inc., a publishing systems supplier based in Ann Arbor, Mich. The installation included 11 AdVision workstations for classified ad entry, one Alps seat for classified pagination, 35 Dateline workstations for editorial and 10 Expressline pagination seats.

Out went legacy systems made by Harris Publishing Systems Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., systems whose proprietary software had gone live on '286s in 1991.

"It was just horrible to get stuff in and out of Harris," said Andy Whitney, the paper's technical services manager. "For the time it was built, it was a wonderful system. But it was time."

Simultaneously, the Herald & Review remodeled its cavernous office, which encompasses advertising, production and the newsroom. Staffers find the maze of chest-high desks and ample workstations ideal for an occasional Nerf ball fight; free popcorn is dished up every Friday.

Publisher Mike Gulledge has no regrets about tackling so much at once. "I had lots of confidence in our people and I was sold on the systems," Gulledge said. "I was confident that it would all be transparent to our customers."

Whitney, who slid down technology's cutting edge for the duration of the projects, had but one thought born of 20/20 hindsight. "I wished we had a little more of a breather between systems."

But all's well that gets installed well. A visit to the newspaper on a hill (well, the kind of rise that passes for a hill in central Illinois) found that the Herald & Review staff had adjusted to the transition fairly easily.

While CText had contracted to install systems, what it really did was instill enthusiasm across many desks.

Training wags the dog
The smooth changeover could be attributed to the staff's long familiarity with Quark XPress, the page layout program that is also the pagination engine for CText.

But Gulledge and Whitney said CText training was central to their success, as was access to experienced CText-savvy technicians at companion papers owned by Lee Enterprises Inc. of Davenport, Iowa. Lee has made CText its preferred solution for its newspapers similar in size to the Herald & Review.

"I don't feel it was pushed down our throats in any way," said Whitney, who had seen CText at two successive Nexpos. He also pointed out that Lee's bigger papers in Lincoln, Neb., and Madison, Wis., have Harris systems, while Lee's paper in Racine, Wis., uses solutions from Baseview Products Inc., a Harris division also based in Ann Arbor.

Having an established CText system at Lee's 50,000-circulation Quad City Times, 180 miles away in Davenport, was beneficial. "We cheated off what the Quad City Times did," he said. "They worked out all the bugs."

In addition, "there wasn't a whole lot of retraining to do," aside from getting paginators who were accustomed to Macintosh workstations adjusted to XPress in Windows. "The ones who were used to keyboard shortcuts took a little longer" adapting to WinXPress, he said.

Reporters and editors did have to adjust to Microsoft Word after years of Xywrite on Harris. To clear these hurdles, the paper availed itself of CText's installation expertise, which included "the best training I've ever seen," Whitney said.

Five people -- "core strong users" -- were sent to Ann Arbor for two weeks of intensive training there. Then in August and September, CText trainers traveled to Decatur.

As each group of editorial staffers ended their three days of training, their Harris workstations were pulled out and new Gateway PCs with 32-megabytes of random access memory and 17-inch monitors were installed. "They worked on them right away," Whitney said.

Classified converted to CText earlier in 1998. The February weekend before going live, ad takers immersed themselves in typing in -- not importing -- classifieds that had been in the Harris system. Font problems were detected and solved as classifieds were proofed.

"It's the old trial-by-fire thing," Whitney said of the process, which built up ad takers' confidence before they began serving customers on CText.

That month also saw the dawn of classified pagination. The impact of the new applications was almost immediate, bringing greater productivity, colorful new upsells in the classified pages that take advantage of the paper's extensive flexographic color capabilities -- and a sharp reduction in pasteup jobs.

"We were able to retrain, and retool positions. Even had a person who was 70 years old didn't leave us," Gulledge said. "We felt good about it."

Redistributing the load
Whitney's wife is happier with CText, as most nights he heads home about dinnertime and rarely has to return.

In the Last Days of Harris, "I used to be back in two or three times a week with little problems," Whitney said. But now that the composing room's former page makeup supervisor has become his nightside shadow, she deals with system problems as deadlines come and go.

"I started out in cut-and-paste," said Megan McEvoy, Whitney's evolving alter ego, recalling the days when classifieds were output in galley form and had to be painstakingly pasted up.

"I had a Mac and that thrilled me," she said. Her interest in technology led to her being able to solve occasional problems with the paper's Agfa imagesetters, which were new in 1994 and are being upgraded this year.

Now McEvoy's turf spans the production components integral to CText. Her day begins at a Macintosh, where page layouts are generated by the Advertising Layout System from Managing Editor Inc. of Jenkintown, Pa.

Page dummies are exported to CText, where ad numbers in the database are matched with boxes on pages. McEvoy opens each ad page in an edition ("I don't set up any fronts"), which on a weekday runs about 32 pages, launching each one from a lengthy list of XPress page templates.

As the ad stacks appear she does final fine-tuning, then instructs the system to flow ads in. As she does, it often returns an error which McEvoy routinely dismisses: "'Warning -- request does not match file' and it does."

McEvoy figured out how to avoid crashing her PC when she discovered a correlation between locking color ads on a page and locking up the workstation. Both bugs may go away later this year when the paper completes the transition from the OS/2 operating system, now supporting classified, to Windows NT, which is carrying the editorial load.

She marches through the pages like a combine in a Macon County bean field in October -- straight and sure, in a virtual cloud of dust -- working on two days' papers in the course of the evening.

As she goes, she keeps track of the nondigitized ads that are preventing the Herald & Review from banishing pasteup entirely. Some of them are sent via AP AdSEND weeks in advance and fall into the bit bucket, which has inspired a concerted effort to bring the retail advertising desk up to speed on managing digital assets.

Locally, McEvoy plans to visit advertisers who are standing in the way of her pagination juggernaut, which now yields output to film for as much as 98 percent of the weekday pages and 85 percent on weekends.

"I'm trying to pinpoint the places that send us hard copy ads," she said, "so I can eventually go to the place and ask, 'What computer system do you have? What are your resources? What are your fonts?' Our pagination will stay at these percentages until we get to those advertisers."

While right now, "I'm kind of like the ruler of page setup," she said, she is training other people to share the crown. But she won't be sending anyone any e-mail or system messages about How to Get Things Done. The CText system has such features, but the Herald & Review never trained anyone to use them.

Instead, as in newsrooms of the pencil-and-paste-pot days of yore, people talk to each other.

The good, the bad, the bottleneck
Copy Editor Maryjo Payne has a good news-bad news list she's compiled over several months of making up feature pages on CText.

The 32-year Herald & Review veteran likes being able to work on the layout while another editor -- or two -- finishes work on a story. However, when a story falls short, all the leftover space appears as a big white blank at the end, leading her to describe CText as "the new kid on the block" when it comes to understanding what's important to the people who use a newsroom computer system.

Payne would like jumps to be placed automatically ("it worked like a charm in training") and for the "nonprinting" instant overset boxes not to print ("we've found we have to take them off the page anyway"). While she's befuddled as to why fractions leading a line appear in red, she salutes the ease with which she can corral and store wire copy.

Whitney likes CText, its few warts and all.

Disfigurements include two-faced fonts, he said: "We've even found the same font on a Mac is not necessarily the same font on the PC." This is an issue, as most ads are made up on Macintoshes in XPress or Multi-Ad Creator from Multi-Ad Services Inc. of Peoria, Ill., then made into Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) files for page production.

The system architecture also creates a font hassle -- updates cannot be downloaded from a server to the clients en masse, but must be installed one by one on each workstation.

The Herald & Review has found its client-server network to be inadequate in another way -- speed. "It was OK at the time but we've outgrown it," Whitney said of the consultant-designed network that funnels as many as 24 PCs into one 10-megabit port into the system.

"Most pagination workstations have their own 10-megabit port but reporters may share with 23 other people," he said, so individual workstations occasionally slow to a crawl during times of high demand. (The system is "slower than snails" at 9:30 a.m., when many people start work, Payne said.)

These "serious network issues" will be remedied through the adoption of Windows NT, installation of network hubs linking the four RS/6000 servers (two primary, two backup) and the Associated Press server, and tighter links between NT and Novell that are due for delivery in October.

All the pagination stations also need to be upgraded to Quark XPress 4.0 -- "3.32 is 16-bit but everything else is 32-bit," Whitney said.

System maintenance has changed with the advent of CText. "We've had to take on more responsibility for day-to-day system stuff," he said.

Harris needed relatively little maintenance ("it was just kind of there") but CText demands periodic backing up to tape and database checks.

"From a data integrity standpoint," he said, "we're in a lot better shape."

And ready for Jan. 1 -- the CText domain has been made Year 2000-compliant even though more changes are anticipated later this year.

Niggling problems persist. "We still have some unexplained crashes from time to time," Whitney said; CText is "still narrowing them down" to find their causes and send fixes.

Even with these problems, "we haven't had one of those nights where I've been here at 11:30 at night and think, 'We're not going to get a paper out.' We had a few days like that toward the end of Harris."

Whitney looks forward to the five to seven years he expects CText to be in the building.

"Overall," Whitney said, "we're very pleased with the system. It has its frustrations from time to time, but every system does."

-- Pete Wetmore

The Associated Press, (212) 621-1500;
Baseview Products Inc., (734) 662-5800, e-mail: marketing@baseview.com;
CText Inc., (313) 677-4700, e-mail: sales@ctext.com;
Harris Publishing Systems Corp., (407) 242-5330, e-mail: jfitch@harris.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.

See also Classy classifieds.

From THE COLE PAPERS, March 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.