That's just a short list. You can add to it United Features, King Features, United Press International, Scripps Howard News Service, Reuters and probably your suppliers.

Several forces turned the tap of Internet interest from a trickle five years ago to a full gush in the last year. Contributing to the flood is the mother of invention adoption, cost savings.

Just as '70s conversions from hot lead to phototypesetters created an appetite for digital text feeds, pagination begs for all-digital comics, puzzles, graphics and photos. Now there are enough begging newspapers to comprise a market.

Full-page output is used to produce two U.S. dailies in five, and among 50,000-plus circulation papers, the rate is more than half, according to "TrendWatch 1998: A Synopsis of the Operations and Purchasing Survey of U.S. Newspapers," a new Cole's Notes report. Another 35 percent use modular makeup or area composition.

Since there's nothing like a deadline to energize newsrooms, Year 2000 obsolescence pushed many to retool, bringing standard networks and Internet access to thousands of wordsmiths. Wire, Web and e-mail now appear on one terminal.

Then there's the "free access" concept -- once you buy an Internet gateway, more use doesn't cost a thing. When you can download a column for nothing, why pay AP DataFeatures $25 a pop or FedEx $19 a week?

That's why DataFeatures and two-day delivery are dead at the Vincennes Sun-Commercial, the smallest member of Central Newspapers Inc. of Phoenix.

"In the past, guest columns, like (Andy) Rooney and Cal Thomas, the AP would literally charge you an arm and a leg to deliver that over the satellite," said Mark Crowley, photo and graphics editor. "I saw that columns that cost $7 to $8 a week (for rights) were costing $25 for delivery over the AP service."

E-feeds decimated transmission bills.

"Now we're paying as little as $2 (per use) for the delivery," Crowley said. "They aren't completely eliminated, but they've gone down dramatically."

When comic strips arrived via the U.S. Postal Service, syndicate shipping and handling fees ranged from $19 to $40 a month. Converting from FedEx to a BBS for a full-page United Media product cut a $900-per-year bill to $130.

"Now I'm paying $2 a strip for the month. A few of the syndicates have an electronic bulletin board access fee, which is a pittance. Electronic delivery of features has saved us several thousand dollars a year -- you do the math," he said.

"The motivation for switching from mail delivery is, one, more timely delivery and, more importantly, cost," said Joe Sullivan, editor of the 16,000-circulation Southeast Missourian of Cape Girardeau, Mo., and editorial director for parent Rust Communications Inc., also of Cape Girardeau. For the 11 Rust dailies that run features, Sullivan estimates AP savings alone at $1700 to $1800 a year.

Even content providers are shedding fee loads.

"AP had a lot of equipment and they did a very fine job, but they charged substantially for it," said LAT/WP News Service's president and editorial director, Al Leeds.

"We were trying to pass along some delivery charges" by billing about $36 a month, he said. "We would have had to charge $120 a month to fully recover our costs" just in AP charges. There's no surcharge for its DataCall services.

"I think quite honestly we deliberately switched" to Internet gathering, Sullivan said. "Along the way I think we have made a dent in this AP mentality that 'we'll decide what's best for you.'"

In the past, "they didn't ask me if I wanted it, they didn't ask me if there was a more inexpensive alternative," said Leeds, an avowed AP critic. "Now they are asking, particularly in the area of the Internet, they are asking a lot."

And the AP is converting the advice it hears to good services. Sullivan likes AP's new web access, particularly for its ability to retrieve expired LeafDesk photos without paying charges for a retransmission.

Then there's the emergency backup. During the Midwest's big March snowstorm, while someone shoveled a garbling dish, "we went to the web site and pulled off stories, and it was no problem," Sullivan said.

Quality through speed
Suppliers also see up-to-the-minute e-feeds as a quality factor. Freshness is better for Brian Ward, operations director for database products at TMS's TV listings center in Glens Falls, N.Y.

"With the mail, we had three to five days to get the product to somebody. Today we are so close to real-time delivery, it really is amazing," Ward said. "Even if we send you data and we make an error, we can send the changes immediately," using push FTP and Apple Remote Access (ARA) servers.

Even the TMS bulletin board and telephone modems don't match the Internet's reliability and speed. "The chance for your data to get screwed up on delivery is really minimalized," Ward said. "The FTP transfer is really safe."

At the same time, "there will always be hard copy," said Ward. "It's a security reason -- they want that hard copy in their hands. Some people are getting electronic and hard copy to use as a proof, and are getting billed for both."

TMS offered these surprising stats: For all features, 56 percent of its customers receive hard copy, while 44 percent receive electronic files. The e-crowd favors DataFeatures, with 17 percent, compared to 4.8 percent on FeatureServ, 3.8 percent on BBS and 3.2 percent on KRT Direct (http://www.krtdirect.com). The remainder pass through owner-group conduits.

Among TV listings customers, only 12 percent take hard copy. Of the e-feeds, 52 percent use push FTP, 16 percent ARA, 7 percent BBS and 3 percent modem.

Despite all these technology channels, don't shelve your sat-rack glossary yet. Old habits, as well as old systems, die hard in newsrooms. That's why Gannett News Service is sticking to DataFeatures for text and photo services after its GGN2's graphics service debut.

"Having implemented that, we have clear evidence that it works and that it should be the way to go for photos and, to some extent, for text," said GNS Editor Caesar Andrews. "It doesn't do as much good to have it in place if most Gannett papers are not positioned to receive it that way. Because we are a service and because we are beholden to those 75 newspapers -- we can only run as fast as they can run."

So GNS positions its products on live satellite feeds, where the editors' eyeballs are. Graphics editors and photo finders are already used to going to the Web to look for stuff, said GNS Systems Manager Jim Bole. For reaching wire editors, "where a majority of text is still being delivered on AP and still being delivered to their front-end systems, that's where we want to be. If we make them go to a separate place, they may not go there at all."

That desire for single-source convenience led one LAT/WP News Service customer in Australia to pay extra for DataFeatures delivery, even though an e-feed is free.

"I think that there are some issues that have to do with internal sorting, within the newsroom itself," said Leeds. "Even though we have e-mail on our web site, I still think that there may be some questions about internal routing at newspapers that makes DataFeatures a popular favorite."

AP still dominates rooftops
AP isn't resting on that status, however, and improvements continue on the satellite-fed AP Server.

Now purchased by more than 200 members, the PC-based network-friendly box now gathers photos and native-format graphics. Plans are to ship text later, and finally audio and video for on-line use.

"It's the beginning of the end of separate pipes, so to speak," said John Reed, AP's director of communications.

For dollar-short newsrooms, AP offers a glimpse of the future with its web site, which features GraphicsNet's success, the aforementioned text backup and a two-week archive of photos.

So where will the supplemental services fit?

"As we reshape our services, certainly DataFeatures will be a part of that," Reed said. Although rates have not increased for years, and many customers find them reasonable, "there is no question but that the actual delivery of material other than ours is a service and a convenience, as opposed to a few years ago, when for all practical purposes, it was the only -- if not the best -- way to receive this material.

"We aren't offering a technology that can't be replicated; we're offering a service or a convenience," he said. "Whether by satellite or Internet, we'll make sure it gets there -- and if you have problems, we'll make sure it gets squared away."

"There is no question but that world is changing. We're trying to be cognizant of that fact," he said. "It's certainly easier to get a single piece of information (from the Internet), and that is opening opportunities for us."

Those opportunities include foreign markets and smaller customers, including on-line outlets. AP's competitors are chasing the same ones.

Reed mentioned small African papers taking Internet delivery that were unreachable earlier; Joe DiMarino, executive vice president of sales and marketing at PressLink parent MediaStream, cited sales efforts in South America and Europe.

While most of PressLink's 1000 or so clients are domestic, its growth potential is overseas. About 20 percent of last year's revenue came from clients outside the United States, "a significant jump from previous years," he said.

Besides more foreign marketing, reliable transfer of foreign content provides more to sell.

"Because of the technology, it's easier for us to get new content," DiMarino said. "Because we're able to get this content more easily, we have more product to sell those customers," whether overseas or domestic non-English newspapers.

"It's all driven by the technology," DiMarino said. "We have all these wonderful ideas, but if you can't pull it together and do it easily, it's just an idea. The move to the Web was vital for PressLink."

This quest for new customers is leading to odd turf initiatives, and not just new competition by supplemental service providers. With the creation of new web sites so fast and inexpensive, some content creators are working multiple sales channels. For example, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers' Group Syndicate are web-available through jointly owned LAT/WP News Service and from Los Angeles-based Times Mirror Co.'s NewsCom.

TMS chose to open its own 'Net store instead of riding PressLink Online, owned by old partner Knight Ridder of San Jose. And KRT Direct has its own web site, as well.

None appear on AP's web server.

But that's a story for another day, inspired by technology but written in the vocabulary of dollars and profits.

-- Marion J. Love

The Associated Press, (212) 621-1500, e-mail: info@ap.org
Digital Technology International, (801) 226-2984, e-mail: info@dtint.com
Gannett News Service, (703) 276-5898, e-mail: candrews@gns.gannett.com
Los Angeles Times/ Washington Post News Service, (202) 334-6173, e-mail: latwp@newsservice.com
NewsCom, (305) 448-8411, e-mail: sales@newscom.com
MediaStream Inc. (PressLink), (215) 239-4100, e-mail: jdimarino@krmediastream.com
Scripps Howard News Service, (202) 408-1484, e-mail: lwilson@unitedmedia.com
Tribune Media Services, (312) 222-4444, e-mail: tmc@tribune.com
United Media, (212) 293-8500, e-mail: syndicate@unitedmedia.com
Wieck Photo Database Inc., (972) 392-0888, e-mail: info@wieck.com.

See also Serving one's own.

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