The Cole Papers., 91, December 1999

Let the sun shine in: The Information International Inc. Page Makeup/2 workstation, unveiled in 1991, ran on a workstation from Sun Microsystems. The handout said that the product could 'handle all aspects of "cut-and-paste" page design, thus providing an interactive tool to create the look of the paper.'

Amid newspaper recession, suppliers take a bunch of risks

Though then-President George Herbert Walker Bush preferred that the term not be used, 1991 was the year of the "recession." In September, The Cole Papers cited figures showing that second-quarter newspaper earnings were disastrous: Affiliated Publications (then the publisher of the Boston Globe) was down 85 percent, year-over-year; A.H. Belo Corp. (Dallas Morning News) was down 60 percent; E.W. Scripps was down 160 percent; Times Mirror down 42 percent and Washington Post Co. down 49 percent.

The entire year was tinged with that downward spiral of profits -- from a dismal ANPA/Tec to a "depressing" Seybold fall conference, held that year in San Jose.

Layoffs were rampant in the supplier industry; newspapers offered workers buyouts.

In spite of -- or perhaps because of -- these strong economic factors, we saw a bunch of risks taken in 1991:

IBM, then behind the eight-ball in its relationship with Microsoft, allied with Apple Computer to produce a new operating system, a new computer chip and a "common multimedia platform." Though the operating system and the platform both tanked, the computer chip eventually became the PowerPC.

System Integrators Inc., the big newspaper front-end supplier, decided that there was a potential in Yellow Pages display ad makeup. It created a Telco Division, based in suburban Denver, whose marching order was to develop a system based on AdSpeed (the Macintosh-based display ad makeup application developed by Digital Technology International of Utah, which SII was then co-marketing) for US West, Colorado's telephone company. SII and DTI would tinker with their 1989 relationship later in the year, with the companies dropping their circulation-based marketing provisions and SII stepping away from offering the full DTI product line.

A software company started by an organic chemist and a former IBMer promised to deliver the newspaper industry something sorely missed at the time: a digital picture archive. AXS/Optical Technology Resource Inc. of Berkeley, Calif., had created a product called NewsPhotoAccess that had a lot of promise. The application, originally designed for fine-art image catalogs, was demonstrated at ANPA/Tec '91 in Las Vegas on the side of the Nikon booth -- and scores of people stood in line for a demonstration.

The other big news at ANPA/Tec was that Atex (then a division of photo giant Kodak) and CText (then as now a small front-end supplier based in Ann Arbor, Mich.) entered into a marketing agreement whereby Atex was allowed to sell the CText editorial and classified systems to magazines worldwide and newspapers 125,000-circulation and larger; CText retained the rights to smaller papers and its existing customer base (which included the Chicago Tribune). This fixed problems for both companies -- Atex lacked a true "fourth-wave" front-end, while CText lacked marketing clout in bigger newspapers.

The agreement with CText was a precursor to many changes at Atex. The company aggressively adopted popular technologies such as Ethernet, Unix-powered workstations and PostScript. Things were so different at the venerable company, we called it "Atex Lite" and "not your father's front-end."

Basically, Atex management took the ideas of the '80s -- typified by the Total Publishing Environment -- and broke them down into modular components that ran on IBM RS/6000 workstations. In addition, the company had a new classified front-end system -- called Total Advertising Management System (Tams) -- in development (Atex executives acknowledged that though the Los Angeles Times was driving many of the requirements of the new system, Tams wouldn't meet the Southern California paper's needs upon release).

At the annual Atex Users Group Meeting, held in Denver in August, William Stroud, director of publishing systems for Philadelphia Newspapers, said that their supplier had changed. "It seemed that aliens had slipped in and occupied the body of the company we knew and that some of us loved," Stroud said.

Layoffs happened throughout the industry: In January, Linotype Hell shed 550 workers worldwide (16 percent); in March, Atex also dropped 16 percent (120 people) of its workforce and in December laid off another 80; in April, System Integrators cut 48 people, or 10 percent of its workforce and in December carved about 42 more. The fall was worse: DuPont/Camex laid off 70 workers or 25 percent, while two others, Information International (62 workers) and Dewar Information Systems (22 people), shrunk by 18 percent.

In the fall, Quark announced its new workgroup publishing product, based on its ubiquitous XPress page layout package. When we first discussed it, it was called "Spiff"; subsequently it was named Quark Publishing System (QPS).

With an anticipated price of $1500 per workstation, QPS was designed to bring accurate copy-fitting to the end user (Quark being unwilling to share its hyphenation-and-justification routines with traditional front-end suppliers). The system, which hinged on a database that was held in the random access memory of a Macintosh, wouldn't be sold directly by Quark or as shrink-wrapped software -- Quark intended to develop "a network of system integrators" to install and maintain the system.

Amid newspaper recession, suppliers take a bunch of risks

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