May 1998, Vol. 9, No. 5

Flying trapeze

Daring young technologists fly through the air with the greatest of ease

Zoo. Some people call newspapers zoos.

Others call them insane asylums. Personally, I've always thought of them as circuses.

Three- or four-ring circuses at that, with a little fire-breathing going on in the production department, some dancing and singing in the marketing and sales departments, and major animal taming in the newsroom.

But the men and women on the high wire -- on the flying trapeze -- have always been the systems and new media people. They're doing the scary stuff, the act that takes more daring and lots of do.

This month, we venture up onto the platform with some high-flying newspaper information systems activities:

In Colorado Springs, The Gazette took the act a little higher than most. The paper’s executives decided that not only did they need a new editorial front-end system (as well as an advertising system, but that’s another story), they would become the first newspaper in the United States to install an editorial front-end from Unisys Corp.

Senior Editor Pete Wetmore traveled to Colorado Springs last month and got a good overview of Hermes and Wire Center, the two main components of the Unisys product.

It appears that the Unisys folks have gotten the product Americanized (though there were some complaints in Colorado Springs about error messages being in German) and that workers at The Gazette are happy, despite some stumbles in the installation.

It has taken Unisys a long time to get itself comfortable in the U.S. market (and get the U.S. market comfortable with it). If what Wetmore saw in Colorado Springs can be replicated at a big site -- oh, say the two dailies in Philadelphia, the Inquirer and the Daily News, where Unisys has a contract to provide a new system -- then perhaps Hermes and Wire Center will make a big impact on U.S. newspapers.

If systems and new media are staffed by trapeze artists, then the advertising department houses the acrobats. Or should we say, the Adobe Acrobats?

Over the course of the last few months I've heard a lot of confusion about Adobe’s implementation of the Portable Document Format (PDF), which it calls Acrobat. PDF is being used more and more by advertising agencies and retailers as a method of distributing digital display advertising -- and more and more newspapers have more and more problems.

Wetmore takes a gander at what’s happening at newspapers with PDF and also checks in with some experts about how publishers can better embrace the product. Further, he takes a look at PDF’s progress toward becoming a real standard.

One neat thing about circuses is that they don't all have to be the same.

I'm of the opinion that the new media arm of a newspaper should be firmly attached to the rest of the paper. The web site editor should sit next to the print managing editor; the web site ad salesperson should go out on calls with the print salesperson.

The exception to that rule appears to be newspapers owned by Cox Enterprises Inc. of Atlanta. All of the Cox papers have ceded their new media operations to a new division in the company, Cox Interactive Media. Julius Duscha, a correspondent for our sister publication, NewsInc., visited the operation (Cox calls them "studios") in Palm Beach, Fla., to see how the separation of new media and old media is working.

Duscha finds the editors are quite pleased not to have new media responsibility. This disappoints me, as I would have hoped that they would understand the need to learn new media to survive.

Some people just don't want to get up on the wire.

Lastly, high wire acts aren't all at newspapers. I visited the System Integrators Systems Users Group, which met April 5-8 in San Diego. I was there as a speaker and didn't take any notes, but used the visit as a springboard to see how the company is doing in 1998.

I believe that CEO Frank Washington has turned the company around -- he is within weeks, if not days, of negotiating an agreement to get the company’s debt down to a manageable $7 million, and has reinvigorated the staff. New products are popping up and new ideas are prevalent.

-- David M. Cole

See also Hellbox.

Flying trapeze

Daring young technologists fly through the air with the greatest of ease

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.