From Point A to ...
"This has been two years of insanity," said Jay Brown, sitting behind the desk in his basement office. Adorning one wall was a backward-running clock, symbolic of all system offices -- there's never enough time for what needs to be done.

As information services director of The Gazette, Brown presided over not only the Unisys installation, but also Year 2000 preparations, a newsroom renovation and installing a 40-seat Atex Enterprise advertising system. "We were rushed because of the remodeling. Otherwise, the time frame was correct," he said.

The day after Enterprise went live, Brown was promoted to the Freedom corporate post of director of new technology. Long experienced with newspaper computer systems, Brown has specific requirements for a production solution: "My preference for a newsroom system is one that has no users because then it never breaks."

When he couldn't get that, he went for Unisys.

"We wanted one application they could look at and didn't have to learn 20 different applications," Brown said. The system incorporates Hermes, the text editing/ production package, and WireCenter, for collecting incoming text and eventually photos and graphics as well.

To some extent, The Gazette flubbed Unisys training. Unisys was partly responsible, said Bill Stroud, director of publishing solutions. "We had never done user-level training," he said; since this installation, Unisys hired an experienced trainer who had worked for other publishing systems suppliers.

"We did not do this in a systematic way," Greto said. As research manager, he was familiar with GUIs and working with others in the newsroom to master computer-assisted reporting; thus, he was integral to training people on Unisys.

He gave the paper an A for effort.

"We created a four-step program," Greto said, from "idiot level" through reporting to copy editing and page design. "That was wrong. The levels were great but we did not spend enough time teaching the reporters," who got six hours' exposure to Hermes, WireCenter and a host of Internet and other applications on PCs.

The learning curve got badly bent when reporters completed training but no Unisys machines were available for them to use. "It's called a waste of time," Greto said. "When [the system] did come up two weeks later, I had to stand behind them to tell them what to do."

The paper had tried to prepare for training well. To free up crucial copy desk staff, Smith said, "we hired every part-time copy editor in town to sit on the rim and do baseline copy editing to give the full-time copy editors more time for their learning curve."

The 110-PC system employs Windows NT over a Cabletron switched Ethernet backbone running at 100 megabits per second to Sun UltraSPARC servers with a redundant array of inexpensive disks (Raid) that has 24 gigabytes of storage. The mirrored servers, whose Sybase databases are never out of sync for more than 15 minutes, are "not stressed at all," Brown said, thanks to client-server architecture which has shown "no congestion."

Pages, be they fully or only partly editorial, are output to two Autologic APS6s or a Konica EV-jetsetter (a second is due). Color portions of pages are sent to negative, with the black plate double-burned to add text.

The intense security that pervaded the CSI system -- "people on one side of the room couldn't get to stories on the other side of the room," Burns said -- was ditched in favor of universal access to wires and most copy. Familiar features were retained, Burns noted, such as queries "parallel" to those found in CSI. "We've kept some of the comfort level of CSI," he said.

One familiar problem -- running out of disc space, thanks to pack rats on the system -- was obviated by denying users their own electronic drawers in Unisys, which are handy, customizable storage bins. Users are encouraged to resort to the disc drives on their workstations, or better yet, back things off on a floppy disk.

With drawers, one familiar task -- sorting wire copy -- is fast and flexible in WireCenter, Burns showed. With wire copy stored in a proprietary database on the loafing backup server, displaying a list of stories was instantaneous.

The list occupied the top right portion of Burns' screen, with a window underneath displaying the full text of each story as Burns clicked through the list. To the left was a vertical window holding his set of drawers and standing queries, which provided quick access to lists of wire stories.

Demonstrating one of the features that make Unisys so appealing, Burns clicked and dragged to highlight a block of text, then dragged the text into a container in the vertical window on the left side of the screen. This was, he explained, the fast way to build a column of wire briefs -- no cut and paste.

Incoming text, as well as headers, is searched for prescribed words. A yellow streak flashes across the bottom of the screen to announce an arriving story that matches the criteria. Double click on the yellow streak and the story opens up immediately.

"It's damn cool -- way cool," Burns said.

On the front line
Demi-Smith is a copy editor-designer who likens Hermes' page layout capabilities to Quark XPress: "It's somewhat like Quark -- create an object -- but it pretty much ends there."

The very act of creation distinguishes Hermes from XPress. Everything within Unisys is stored in a container. Create a story, it's a text container. Bring in a photo from another system, it's in a photo container. Grab an Associated Press graphic, it's inside a graphics container.

The beauty is, unlike XPress, one container fits all: Create a container, then designate the category of contents it'll hold. This kind of functionality inspires operating efficiency -- look, Ma, fewer steps.

The Gazette acknowledges it has a long way to go to realize production efficiencies.

For starters, the design desk is saddled with busy work, creating ad reservations for ads that can't be imported -- there's no ad manager system, no OPI server for ads, and ads are done in a range of file formats. As of now, virtually all end up as paper pasted on a page board -- and to make matters worse, ad stacks change as the day goes on.

To move into full-page output, Unisys is working to forge a universal link to ad stacking programs like Layout/8000, the application from Software Consulting Services of Nazareth, Pa., that The Gazette uses to create its ad stacks. When done, it will automatically generate each edition in Hermes, drawing pages as prescribed by Layout/8000.

Then there's image-handling. Editors use paper proofs and a sizing wheel to select and crop photos; desktop display is still in the future. The paper is protecting its investment in a Hell Topaz color correction system, so for now all images -- halftones and color -- are exported for touching up in the scan room downstairs, then sent to an OPI server for output.

This has put off implementation of one feature of WireCenter -- displaying associated text, photos and graphics in a single list.

While page assembly is swift in a good user's hands, the system, for now, lacks macros for automating tasks. Templates can be set up for any number of pages, but few have been. The list of tags -- coding styles -- that each designer has to wade through seems unnecessarily long.

And standing items, such as photo credits, must be massaged upon introduction to a page. The system needs to know the container has been opened, so Demi-Smith obliges. In the process, for example, the designation "AP" becomes "Associated Press" in print, properly flushed right.

"One of the best tools is the makeup window," he said, which is used to import text. Text may be displayed in draft mode, galley form and WYSIWYG, where color-coded borders give a visual clue as to whether a story fits -- red for overset, yellow for underset, green for ready to image set.

Color similarly alerts designers as to the status of stories in a list. Yellow signifies the copy is on the copy desk, orange says a designer has the story open, blue means an editor is working on it, and green flashes that all is ready.

Alicia Hocrath used Quark XPress where she worked before joining The Gazette. "It's real easy to build pages on this system," said the copy editor-designer. More importantly, "any number of people can be working on a page," unlike XPress. "If we had to deal with that here, we'd never make deadline."

One day in mid-April, Hocrath assembled three inside business section pages in about 45 minutes. As she completed each page, she called out to the copy desk, "There's something to work on Biz 6."

One day, that notification will be automated as well.

What's wrong with this picture?
Server woes. Unreliable printers. General Protection Faults in reporters' workstations. Monitors that are too small. Disappearing drawers in WireCenter.

Even with these problems -- some of them the consequence of choice -- no edition has been threatened. When a server problem materialized several months into operation, everyone was caught short; it turned out to be a Sun UNIX problem. Even with nighttime crashes, Smith noted, "we still made deadline."

Burns remarked that despite the fact the 15-inch monitors reporters use were too small because "this system relies so much on visuals and color," they will be kept.

Greto found fault with the printers. "We should have bought more printers, and printers that hold fonts," he said, as well as ones that don't clog as readily.

Demi-Smith remarked that he encountered a GPF the instant he tried to sign on (prompting Stroud to kid, "That's the least destructive time"). The GPFs constitute an annoyance caused when too many applications vie for memory, something that was not expected because the machines were configured for Unisys-only operation.

GPFs will be exorcised with a memory boost to 48 megabytes from 16 megabytes in the 133 megahertz Gateway workstations reporters use. Designers, who are inexorably moving off Macintoshes, will get 128 megabytes in their PCs.

Demi-Smith also mentioned that sometimes the system provides the wrong page grid on the first try. Another petty problem: Coding "is kind of squirrelly," he said. The first in a series of bullets, for example, may be misformatted, but fixing it simply pushes the problem to the next bullet. All must be touched to correct the problem.

Now past its birth pains, the Death Star is ready to preside over The Gazette well into the next century -- well, 10 years or so, estimates Smith. "It's more indefinite than that, depending on where Unisys goes," he said. "We're no longer prisoners to hardware as we were with CSI," which means the paper can continually upgrade its PCs and network, prolonging Hermes' life.

What will it eventually provide reporters and editors that they don't have now? Broadly, noted Greto, "This is changing the way newspapers are operating. Two years ago, we were in the Stone Age."

He sees improved tools for reporting -- access to the Internet, beat source files on the newsroom intranet, e-mail, 10 years of data now stored on a DataTimes electronic library. Reporters, Greto said, "don't have to open a phone book any more. Of course, if the power's out, they're dead."

At some point, the paper's web site -- the first in Colorado -- will be integrated into Unisys, whose next upgrade will include tools for easily posting items on the Web. (Unisys aside, the paper is sending classifieds to its ad site, http://www.44sell.com/, with advertisers placing orders over the Internet.)

Smith anticipates output to full-page negatives in 12 to 18 months, noting that the pre-press and composing room operations were well on the way to oblivion. After Hermes version 4.0 is installed, probably this summer, The Gazette will "retrain everyone from Square 1."

Smith has no regrets about choosing Unisys. "We're putting out the paper with the same, if not fewer, people than we already had. Those kinds of efficiencies are what we bought the system for.

"I'm a totally happy camper."

-- Pete Wetmore

Software Consulting Services,
(610) 837-8484;
Unisys Corp.,
(215) 986-4080.

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