The Cole Papers

News Industry Text Format OK'd

LAS VEGAS -- The Wire Service Committee of the Newspaper Association of America has approved the News Industry Text Format (Nitf), giving system suppliers and newspapers the green light to begin implementing systems based on the standard.

Nitf is a coding system based on the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) that allows wire services and newspapers to exchange and archive news stories in a universally understood format.

The Nitf has been in development for more than five years; it is designed to replace what had been called ANPA 1312, the wire header format first introduced in 1979.

The process of developing Nitf has been long and arduous (see The Cole Papers, August 1993, May 1994, August 1997). Nitf was a joint project with the International Press Telecommunications Council of London, which handled the development of wire service photo headers universally known as Iptc. In addition, the Radio-Television News Directors Association and the American Press Institute's Media Center endorse the new format.

-- dmc

The Chicago connection

The Newspaper Association of America's Connections conference, sponsored by the New Media Federation, will be July 15-18 in Chicago. This year's theme is "Power of the Package -- Print and On-line."

The opening keynote speaker will be former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki. Today the chief executive of Garage.com, a web site dedicated to helping technology entrepreneurs get their ideas off the ground, Kawasaki has written a number of books on business and communications, including Selling the Dream and How to Drive Your Competition Crazy.

Scheduled as closing keynote speaker is Seth Godin, vice president for direct marketing at Yahoo! His presentation will address success strategies for Internet selling and concepts for permission marketing. (Godin replaces entertainment executive Barry Diller.)

In between is a cornucopia of sessions linking print and new media:

  • Friday's sessions include a panel discussion on the conference theme, with participants including William Drewry of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Charlene Li of Forrester Research, Joycelyn Marek of the Houston Chronicle and Kathy Yates of Knight Ridder New Media. Other Friday speakers include Robert Cauthorn of StarNet, Alan Fisher of Onsale Inc., Jesse Berst of ZDNet Anchor Desk, Gary Farnsworth of The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Shelly Salak of the Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., and Fred Mann of Philadelphia Online.

  • Saturday's sessions are highlighted by a series of 30-minute breakfast roundtables that are repeated three times. Topics include "Design Elements and Navigation," "Cashing in On the Directory Listing Business," "Starting Your Community Publishing Site," "Closing the On-line Sale -- Key Elements," "Setting Up Your E-Commerce Site," "Promoting Your Site on a Shoestring Budget," "Fine Tuning Your Classifieds," "Cross-training Staff and Finding Hidden Talents," "Creating A Business Plan -- That You Can Live With," "How to Package Print, Audio and On-line," "Audio Text," "Live Web Cams -- How and Why," "Technology Talk or 'Geekspeak'" and "Co-op Dollars for On-line -- Hidden Treasure."

    For more information, call (703) 902-1783 or e-mail cookh@naa.org.

    -- dmc

    Bit bucket ...

    "It doesn't work, of course, because you're sitting here."
    -- Jeff Litvak, Atex Omnex product manager, addressing Cole Papers Senior Editor Pete Wetmore as Litvak's demo faltered.

    Managing information: At Orlando Sentinel Communications in Florida, Ernie Kuenzli has been named vice president and director of technology and systems; most recently Kuenzli was the department's director. ... At The News-Journal of Wilmington, Del., Bill Steigerwald has been named information systems director; previously Steigerwald was information systems manager at the Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer-Times and in the advanced systems group at The Sun of Baltimore. ...

    New media mavens: At Cox Interactive Media of Atlanta, David Hills has been named vice president of sales. Hills is an 18-year veteran of Cox-owned TeleRep Inc., the nation's largest television sales representation firm where he served as vice president and director of TeleRep Enterprises from 1987 to 1999. Also at Cox, Steve Yelvington has been named executive editor; Yelvington had been editor of on-line at the Star Tribune of Minneapolis since 1994 (he had been with paper since 1985). ... At The McClatchy Co. of Sacramento, Christian Hendricks has been named vice president, interactive media, a new position. Hendricks had been president and publisher of Nando Media, McClatchy's on-line publishing business in Raleigh, N.C. He joined the company in 1992. ... At Tribune Interactive of Chicago, Sharon Mandell has been named vice president and chief technology officer; previously she was director of advanced technology at Tribune Co. (and in a previous life Mandell served as vice president of Plannet Crafters Inc., a developer of software utilities for Microsoft Windows). Also at Tribune Interactive, Michael Plonski has been named vice president of technical operations; previously he had been director of processing technologies at Tribune Information Systems (his pre-Tribune career included stints at Classified Ventures and Peapod). ...

    Vendor visualizations: At Agfa Corp. of Ridgefield Park, N.J., James Timmins has been named director for Agfa's Digital Printing Systems business unit. Previously, Timmins was director of sales for the Americas at Misomex International. ... At Cybergraphic Systems of Burlington, Mass., Daniel Nigloschy has been named senior sales executive for the Northeast and mid-Atlantic region; previously Nigloschy was a proprietor of a European Baseview distributor. Also at Cybergraphic, Dianne Peterson has been named sales executive for the Southeast; previously she was with Arbortext and SII. ... At Information Presentations Technologies Inc. (IPTech) of San Luis Obispo, Calif., Ralph Lloyd has been named director of product marketing. Previously Lloyd was with Harlequin and Xyvision. We seemed to have missed that also at IPTech, James Bovay was named vice president of business development a couple of months back; Bovay spent 25-plus years at Digital Equipment Corp., with direct involvement in a variety of newspaper-oriented projects, including the legendary TMS and CMS front-end systems. ... At Geac Publishing Systems of Tampa, Fla., Richard Kitzmiller has been named regional sales manager; previously Kitzmiller had been with Unisys, but before that had a long career at Geac and its predecessor, Collier-Jackson. ... At Graphic Enterprises Inc. of North Canton, Ohio, Tim Tesmer has been named national sales manager for commercial printing; previously Tesmer had worked for Autotype Americas. ... At Printware Inc. of St. Paul, Minn., Michael Lockett has been named Midwestern district sales manager; previously Lockett was with Graph-Ex Consultants, a printing automation consulting firm. Also at Printware, Thomas Pearce has been named Southeastern district sales manager; previously Pearce was with Fuji Film USA. ... At System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento, Albert de Bruijn has been named vice president of newspaper industry marketing. Previously, de Bruijn was manager of sales and marketing for Cybergraphic's Australian office, working out of suburban Sydney (in a former life, de Bruijn worked for Atex for 11 years). ... At Tribune Media Services of Chicago, Colette Cogley has been named Northeast account executive for TMS' News and Features/KRT division; previously she was with the New Media Division of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. ...

    Confabs: Local Online Commerce, "the nexus of on-line directories, city sites and e-commerce," will be July 18-20 in San Diego. Speakers include Kathy Yates of Knight Ridder New Media, Brendan Burns of AdOne, Charles Conn of TicketMaster Online CitySearch Inc., Paul DeBenedictis of AOL's Digital City, Michael Moran of KOZ Inc., David Morgan of Real Media, Bruce Murray of AltaVista's Zip2, Chris Neimeth of New York Times Electronic Media and Paul Poppajohn of WashingtonPost.Newsweek.com. For more information, call (609) 921-7200 or e-mail tkg@kelseygroup.com. ... Web Design World is July 19-23 in Seattle. It encompasses five events: Web Design '99, JavaScript Conference, Apache Summit, Web Site Usability and Web Marketing for Web Builders. Keynote speakers are Vincent Flanders and Michael Willis (co-writers of Web Pages That Suck); other speakers include Glenn Davis of Project Cool, Jakob Nielsen of Nielsen-Norman Group, Avi Rappoport of Search Tools Consulting and Jeffrey Venn of Wired Digital. To be in this web world, call (206) 285-0305 or send e-mail to wdw@thunderlizard.com. ... The E-Commerce Operations Institute will be July 22-23 in San Francisco. Speakers include Donald Askin of CommercialWare Inc., Ari Friedman of HomeDelivery.com Merchant Network, Ken Hawk of 1-800-Batteries and Jeff Sheahan of Onsale Inc. For the e-information, send e-mail to info@fulcruminfo.com or call (212) 647-0808. ... The Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association's annual conference and Pantech trade show will be Aug. 2-5 in Christchurch, New Zealand. Speakers include Peter Winter of Cox Interactive Media, Earl Wilkinson of the International Newspaper Marketing Association, Terrie Mitchell of the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel and Mike Gannon of the Sacramento Bee. For a little Down Under info, e-mail panpa@panpa.org.au or call {011} (612) 4322 1066. ... LinuxWorld, the conference and exposition devoted to penguin-mania, is Aug. 9-12 in San Jose. Speakers include Linus Torvalds, inventor of the Linux operating system, Sean Maloney of Intel Corp., Mike Prince of Burlington Coat Factory and Jon "Maddog" Hall of Linux International. Pure penguins should call (781) 821-6741 or send e-mail to linuxworldexpo@idg.com. ... The 1999 San Jose Web Design Conference will be Aug. 10-11 in -- surprise! -- San Jose. Topics include "Making Your Site Usable, Easy to Navigate and Multi-Browser Compatible," "How to Choose Vendors -- Without Getting Burned" and "Cool Tools for Web Developers." For more information, call (800) 682-5078 or e-mail info@natsem.com. ... #

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

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