By Barry Schaeffer

Reprinted from Newspapers and Technology Magazine

Author's note: This article was written in the first quarter of 1997, based on information available at that time. Since then, so much has happened that some of its assertions may seem a bit dated. The message it holds for the news industry is, if anything, more urgent than it was at its writing. BAS

 

The World Wide Web, today's primary electronic delivery channel, is both an opportunity and a demand to offer something electronic to both readers and advertisers. Papers failing to get on board risk falling behind the brave new media world. Although sensing the growing the urgency of their situation, most newspapers admit to not knowing exactly what to offer, how to create it or how to deliver it profitably. Efforts up to now have shared several similarities.

Only a minority of people read a newspaper for the ads. Despite this and the fact that they went online originally to protect their franchise, many newspapers end up loading their web sites with ads that few will see. While no-one can quarrel with making money, the online newspaper may not yet be sufficiently mature to support an intense push for ad revenue. Ironically, dramatic increases in ads can actually decrease the online edition's reader acceptance. This happens because, while the publisher and advertisers pay for ads in the paper edition, ads delivered online force the viewer to pay as well through increasing download time, and screen clutter. Moreover, preoccupation with revenue diverts attention from the more pressing need to create an electronic edition that contributes to the newspaper's role as a primary information provider.

Most managing editors operate as if their paper and online offerings are different, often competitive, products instead of different channels for delivery of a core news product. The resulting staff duplication and confusion can seriously limit a paper's ability to create a better product through technology. In fact, news isn't a product at all, but a continuous process by which readers learn what the reporters and editors know. Viewed this way, the online vehicle is simply the method of giving readers an early synopsis of unfolding events, hopefully better and sooner than the competition. The paper edition is a less timely but more depth-friendly means of describing in more detail what has transpired and been fact-checked since the online edition first sounded the alarm.

Finally, the online site can follow up with more depth over the next several days or weeks and provide a means for research and back issue browsing with easily reached electronic cross references and sidebars. When reporters plan and write this way, the total process becomes both timely and complete, encouraging readers to stick with the news provider because each component fits with the others into a properly planned, comprehensive news service. It doesn't take much surfing to see that this kind of integrated reporting and delivery isn't the industry norm. Nor does it take much conversation with online editors to understand that the relatively few papers that approach their work this way do so at considerable cost in manpower and duplicate effort.

The key to this dilemma, though not difficult to describe, will be difficult to attain. Reporters, as other authors, should research, plan and create copy, right from the start, in a data format capable of holding and delivering both what the layout process needs, and the elegance, depth and integration needed to properly support the online product. The data format with the most promise in this regard is SGML, the parent standard of the Web's HTML. While SGML has been easy to ignore due to its roots in the technical publishing industry and a pretty significant "geek" factor, its new offspring, XML, will change the rules dramatically. With XML, the path from reporter to reader can be a single leap with little or no intermediate processing required. Obviously, organizations that take advantage of this new paradigm will gain significant advantage over those that lag behind. Newspapers, thus far, have given every indication of settling into the latter group, much to their detriment. But it needn't be that way. While the print news franchise is perhaps unique in its place in society, its technical challenges are not as unique as the industry would like to think. Other industries and other parts of the news industry have made the changes necessary to stay abreast of new technologies, and newspapers can as well…if they will try

FIRST:  The implicit assumption, held by many editors, that online copy must reproduce the content of the paper edition, even if only a small portion of the total ends up on the web site. This requires newspapers to take their online copy from the layout system so that the final organization and copyfitting changes made at that stage are also part of the online edition. While easy to ignore due to its "geek factor", SGML has spawned a lean and mean offspring, XML or "extensible markup language" that will soon make the path from reporter to reader a single leap with little or no intermediate processing required. In effect, the page layout system controls the editorial and production processes, making content an extension of layout rather than the other way around.

SECOND: The attitude of the layout industry toward supporting data that is not of its choosing and design. The layout leaders, Quark, CCI-Europe, ATEX, SII and others, have made little secret of their unwillingness to embrace a neutral data approach to layout automation. Without some level of co-operation on their part, layout-dependent newspapers are forced to work around rather than with their primary software vendors to field an online edition, a risky, expensive and time-consuming process.

Viewed in total, these realities mean that, for electronic journalism, the limitations of the past are the architects of the future. How can this be and how did it happen?

It is no hyperbole to say that the newspaper world lives under a tyranny of page layout. Layout systems twenty-year-old designs are based on highly proprietary data formats and software architectures intended to make up for technology limitations that existed in the late 1970s. In those days, newspapers made a Faustian bargain with a fledgling layout software industry. That bargain was; the layout systems would get the copy to do with as they saw fit and the newspapers would get their editions out on time. It worked; in an age that didn't yet know what a PC was, ATEX and SII (among others) were marvels of speed and flexibility. The price, seemingly small at the time, was data stored in a form that had little value outside the software system for which it was created. Today this arrangement is still followed by even modern layout system vendors, meaning that data in layout systems cannot easily provide the basis for really good online editions. Having grown up with it, many editors accept this status quo without question, delivering marginal products online or spending considerable money to build better ones almost from scratch.

Today, things have turned around. Technology has become cheap and fast while data, the raw material of all news delivery, has become the cutting edge where newspapers are still strategically positioned as the best news gathering resource. Unfortunately, layout system vendors show no apparent inclination to help by making their proprietary data formats more open and reusable. The most prominent attempt to get around this roadblock has been the software creation of HTML web-compliant data from the contents of the layout system. This back-end process works somewhat, but produces an output product that, without major rework, can never be more than a ghost image of the paper copy. Moreover, when a reporter writes solely for paper layout, much of the background material and relationships among copy and other parts of the newshole must be omitted because the software and its internal data format just can't deal with them. In an online environment this is news, paid for and collected, going down the drain. More ominous yet, the rise of XML will render obsolete much of the thinking and software now used to create web versions of news. While new approaches will be available, the scramble to keep up with more nimble competitors will guarantee that some organizations are left out in the cold.

Facing such formidable obstacles, newspapers have not been able to break through into the world of integrated reporting and publication, and the public's response to their online offering shows it. Although leaving their two-decade affair with the layout-meisters and diving into the uncharted waters of multimedia reporting will require courage, newspapers may have little choice. Very soon, the reading public will demand nothing less than fully integrated news and will gravitate to outlets that best satisfy their appetite for it. Fortunately the experience of other publishing industry segments, facing different but equally daunting challenges in going online, suggests that a seriously undertaken effort will bear fruit. Modern civilization, owing much to the fourth estate, must hope that the industry musters sufficient resolve to take the plunge before the brash new entrants from the software and entertainment media worlds pre-empt much of the online market.

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