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Digital Highways

Author:		Stephen Waters
Posted:		4/8/04; 1:53:18 PM
Topic:		Digital Highways
Msg #:		39 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next:		38/40
Reads:		3438

Digital Highways of the Future:

• What it will afford and enable newspapers to do.
• Seybold Seminars 1993 — Stephen B. Waters ©1993

Until this year, the delivery of electronic newspapers to the home had seemed unrealistic

• High bandwidth interactive cable seemed too expensive
• Residential compute power seemed unlikely
• A viewing model with all the ease of a printed newspaper hadn't won popular acceptance
• An acceptable, widescreen, lightweight, wireless, high–resolution viewing screen had not been invented.


• 500 channels mean publishers face serious leakage of advertising revenue to interactive "Lands End", Macy's and other QVC–type catalog shopping channels.

Delivered digitally, can I restructure the newspaper to survive the loss of advertising revenue? Can we price delivery so we can survive?

• With an HBO–like monthly fee ($5–$9) we could keep the reporters, editors, photo staff, some layout people, a couple of subscription clerks, pay for the offices, and still pay the publisher and stockholders.

What happens to the other departments: Advertising, Layout, Printing, Distribution, Business (Computing)?

• Advertising -- Assume the services provided by local agencies handling radio, cable and other print outlets.
• Layout -- will develop multimedia skills to attach audio and video to hypertext–linked buttons on each newspaper–like electronic page.
• Printing -- when it may not be required to print a daily newspaper, will publish periodic specialty or niche publications.
• Distribution -- will deliver those and perhaps samples as targeted by the database.
• Business -- since computing is so essential, commercial computing services or database management and imagesetting will be offered to customers.

How do we get ready?

• Invest in computing horsepower to do more work more quickly,
• Invest in programming tools to cheaply and speedily reconfigure the computers to do new jobs.

To survive newspapers need:

• the skill to write for dual news streams (print and electronic)
• the wisdom to organize departments as cost/profit centers,
• the insight to look for ne ways of doing business,
• the guts to cashier departmentally isolated dinosaur computing systems in favor of business–wide, database–oriented flexible systems.

Digital Highways

• Ubiquitous high–band–width digital communication will spawn services, products and ways of doing business we have yet to imagine. This session will bring you up to date on what's happening, who the players are, who is doing what to whom and what it all means to your business.

What we will not do.

• Not to predict what will happen.
• Not to describe the technology that will make it possible. (Morton: Information technology availability does not mean a market will follow.)
• But to discuss the ramifications for a small newspaper.
• and the impediments for small newspapers.

What's happening

• Nothing special -- today.
• Signposts
• Internet -- 10,000 computer networks in 50 countries; used by perhaps 15 million people daily.
• WSJ -- 51% or 34,400 networks private; 29% research; 4% educational and expanding at 1 million users per month.
• For the last ten years, so–called "bypass" carriers -- cable companies -- have been laying fiber lines in urban areas, essentially for businesses that want to bypass local phone company switches (and local carrier costs) and have direct access to long–distance broadband servies. -- Tod Newcombe, Government Technology, 8/93
• Why now? Rochester -- the next–to–last last obstacle removed.
• The service we offer today is not so important as the infrastructure we lay down for tomorrow -- flexibility, extensibility, interconnectivity, ease of programming.

Who the players are

• Telcos
• 1992 FCC video dial tone ruling:
• Telcos permission to transmit television and video in their own serving area, as long as the programming is supplied by others.
• Telcos may own cable systems, but only outside their telephone service area.
• While telcos and cable TV companies are in the headlines, other players are on the periphery.
• Microsoft announced that, along with Intel and General Instruments, it was planning to build a 386/Windows cable converter that would provide interactive programming, home shopping, video–on–demand, and information services.
• At our level:
• A newspaper isn't a thing, it's a format. (Roger Fidler's print interface "retains all the typography and design of a newspaper so that browsing ability... is maintained" -- presstime August 1993, [cost in 7–10 years for as little as $200])
• Newspaper as a display is flexible (folding), extensible (opening), well-indexed, allows scanning, has large bandwidth, and a horrible refresh rate (24 hours).
• Hypertext and gateway ordering "offer a "read more about it" assortment of background readings and past articles of the reader's choice, as well as opportunities to communicate with the paper's reporters, editors, and some of the people they write about." -- William Glaberson, NYTimes News Service, Syracuse Post Standard, 8/22/93
• The format allows both scanning topics quickly and delving for detail as desired
• Design -- columns, type variety, size and location -- makes it easy to navigate through the news.
• Functions
• Editor, Briefer, Planner, Collector, Inquisitor, Collective Memory, Projector, Calendar, Bulletin Board, Formatter, Ordertaker, Gatekeeper, Local newsgatherers
• Versatile, skilled local advertising expertise
• Associated Press risks frittering away its franchise by dwelling on unique interfaces, and specialized hardware and software.
• It retains its hold on customers through inertia, and a temporary, but deteriorating command of state reporting. This franchise will disappear with the ease on interconnection.
• The biggies will duke it out, but not challenge our local franchise.

What it all means to your business

• Do not sell the written word short. It is at the core of everything a computer does.
• David Easterly, president of Cox Newspapers, Editor & Publisher, 8/14/93: You can't do it all by yourself.
• David Easterly reminds us (E&P August 14, 1993) 114 million read a newspaper yesterday. In the 18 t o24 age group, 53% read a daily newspaper and that daily audience is more than double the cumulative reach of MTV measured over a full week.
• Daily newspapers are the most complete record of local events -- and can be expected to remain so. What they contain is a summary reference -- a pointer -- to even more that they leave out. The record has value. No one has the resources to collect it.
• Television is a peripheral. It is in the background when I read the newspaper, the book, or use the computer. The TV is there for replays.
• We can only afford to do it once. We have to do it right. This is expensive for our size newspaper.
• My time is spent not deciding what we will have, but trying to be darned sure we don't dead end.
• Don't mistake the noise for news.
• Advertising
• Leakage of advertising that has traditionally subsidized newsgathering.
• I'm obliged to expect the leakage of the main pillars of advertising: real estate, automobile, and employment. An online service is instantly updateable, extensible when combined with othe databases. I won't lose all the ervenue. I'll get a percentage as a collector of the initial ad -- but nowhere near the whole thing.
• Merge your classified database -- if we don't cooperate we'll be eaten by those who are more regional than ourselves. Network. Get the revenue from serving the customer.
• WSJ reported: Residents of Cyberspace do not take kindly to sales pitches or electronic cold calling.
• Pricing
• Easterly calculates local services priced as low as a flat $6.95 per month.
• Flat fee first, increase according to:
• Immediacy of service and prime time delivery
• Size of request (Use of available bandwidth)
• Complexity (Character, Audio, Video)
• Editing
• Basic flat fees
• Extra fees for immediate delivery, size, complexity, and prime time service
• Company Structure
• The need for each department to stand alone as a profit center.
• The compression of the staff to the front line.
• One–stop shopping at the front desk: subscription payment, fill out announcements, order back issues or reprints, place ads, sell memorabilia.
• Other departments will become independent profit centers
• The Triangle: Reproduction --
• Bulletin Boards will need administration.
• Society Structure
• What it means to society: Risk two–tiered society
• A perfectly educated and thoughtful society will prefer information access to advertising: Don't expect it to happen soon.
• Private sector's Council on Competitiveness presient Daniel F. Burton: The problem for government "is to figure out the common denominator that will allow everyone to get into the system an build on it if they want, yet won't put an onerous [cost] burden on the providers to lay out telecommunications and computing equipment that most people will want only a fraction of".
• Regulatory issues that need to be addressed:
• antitrust, carrier liability, intellectual property protection, international connectivity, spectrum allocation, standards, tax incentives, First Amendment rights, privacy, affordability, access.

Ubiquity

• Windows "won" because of DOS/PC ubiquity, not because it was better than Apple's GUI -- it is not.
• Windows is like rubbing the carpet against the nap. It's like a pre–TQM automobile -- built with tolerances a little too loose.

Operating Systems

• Interchangeability -- within a few years of its introduction in 1913, the Intertype linecasting machine interchangeable parts and matrices were able to be shared with the earlier Linotypes. We are still not there in computing.
• PC's and Windows, Macs and System 7 -- it's like the Republicans and the Democrats. Neither one can see where they have been wrong; neither one can admit to the truth in the other position. The Apple's GUI is far smoother and easier to use, but the PC has the applications, connections and extensions I want access to.
• Ric Ford in MacWeek 9/20/93:

• OS2 -- real multi–tasking, crash protection between applications
• Windows NT -- OS/2 advantages plus multiprocessing, serious security, network and system management
• NeXT -- plus object–oriented design and development tools
• Windows --
• File management -- view options, a trash can
• Network connections -- Novell logins outside of Netware
• Printer management -- try to use dual trays
• Default keyboard character mapping -- Em and En dashes, true quotes
• Command mappings -- standardizations
• *.ini absurdity -- Quicken print formatting
• Two buttons -- still don't know what the second one is for officially. Turbo Mouse gives me a programmable second key on the Mac.
• System 7 --
• Names files in real English words and has automatic linkage of documents and the programs that created them, unifies the launching of them. (When combined with the hardware is easier to setup, network and expand -- Walter S. Mossberg, WSJ 8/26/93.)
• needs real multitasking and robust memory management, larger, more sophisticated. file structure
• Oracle's Larry Ellison better consider the lesson of Apple: Ubiquity is worth reducing immediate profits. 1,000 daily newspapers could be paying yearly maintenance fees.
• AP's monopoly on channel is evaporating.

Spawn services, products and ways of doing business

• Editing -- information is not our core business, collecting and editing is.
• Local Library access -- today's news and our archive of yesterday's news
• Gateways -- The formatted news page is the entrypoint for the info junkie.
• Online Services
• 95+% of all the information transferred on a GUI–based information service today is a misuse of bandwidth.
• Graphically oriented interactive media present their own abrasive characteristics. Some logins uninterruptably commandeer your computer to download gobs of updated support files -- monopolizing both your time and your disk space.
• Current electronic newspaper systems are -- pardon the pun -- terminally flawed. One of the problems of the overblown graphical interface is that it is impossible to get it out of the way. Ity monopolizes bandwidth, storage and time -- your time. All you wanted was a simple piece of information; what you get is unnecessary cute icons; boring icons after the second view.
• People will choose the interface they prefer.

Digital highways are empowering, repowering and de-powering -- no less in newspapers than in all the corners of the rest of society... democracy, schooling.

• A small community is a particularly interesting social study -- Allowing insight; -- Having manageable problems.
• Copyright Reference Types:
• Referential -- Hyperlink
• Reportorial -- Excerpted for news; "Fair Use Doctrine"
• Advertorial -- Commercial Use; To Sell
• Anthological -- Full or extensive use
• Artistic -- an excerpted note, line, image incidental to another piece.

I'm a small town newspaper man and I expect to remain a small town newspaperman throughout the coming change of technology. All I really want to do is to think about my community.

• To do that, I need to be able to stop having to dwell on technology and its interconnection.
• It enables me to see that businesses in this field can be so right and so wrong at the same time.

• Predictions -- AP will get a comeuppance. It lacks the flexibility, the broad market base, and the attitude to survive. It will have squandered all its resources trying to lock in its small customer base.
• Lessons:
• Easterly -- Use newspaper resources to create a new medium.
• Newspapers keep local history --
• Grazing
• Public Opinion Polls are playtime. Feedback that contributes to knowledge, understanding and direction as far more useful.
• The strength of the path is useful (the number of times followed and by whom). -- a neural net.
• It is important to show what I can't bring to you and why.
• Rampant Analogy