This is a Steve Outing column written for Editor & Publisher Interactive and posted January 12, 1998. The news hook was two pieces of bad news arriving at about the same time: New Century Network had laid off 10% of its staff and refocused its work away from anything that might compete with its owners’ own Web sites, and PAFET — Partners Affiliated For Exploring Technology — had closed its two-person central office in Dallas at the end of 1997. Outing used both to ask a question that hung over the industry for years:
Can newspapers really work together in cyberspace?
PAFET was a six-company research and development venture — A.H. Belo Corp., Central Newspapers, Cowles Media Co., Freedom Communications, McClatchy Newspapers, and Pulitzer Publishing Co. Executive director Marla McDonald and her assistant were let go on December 31, but, as Chris Hendricks of Nando.net told Outing, the governing committees would keep meeting as before. I was on the operating committee, and I’m quoted throughout the piece downplaying the closing — the organization had looked at what it wanted to accomplish and decided it didn’t need the Dallas operation, and the decision wasn’t a budget decision. With McDonald gone, Outing noted PAFET didn’t really have a “point person,” and I suggested that informal title probably belonged to Joel Kramer, publisher of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and chairman of the PAFET management committee.
The column is a good description of how PAFET actually worked: strategic investment recommendations that each company acted on individually — Zip2, PointCast, Firefly and Infoseek — and joint projects like the WorkAvenue classified employment site, conceived together but implemented company by company. The thing I was most pleased about, then and now, was the cooperation itself:
“We have learned how to cooperate, and that’s pretty exciting,” Finberg says. “From my perspective, we have to learn how to cooperate with each other. The days of dealing with a newspaper 1,500 miles away as competition are over.”
Outing also collected outside views. Randy Bennett of the Newspaper Association of America called the two stories “apples and oranges” — PAFET was about research shared among members, NCN was trying to build Internet services itself. Eric Meyer of the University of Illinois and Newslink Associates was blunter about the underlying problem of consortia with multiple masters, and about publishers’ attachment to their own brands:
“I don’t think The Associated Press would have been developed with the attitudes of publishers today,” he says.
There’s a personal footnote at the end of the column, in Outing’s “Movin’ On” item: as of January 1 I had become Central Newspapers‘ director of technology and information strategies, a corporate job I held while staying in Phoenix rather than moving to Indianapolis. David Allen, then information technology director at Indianapolis Newspapers, Inc., took over as director of information technology at The Arizona Republic beginning February 2.