“Phoenix Newspapers” Items

Named to New Job: Senior Editor/Information Technology

As I moved out of the newsroom, I had a number of different roles/titles.  In late 1993 I moved into the newly created position of senior editor/information technology.  Among my duties were:

*Working on the planning and establishment of new ventures by PNI. These could include on-line news and advertising services; new printed, fax and audiotex news and advertising products, and CD/ROM marketing of databases and photos.

*Directing the introduction of new text-editing and pagination systems for the newsrooms.

*Leading PNI in assessing the possibilities of new technology, especially those efforts relating to the integration of newspapers, telephony, fax technology, television and computers. He will work to keep PNI abreast of all developments that could affect its interests in news-gathering and advertising and will make recommendations for PNI’s involvement in new technology in these areas.

It was an exciting opportunity to help influence a company and the digital revolution was about to take hold of the media industry. I’m indebted to John Oppedahl‘s vision and his trust.

“The consumer’s need for information is changing and so is the delivery of that information,” said John Oppedahl, PNI executive editor. “PNI is in a unique position to be Arizona’s source for news and other information regardless of how it is delivered. While we’ll still publish on newsprint, PNI needs to look at other forms of delivery, such as via computers.

 

Dual Online Strategy Memo

You need to have a memo about the plan, even though there are lots of conversations along the way.  Here’s the memo I wrote John Oppedahl (my boss), editor of The Arizona Republic.  It outlined our strategy to launch on both AOL and on the Web.  And we also had a bulletin board service for home sales.

June 2, 1995

TO:                     John Oppedahl

FROM:               Howard I. Finberg

SUBJECT:         Executive Summary/Online Plan

This is an executive summary of Phoenix Newspapers’ Online Plan:

As outlined in the “Online Opportunities” report, PNI will take a multi-platform (or multi-newsstand approach).  This will allow PNI to control where content is placed and will provide opportunities to reach readers through different services (America Online, the Internet/World Wide Web server and PNI’s existing bulletin board service). PNI will not sign an “exclusive agreement” with any online service, and hence will be free to take advantage of upcoming opportunities in 1996 and 1997 (e.g. Microsoft Network and New Century Network).

The full memo has more details about staffing and revenue expectations.  The revenue was optimistic, but realistic given the AOL bounties.

Arizona Central’s Official Launch Announcements

Even though Arizona Central (AzCentral) was live on both AOL and the Web earlier, we needed to make an official and public announcement about both services.  The Phoenix Newspapers (PNI) marketing department created an excellent package of materials, including press releases (one for each service) and screenshots of the online services.  And, of course, a FAQ about going online.  It reads quaint today, but the basic “here’s how to get online” information was essential in 1995.  The other members of the launch team were Dave Gianelli, special projects manager, Dan Hontz, online project for AzCentral on the Web, and Jeff Unger, online producer for AzCentral on AOL.

Both press releases are here: pni_annouces azcentral_12_08_1995

The FAQ about Arizona Central on AOL and on the Web are here: azcentral faq sheets_12_08_1995

Understanding the Online Future

In early 1994 I was given the task to figure out, with help of some great colleagues, the online future for Phoenix Newspapers [The Arizona Republic, the Phoenix Gazette and the Arizona Business Gazette]. Dave Gianelli and I spent a lot of time looking at different partnerships, such as America Online and Prodigy.  And we also looked at “going it alone” also known as the Web or Internet.  Remember, this was 1994.  The Web was something newer than the online services.  We created a report to help guide the company’s decision.  In the end, we urged a dual approach — partner with AOL [for the cash bounties] and go it alone, via the Web.  At the time, it was a bold and unusual strategy.

The first section is available as a PDF: PNI Online Opportunities Report 01_09_1994

 

1999 American Press Institute letter from John G. Finneman confirming participation in the Newspaper Design: 2020 seminar

An Invitation To Imagine Newspaper Design: 2020

Eleven years after API’s Newspaper Design: 2000 and Beyond u2014 the 1988 seminar I’ve already posted documents about elsewhere on this site u2014 the American Press Institute decided to run the exercise again, this time looking two decades out. In the spring of 1999, John G. Finneman, API’s director of operations and administration, wrote to confirm that I’d be part of the 16th annual J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar in Reston.

This is to finally confirm that you will be participating here in API’s 16″ annual J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar, which we’re entitling Newspaper Design: 2020, on Oct. 24-26.

The letter is explicit about the lineage, and it’s worth reading alongside the 1988 material in the timeline:

As we’ve discussed, this will be a follow-up to API’s 1988 program, Newspaper Design: 2000 and Beyond.

At the time I was director of technology and information strategies at Phoenix Newspapers, Inc. u2014 a title that says something about how far the conversation had moved from the drafting table since the first seminar. The assignment, though, was the same one: put on the collective creative hat.

During our upcoming fall program, participants once again will be asked to wear their collective creative hats and envision the “newspaper” of 2020 from a design standpoint. How is it most likely going to evolve and what might it look like?

The quotation marks around “newspaper” are Finneman’s, and they do a lot of work.

The Society of News Design was again a partner, with a study organized around three buckets u2014 design, color and infographics; technology and new media; and people. Finneman credits the framing to a conference call I’d had with David Gray:

Warren told me this is what you came up with in your conference call with David Gray.

The signature element of the 1988 program came back as well. Each participant would build a front page of the future, content mix and all, for analysis and a post-seminar book.

These pages, which will once again be featured in our post-seminar book, will be analyzed in advance by Roger Black. As he did in 1988, Roger will be leading a discussion on the body of work.

The seminar was underwritten by API’s J. Montgomery Curtis Fund, which covered tuition, room and meals at the Hyatt Dulles, plus the production of the book. Participants paid their own way there. And, in a detail that dates the letter as surely as anything else in it, I was asked to send along a glossy photo and a biographical sketch.

Looking at this from 2026, the target year has come and gone u2014 and then some. What strikes me is that the 1988 group was asked to imagine 2000 largely as a printed artifact, while the 1999 group was being asked about 2020 with the web already reshaping the question. Whether any of us got it right is a matter for the front pages themselves.

July/August 1997 TechNews magazine article about The Arizona Republic becoming the first North American newspaper produced entirely with a CCI database publishing system

First U.S. Database Publishing System

From the July/August 1997 issue of TechNews, the magazine of newspaper operations published by the Newspaper Association of America published a story about the conversion of The Arizona Republic to a CCI Europe database publishing system. This was work I led as the paper’s director of information technology. The new system replaced the Information International Inc. (Triple-I) pagination system that had made the Republic one of the first metro newspapers in the country to be completely paginated.

The Arizona Republic recently became the first newspaper in North America to be created entirely through “database-system publishing.” The Republic can now gather information once and distribute it in a variety of formats: from ink-on-paper to online, from fax to CD-ROM.

The first phase was completed June 2, 1997. The story notes that Phoenix Newspapers Inc. was doing this while also constructing a new 10-story building, launching Arizona Central, merging The Phoenix Gazette and Republic newsrooms and closing The Gazette, and moving more than 1,000 employees and their computers across the street.

Finberg described the timing of the switch to CCI’s database system as a lot like “changing the engine in an airplane at 35,000 feet. On paper it looks possible, but in your heart you know it will be pretty tricky. It is not something for the fainthearted.”

Dave Seibert, technology-development manager for news and information at PNI, is quoted on the hardest technical problem — getting CCI to talk to the existing SII text-editing system, which took about six months. David Neibergall, team leader for design, points to WYSIWYG editing, and to designers finally leaving the darkened room the staff called “The Cave,” a space required by the low-contrast green screens of the Triple-I system.

At the time of the article, the Republic was paginating more than 1,100 pages a week on CCI, with a common copy-editing and design database due that fall and reporters moving to Windows PCs in 1998. The piece closes on MediaServer and the ambition behind the whole project:

“With a database publishing system, we’ll have the tools to produce not only the newspaper, but also online editions, magazines, and more. The key is effective access to our content—text, photos, audio—regardless of the delivery method.”

Reading this in 2026, the vocabulary has changed but the argument has not. Create the content once, store it in a structured way, and deliver it wherever the audience happens to be. Every content management system and API-driven newsroom workflow in use today rests on that same idea — one we were arguing for, and building, a page at a time in Phoenix.

Editor & Publisher News Tech column page from March 1, 1997, reporting on the pagination quiz at the 1997 SuperConference in Orlando

“Pagination Imagination” at the 1997 SuperConference

A News Tech column by Mark Fitzgerald in the March 1, 1997, issue of Editor & Publisher, reporting scenes from the Newspaper Association of America‘s 1997 Newspaper Operations SuperConference in Orlando. The centerpiece: a Jeopardy-inspired quiz hosted by David Cole, described in the column as “the newsroom systems maven and editor and publisher of the Cole Papers newsletter.”

The panel of contestants included me, then at Phoenix Newspapers, and Kristin Tennent of the New York Times.

Industry pagination experts such as Phoenix Newspapers’ Howard Finberg and the New York Times‘ Kristin Tennent giggled, hemmed and hawed, guessed and sometimes answered quickly and correctly a series of often-obscure questions about pagination.

Cole’s answer key did not always survive audience review u2014 asked what RISC stands for, he ruled for “chip” over “computer” until the room objected, at which point: “Okay, computer,” Cole said.

One audience-contributed question asked how long it would take for 80% of newspapers to be fully paginated.

By an overwhelming voice vote, the audience picked the answer, “When hell freezes over.”

The column also noted attendance at the 1997 SuperConference was “just over 700, a substantial increase from the approximately 450 at last year’s SuperConference, the first.” Other items in the same News Tech package covered agri-pulp newsprint testing at Smurfit, Blevins Harding Group projects, an Agfa–Monotype typeface alliance, and the 1997 Isaiah Thomas Award to Knight-Ridder‘s P. Anthony Ridder.

Typed 1996 memo from Phoenix Newspapers reporting on a CCI Europe seminar about newsroom technology and reorganization

Technology and a New Newsroom: 1996 Memo

In October 1996 Phoenix Newspapers was invited to a CCI Europe seminar on how news organizations were changing and what technology they would need next. This memo is my report back to John Oppedahl, the senior editor of The Arizona Republic, with copies to Chip Weil, Mal Applegate and Pam Johnson.

The company in the room was good: senior executives from the Chicago Tribune, the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, the Orlando Sentinel, De Telegraaf of the Netherlands, Ullstein Verlag of Germany, Politiken of Denmark and the Helsingin Sanomat of Finland, plus CCI’s management team led by managing director Carsten Christensen. Gunther Bottcher of IFRA facilitated. CCI wanted to use what it heard to plan its own direction for the next two to five years, and to shift from an engineer-driven company to one focused on customer needs. The newspaper people at the table liked that idea a great deal.

My summary came in two parts. The good news was that Phoenix Newspapers wasn’t out on a limb:

PNI’s vision of an integrated and fully connected system is a concept shared by all of the participants and being implemented at those newspapers today.

The not-so-good news was that getting there would take a great deal of work — and most of it wouldn’t be technical:

Not only technical or system work, but striving to address issues of how we organize, train, and deploy our workforce.

The workforce piece would be the toughest, with or without union considerations. We were fond of our journalistic traditions and our workflow, and the org chart was easy to manage. But business processes would have to change if the technology investment was going to pay off:

Flying a jet between two cities 50 miles apart is a waste of equipment.

Much of the memo is about the new newsroom. The seminar group predicted a shift toward “content teams” organized around products rather than coverage areas — closer to the way we had already built advertising sales teams. That meant more skills, more training, and an end to the unspoken single-task job description: I’m a copy editor, I don’t write; I’m a reporter, I don’t edit. With no expectation of hiring beyond existing staffing levels, the goal was multi-skilled specialists.

The day of the “designer only” is coming to an end.

The idea I still like best here is the difference between re-purposing and pre-purposing — deciding early that a story will be written for and published in multiple mediums, rather than pushing it through the production system for print and then reusing it. Which also means tracking and archiving every element. Hard enough for print, as I told Oppedahl. Add video, audio and other data types and it gets harder.

The section on communication tools holds up too. E-mail worked one-to-one, but broadcast a request on deadline and most people ignored it, assuming it wasn’t meant for them. What the newsroom needed was closer to shouting a question across the room:

This communication model is a “many-to-many” system that allows everyone to join the discussion.

I pointed to PNI’s Lotus Notes discussion databases as proof we already had the technical ability. What we lacked was the cultural shift. The memo closes with a short list of other issues — content management, production management, user interfaces, and system manageability, where I wondered whether the network computer might replace the personal computer.

Typed pages from a 1996 Arizona Central briefing report for Phoenix Newspapers managers, with talking points and traffic charts

Making the Case for Arizona Central, 1996

This is a report I put together in August 1996 for managers at Phoenix Newspapers who didn’t quite understand what “going online” meant — or where it was headed. Rather than argue in the hallway, I built a briefing book: talking points, traffic charts, a project list, revenue and expense projections, and a stack of clippings from the trade and business press so no one had to take my word for the direction of the market.

The first section is organized around questions from Chip Weil, then President and CEO of Central Newspapers, with my answers filled in:

I’ve taken some of Chip Weil’s questions [the italics] and added some general answers and/or talking points that could be discussed at the meeting. Marilyn Tanious was helpful regarding some key points that should be discussed.

Most of the questions were about classified advertising — real estate and employment — which was where the money was and where the threat was. The report notes on-going discussions with the area’s multiple listing service [ARMLS] for complete property-for-sale data, work on getting employment display advertising online, more “Virtual Job Fairs” starting in September, an outside company [Moore Data] on a rentals database, and an automotive push with the AIG group and with Bill Luke, which wanted to put its used-car inventory online.

Asked about strategy over the next 24 months, I listed four areas: consumer acceptance, broadband delivery, directory publishing and transactions. Longer term, commerce systems and agency relationships — shared “ad space” with content partners. PAFET, the newspaper technology consortium, gets credit for access to experiences that would have been hard to duplicate, along with the strategic alliances with InfoSeek and Pointcast. On the money: about $2.3 million being spent CNI-wide, with a projected 10% expense increase for 1997 and capital spending estimated at $150,000.

The overview section reprints a piece I’d written for the first edition of an in-house newsletter, the Cyber Chronicles, aimed at a general newsroom audience:

While using a 17th Century technology — ink on paper — to communicate what’s happening with PNI’s online efforts may seem strange, it helps make the point that the newspaper isn’t going away. Frankly, there are just some things you can do better on newsprint.

Arizona Central ran two editions — one on the Web, one on America Online — and a good part of the internal confusion was about why we bothered with both. The answer in the report is blunt:

We are often asked, “Why have any content on AOL?” The reason is simple: It reaches a different audience than the Internet.

AOL was then the world’s largest commercial online service with six million customers, sharing market revenue with PNI and paying bounties for each customer we signed up with a special Arizona Central disk. The distinction I drew was between “the technically advanced” — comfortable with IP addresses and hunting on the Web — and “the technically evolving,” who preferred the safer environment of a commercial service.

The traffic charts are a reminder of how crude measurement was. Web numbers were “hits,” with a note that our pages used only three or four image files while boston.com used 19 on its home page — so our hit counts looked small by comparison. The big spike came from putting employment liners online in late June; the flattening was blamed on the Olympic games, a drop seen across AOL as well. AOL, at least, could count actual paid entries into Arizona Central. Median age was 43.7 on AOL and 43.5 on the Web, and the daypart charts show AOL peaking at 8 p.m. while Web use tracked working hours — traffic from major Valley employers and corporate sites around the country.

The project list is the part I still enjoy: movie times, Living Here, Meet Your Match, calendars formatted for database searching, Prep Stats, Holiday Lights with the Downtown Association, and a SAVE system to search and purchase past stories. And the honest bottom line, stated up front:

While it is unlikely that online will be profitable this or next year, revenue is running ahead of projections.

Thirty years on, what strikes me is how much of the argument was about audience rather than technology — where readers actually were, and the willingness to publish in two places at once to reach them. That part of the job hasn’t changed at all.

Nielsen I/PRO I/AUDIT report page for Arizona Central, July 1996, listing certified visits, page views, and top pages

Nielsen Audits Arizona Central, July 1996

This is the Nielsen I/PRO I/AUDIT report for Arizona Central for the month of July 1996. I was managing Arizona Central at the time, and this was one of the first attempts by anyone to put an independent, third-party number on what a newspaper web site was actually doing.

The point of the exercise was advertising. If we were going to sell space on the site, someone other than us had to vouch for the traffic:

This report is a standard, verifiable means for Web sites to report traffic to advertisers and media buyers/planners in order to facilitate effective placement of advertising.

I/PRO built the audit from a census analysis of our raw log files, reviewed by their audit analysts, and certified the results as “an independent, accurate, and complete summary of this web site’s activity.” The affidavit language matters more than it might seem now — media buyers had no reason to trust self-reported server numbers.

The month’s totals:

VISITS … TOTAL 56,757 / AVERAGE PER DAY 1,831 / AVERAGE VISIT LENGTH 8:33 minutes

And on the content side, 381,538 pages viewed, an average of 6.7 pages per visit. The top 50 pages accounted for 299,906 pages, or 78.6 percent of everything viewed.

What those top pages were is the interesting part. Job Search, under the classifieds directory, drew 13,584 page views — a reminder of how early classifieds moved online. Alongside the standard departments (FLASH, FEATURES, FUN, comics, Dining, Destinations, the Arizona Golf Guide, the interactive TV listings, Home Buying Choices), the news pages that show up are exactly the stories of that summer in Arizona: “Phoenix bombing plot,” “Symington indicted,” and “Arizona’s Olympians.” There’s also a page titled “Tell us what you think!” — 617 views for the survey.

The visitor-by-organization table is its own time capsule. America Online alone delivered 14,143 visits, more than seven times the next name on the list, Primenet, at 1,824. Arizona State University, GoodNet, CompuServe, Netzone, Microsoft Network, Internet Direct — the local ISPs and the national online services were the on-ramps. The top 50 organizations were 60.7 percent of all site visits. Geographically, 91.0 percent of activity came from the United States, with Canada at 1.8 percent and a scattering from Australia, the Netherlands, Japan, the U.K., and Germany.

 

April 1996 Editor & Publisher article about the uncertain path to a newspaper pagination system, with a callout quote from the panel

Pagination: Forever Five Years Away?

This is a story by Mark Fitzgerald in Editor & Publisher, published April 6, 1996, about a session called “The Uncertain Path to Pagination” at the first Newspaper Association of America Newspaper Operations SuperConference. I was one of four speakers, in Miami Beach to talk about Phoenix Newspapers’ experience choosing and installing its second pagination system.

Fitzgerald’s framing was the running industry joke that real pagination was always just over the horizon:

Someone will say “true” pagination is still five years down the road. Someone else will make a joke about how it’s always “five years down the road.”

My contribution was to point out that some of us had already made the trip:

“We’ve been completely paginated since 1988,” said Finberg, senior editor/information technology for the Phoenix papers. “Every time we went to a conference like this and heard that pagination was five years down the road, we wondered what road that was.”

The larger point I was trying to make — and the one that got pulled out as the article’s callout quote — was that the word itself had become the problem.

“I think even the use of the term pagination should be banned from here on out. Because that’s not what you want to do — paginate. What you want is to work more effectively.”

The story records my argument that going from hot type to cold type had been evolutionary, not revolutionary, because we simply applied an existing work flow to a new technology. Going digital required rethinking data input and output — which is why Phoenix Newspapers moved to the SQL database-oriented system from the Danish firm CCI. The goal, as I put it in the piece, was “multiple products from the same information,” using the same database for niche publications and Internet publishing. And there was a virtue in the long installation: it forced you to look at work-flow issues first.

“We wanted to end the assembly line where nobody is really looking at the whole publication.”

The other speakers filled out the picture. Linda Bruning of EDS warned that “There’s a whole lot more to pagination than technology.” Mark Francis, president and publisher of the 27,000-circulation Niagara Gazette, described giving every department an equal vote in picking a system, and said his paper was already 100% paginated with all pages going direct to negative film — while still printing on a Goss Mark I letterpress bought in 1949. Mike Schoepke of Paddock Publications described the Daily Herald‘s deliberate, one-element-at-a-time rollout of DewarView.

The skeptics came from the biggest papers. Paul Lynch of the Chicago Tribune said there were still functionality issues. Tom Cusack, prepress director at the Star-Ledger, put his finger on something that would sound familiar to anyone who has ever moved large files around a building:

“The single largest barrier to paginating medium to large circulation papers is the network and communications issues internally.”

Fitzgerald ended the piece the way the industry always ended these conversations — noting that things might change. Down the road, of course.

The Arizona Republic front page from November 26, 1995, announcing the Arizona Central online service on America Online and the Web

Arizona Central Opens for Online Business

On Sunday, November 26, 1995, The Arizona Republic told its readers that Phoenix Newspapers Inc. had gone online. The story, by staff writer David Hoye, ran on page one under the headline “PNI opens ramp to information highway,” with a full page inside devoted to explaining what Arizona Central was and how to get to it.

There were two front doors. One was on America Online — at the time, by the paper’s own description, the largest commercial online service on Earth, with 4 million customers, “bigger than CompuServe and Prodigy combined.” The other was on the World Wide Web.

On America Online, type keyword: arizona central

On the Web, http://www.azcentral

The AOL service opened with a set of buttons that would look familiar to anyone who has built a home page since: News/Money, Sports, Destinations, Your Life, At Ease, Sound Off, ALT. and What’s Hot. Sound Off held the columnists, editorials, letters and Steve Benson‘s editorial cartoons. ALT. was aimed at young adults and carried stories written by local students. Elsewhere there were Penelope Corcoran’s restaurant reviews under Taste the Town, interactive TV grids customized to your cable company, a searchable golf-course database, the Pick the Pros contest, a GiftLine for holiday shopping, and a survey button asking readers what they wanted from an online service.

The ambition was larger than shoveling the newspapers onto a screen. As the story put it, Phoenix Newspapers planned “to create nothing less than an online community, where users can learn, communicate, buy and sell and have fun.” The Oasis, Arizona Central’s chat room, was already doing that work — Charles Barkley had spent more than an hour there the week before, taking questions about the 1995-96 Suns season.

John Oppedahl, executive editor of the newspapers, framed it this way:

“Our new effort online is a significant move forward for Phoenix Newspapers Inc.,” said John Oppedahl, executive editor of the newspapers. “I look at this as the beginning of a new era.”

I was quoted as well, in my role at the time:

“It’s instant journalism,” said Howard Finberg, Phoenix Newspapers’ senior editor of information technology. “It’s pretty exciting.”

Worth noting where the launch story sat on that Sunday front page. It shared A1 with a package called “FUTURE ON THE LINE: REWIRING THE VALLEY” — about Congress and state regulators opening the telephone market to competition, cable companies becoming phone companies, and the promise of 500 television channels and video calls over the Internet. The newspaper was covering the coming of the network and joining it on the same day.

The story also made the case to advertisers, with a comparison that has aged into a period piece: online was “the most important new communications medium since Johann Gutenberg‘s experiments with movable type more than 500 years ago.”

Arizona Republic front page from November 26, 1995 announcing Arizona Central, Phoenix Newspapers' new online service on America Online and the Web

Arizona Central Opens for Online Business

On Sunday, November 26, 1995, The Arizona Republic told its readers that Phoenix Newspapers Inc. had gone online. The story, by staff writer David Hoye, ran on page one under the headline “PNI opens ramp to information highway,” with a full page inside devoted to explaining what Arizona Central was and how to get to it.

There were two front doors. One was on America Online — at the time, by the paper’s own description, the largest commercial online service on Earth, with 4 million customers, “bigger than CompuServe and Prodigy combined.” The other was on the World Wide Web.

On America Online, type keyword: arizona central

On the Web, http://www.azcentral.com/

The AOL service opened with a set of buttons that would look familiar to anyone who has built a home page since: News/Money, Sports, Destinations, Your Life, At Ease, Sound Off, ALT. and What’s Hot. Sound Off held the columnists, editorials, letters and Steve Benson‘s editorial cartoons. ALT. was aimed at young adults and carried stories written by local students. Elsewhere there were Penelope Corcoran’s restaurant reviews under Taste the Town, interactive TV grids customized to your cable company, a searchable golf-course database, the Pick the Pros contest, a GiftLine for holiday shopping, and a survey button asking readers what they wanted from an online service.

The ambition was larger than shoveling the newspapers onto a screen. As the story put it, Phoenix Newspapers planned “to create nothing less than an online community, where users can learn, communicate, buy and sell and have fun.” The Oasis, Arizona Central’s chat room, was already doing that work — Charles Barkley had spent more than an hour there the week before, taking questions about the 1995-96 Suns season.

John Oppedahl, executive editor of the newspapers, framed it this way:

“Our new effort online is a significant move forward for Phoenix Newspapers Inc.,” said John Oppedahl, executive editor of the newspapers. “I look at this as the beginning of a new era.”

I was quoted as well, in my role at the time:

“It’s instant journalism,” said Howard Finberg, Phoenix Newspapers’ senior editor of information technology. “It’s pretty exciting.”

Worth noting where the launch story sat on that Sunday front page. It shared A1 with a package called “FUTURE ON THE LINE: REWIRING THE VALLEY” — about Congress and state regulators opening the telephone market to competition, cable companies becoming phone companies, and the promise of 500 television channels and video calls over the Internet. The newspaper was covering the coming of the network and joining it on the same day.

The story also made the case to advertisers, with a comparison that has aged into a period piece: online was “the most important new communications medium since Johann Gutenberg‘s experiments with movable type more than 500 years ago.”

Phoenix Newspapers press release dated January 20, 1995, announcing the CCI pagination system contract

Announcing the CCI Pagination at Phoenix Newspapers

This is the press release Phoenix Newspapers, Inc. issued on January 20, 1995, announcing that PNI had signed with Computer Composition International for a new editorial pagination system. I was senior editor/information technology at the time, and this was the project I led in Phoenix. I also helped other newspapers think through database publishing.

The point I wanted to make in the announcement wasn’t about replacing aging equipment. It was about what a publishing database could do beyond the printed page.

“This is not just the replacement of a pagination system,” said Howard Finberg, senior editor/information technology. “This is a next-wave system that not only delivers electronic page layout but also database publishing. It will give us the flexibility to respond quickly to the changing ways information can be delivered to our customers.”

And on where that information might go:

“In addition to the newspapers’ traditional design needs for ink on paper, we will be able to use the information that pours into the newspapers daily in a variety of ways online, fax, audiotext, CD ROM and eventually the technologies that will be developed in someone’s garage,” he said.

The garage line was a bit of a joke at the time, since Apple Computers started in a garage. Looking back from 2026, it holds up better than the list that preceded it u2014 fax and audiotext are gone, CD ROM is a museum piece, and the things built in garages turned out to be the whole story.

PNI was not new to pagination. The release notes the newspapers began using Information International Inc. (triple-i) technology in 1985 and were completely paginated in 1987, with The Republic, The Gazette and the Arizona Business Gazette paginating roughly 2,000 pages a week. That history mattered: the CCI installation had to coexist with the triple-i pagesetters at the Deer Valley and Mesa production centers and with the triple-i scanners.

What strikes me rereading it is how much of the release is given over to the people who would actually use the system. Johnny Thoegersen of CCI made the WYSIWYG argument u2014 that the same designer could do more pages in the same amount of time, thanks to templates and automatic features u2014 and described the database as a central information repository accessible across departments. But the better quotes came from inside the building.

Dave Seibert, a pagination project team leader at PNI, said the CCI system “will let us pull up data and link photos easily. And the designers won’t have to work in a cavelike, low-light atmosphere anymore. They’ll be able to see a headline in color in their screens, something they can’t do now.”

Jenny Ignaszewski, a Gazette page designer, is looking forward to the new system because “it will make it easier to do wraps, illustrations and typography. We’ll have the capability of doing feature page design more easily under deadline.”

Mike Wilson, project team leader from Information Services, called CCI “the best system on the market today” and flagged the real engineering challenge u2014 the interfaces back to the existing triple-i equipment. The CCI server was to live in the computer room on the third floor of the Phoenix Center. Where the page design system itself would go was, as of the announcement, still undecided.

Installation was scheduled to begin that summer, with the first phase completed in late 1995.

One last artifact worth noting: the contact block at the bottom lists a fax number and an e-mail address, hfinberg@pni.com. In early 1995, listing both was still a hedge.

Interactive Newspapers conference program page listing the Pafet consortium panel and its six newspaper company representatives

Pafet Goes Public at Interactive Newspapers Conference

The conference program for the interactive newspapers gathering — built around The Kelsey Group’s and Editor & Publisher’s Sixth Annual Interactive Newspapers Survey — put the Pafet consortium on the Tuesday morning agenda, with a representative from each of the six member companies on stage.

AN INTERVIEW WITH PAFET
10:30-12:00
A discussion with representatives from the six newspaper companies comprising the Pafet consortium. These newspaper professionals will talk candidly about their plans to evaluate opportunities emerging from developments in technology and to focus on those related to their core competencies.

I was there for Phoenix Newspapers, one of six panelists listed:

Martha Duckert, Planning & Process Leader, Cowles Media Company
Howard Finberg, Senior Editor, Information Technology, Phoenix Newspapers, Inc.
Jim Galli, Manager of Business Development, A.H. Belo Corporation
Chris Hendricks, Manager of Technology, McClatchy Newspapers, Inc.
David Lipman, Chairman/Pulitzer 2000, Pulitzer Publishing Company
Mike Weaver, Vice President New Media, Freedom Communications, Inc.

The rest of the program is a nice snapshot of what the industry was worried about at the time: international interactivity, digital advertising, database marketing, and a keynote from Louis Boccardi, President & CEO of the Associated Press, on what he called the editorial perspective. My favorite session title on the page: “MAIN STREET U.S.A MEETS THE INFOBAHN.”