“The Arizona Republic” Items

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

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 people column from June 1997 listing Arizona Republic appointments, including Howard Finberg directing the information services department

Second Job: Information Services at The Republic

Editor & Publisher’s people column for June 21, 1997, included a short run of appointments at The Arizona Republic — and one of them was mine.

HOWARD FINBERG, director of information technology, also will direct the information services department for the next 18 to 24 months.

Two jobs, with a stated expiration date. The same column noted other changes at the Republic, including Toni Antonellis as director of organizational development, Pat Tucker as education manager, and this one:

STEVE KNICKMEYER, deputy managing editor at the Republic, was appointed managing editor/content

A reminder that in 1997 “information technology” and “information services” were still two separate things inside a newspaper — and that somebody had to bridge them.

January 1997 memo to Arizona Republic editors on the multi-skilled journalist of the future

The Future: Journalist’s Skills

This is a January 1997 memo I wrote to Don Henninger and Steve Knickmeyer, two senior editors at The Arizona Republic and The Phoenix Gazette. It came out of a conversation we’d had the day before about the skills journalists were going to need, and it was very much part of my techno-evangelism at Phoenix Newspapers — trying to help editors prepare for changes coming to journalism and, potentially, to their newsrooms.

The core argument was that the future belonged to people who could do more than one thing:

The overall direction that I see journalism [and journalists] heading in the next five to 10 years is one of multi-skilled individuals. These will be the people that will succeed and prosper in the next century. In a sense, we will be going back to our roots — the small town publisher/editor/reporter/ad salesman — to find models that put more responsibility for all aspects of journalism in the hands of the source.

I used my own history at the newspaper as the example, which felt honest at the time and still does. Creating a separate design department had made sense when I arrived, given the technology we had. By 1997 it made a good deal less sense — and the split between the art department and the design department looked worse still.

So, in a sense, we created a “graphics factory,” because they had their own special technology — the Macintosh — to create charts and maps.

The point wasn’t that everyone should do everything. Specialized talent still mattered. What I expected to disappear were the divisions that existed only because of the equipment:

However, the artificial separation of skills based on technology will be eliminated [and much sooner than the five to 10-year time frame that I’m using].

From there the memo works through photography — why not put a digital camera in every reporter’s hands, since other delivery methods would consume far more visual material than the printed paper had room for — and then video and audio, and what editing skills would be needed to combine words, audio, stills and moving images.

The section I’m still fondest of is the one about the Web not being print and not being broadcast either.

On the Web, you tell stories in non-linear fashion. You need to tell those stories in such a way that the reader/consumer/user can understand the story regardless of where he entered the presentation. This is a different way of presenting news.

And the editing skill that follows from it, which I called “de-composing” linear stories into Web format.

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.

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.

Typed 1993 memo from the Arizona Republic library listing reader response counts for PressLine, contests and call-ins

Reader Connections at the Republic

In early 1993 I asked the Arizona Republic’s library to pull together numbers on how many readers were actually responding to the paper’s various ways of inviting them in — contests, call-ins, the PressLine audiotext service. Joanne Dawson, the librarian, came back with this tally, along with a sensible caveat about the state of the data.

As you requested, here are some figures for how many people responded to the Republic’s “reaching out” through contests, call-ins, PressLine, etc. Many of the figures are estimates or averages as most areas do not keep statistics.

PressLine was the biggest piece, with 258,052 calls between December 29, 1991 and January 2, 1993. Sports scores dominated at 126,173, followed by movie reviews, sidebars, restaurant reviews and the recipe hotline. Short Takes, the Kids Page, sports phone-ins and a handful of contests filled out the rest.

GRAND TOTAL (est.) 334,790

What strikes me looking at this in 2026 is that almost nobody was keeping statistics. A third of a million reader interactions in a year, and most of it had to be reconstructed from old articles and someone’s best estimate of “40 calls/wk.” The audience was there and talking back — the newspaper just had no habit of measuring it. Web analytics would arrive soon enough and change that permanently.

February 1993 memo to Pam Johnson proposing a new approach to The Arizona Republic's Saturday edition

Rethinking the Saturday Republic

A February 1993 memo to Pam Johnson about the Saturday edition of The Arizona Republic. It grew out of a conversation with John Oppedahl and the paper’s latest readership research, which suggested Saturday didn’t behave like the rest of the week.

For too long, many newspapers, including this one, have looked at Saturday as an extension of the weekday (Monday through Friday). While our readers (myself included) see Saturday more as an prelude to Sunday.

The research point that mattered most: one in four readers said they spent more time with the Saturday paper than with a typical weekday edition — and those readers tended to have children under 18 at home and two or more people employed in the household.

Understanding and responding to that difference is the opportunity and challenge facing the paper.

I proposed a small working group — the right mix of “thinkers” and “doers” — naming Phil Hennessy, Susan Love, Bill Hill, Amy Carlile, Vinton Supplee, Judy Nichols and Diana Shantic. Among the content ideas: a Saturday centerpiece much like Sunday’s, a week in review feature, color comics, a feature for parents and kids to read together, home and garden and auto packages, personal finance, and health or fitness.

Attached was a timetable running from committee selection in February through research, prototypes, focus groups and marketing, with a launch of a new kind of Saturday newspaper by October or November.

Typed 1993 internal memo to Phoenix Newspapers executive John Oppedahl outlining questions for a meeting with America Online

An Early Look at America Online

This is a short memo I wrote in February 1993 to John Oppedahl, then an executive at Phoenix Newspapers, Inc., about a meeting I had scheduled with America Online. At the time, AOL was signing up newspapers to put content into its database, and I wanted to understand what such a partnership would mean for PNI before anyone committed to anything.

John, attached is a package of information about America Online, the computer service company. Of specific importance are the pieces that relate to linking newspapers to their database.

The meeting was set for Thursday, Feb. 11, with Bob Smith, Manager, Business Development for America Online. The questions I planned to ask were the basic ones any newspaper should have been asking in 1993 — and, honestly, the ones many didn’t ask carefully enough:

* How the relationships work between AOL and the Chicago Tribune and San Jose Mercury News?

* What would be our responsibilities to make this project successful and what is expected of PNI in regards to equipment, staff, marketing, etc.

* What type of material would be expected from PNI on the computer database?

* Do we share in access time by all users? Or, do we receive royalties from only those users we sign on ourselves?

That last question — who gets paid, and for whose audience — turned out to be the one the industry spent the next decade arguing about.

I was careful to keep expectations modest:

I’m sure there will be other areas that need to be discussed before we go that first step with this project. Smith and I are at an ‘information sharing’ stage only.

The memo closes with the smallest of logistical notes: I would bring Smith by Oppedahl’s office at 11 a.m. Thursday.

Postscript: Phoenix Newspapers did sign an agreement with America Online.