Between AP and ET, There was Newsplex

By: Jim Rosenberg When Virginia Commonwealth University's president learned of the Associated Press project that studied the working environment at U.S. newsrooms in 1992, he invited study participant Safwat Fahim, an architect, to create "a new model for a school of mass communications." That assignment led to the proposal for what would later become, in collaboration with journalist and newsroom systems veteran Kerry Northrup, the Newsplex -- a project that would involve Ifra and U.S. publishers.

That converged newsroom of the future opened its doors exactly six years ago in South Carolina's capital (E&P, Dec. 9, 2002; Jan. 2004), but the original plans go back to the previous decade and another state's capital.

Although "we really put the model together" at Richmond-based Virginia Commonwealth University, says Fahim, "they just couldn't raise the funds for it." Other universities were approached, but "many of the big-name schools didn't want to touch it," he continues. It found a champion at the University of South Carolina and a home at South Carolina Public Television. In contrast to resistance from VCU's tenured faculty, a "pretty gung-ho" dean in Columbia, South Carolina, was determined to make it happen with little staff consultation, says Fahim.

But a decision taken at VCU - to have an "information journalist" rather than an archivist, librarian or IT person manage an electronic morgue - found an unexpected welcome in Columbia. "Before we knew it, the schools of mass communications and libary science and information were merged," and then-Provost Jerry Odom, a chemist, thought having a user manage the information made sense.

This was a follow-on to a recommendation Fahim made early in his project for the AP - an electronic library accessible by staff from the desktop. "It was just ridiculous what I saw" when visiting newspapers' archives in 1992, Fahim says, adding that he could not believe that anybody ever managed to find anything.

The AP project "led to all of this ... on the academic side," including journalist training, says Fahim, who also designed the Newsplex at Ifra headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany, with a "virtual interface" to the main venue in Columbia.

A Newsplex board member, Fahim says it is still doing well, though most of the people we trained "were from Europe," with very few U.S. newspapers taking advantage of Newsplex. Europe uses both the Columbia and Darmstadt facilities, and the larger U.S. site has caused some friction within Ifra.