Strategic Innovations Overshadow the Technical

The next killer app that will knock an industry-leading software vendor off its perch as a market leader and disrupt the way we produce newspapers might be incubating in some techie’s ‘sandbox’ as I write this article. I’m not going to pretend I know where it might be coming from or what it might do.

But just as likely, it’s not a technical innovation we should be anticipating in the year to come. Rather, it could be a strategic bundling of software products and services and new ways to license and deploy existing products that will upend our current production workflows. I know this because it’s already happening in some quarters, decidedly differently depending on whether the paper is a small independent or part of a media chain.

Some strategic innovations are homegrown, focused on the needs of the individual paper or group. Some are vendor initiated or enabled by vendor partnerships. Some are speculative and may or may not get any traction. What follows is a sampling of a few key or emerging trends as perceived by industry leaders who are well positioned to observe what’s going on in both a micro and macro way, and provide insights about where these trajectories might lead.

Adobe’s Creative Suite vs. Creative Cloud

I admit I was not a fan of Adobe’s move from perpetual licensing to a subscription model in 2013. When I was operations director at The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer, my paper invested that year in an upgrade to Creative Suite 6, securing ownership of the latest, greatest versions of InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat and Flash that one could buy. The purchase was specifically to forestall having to fork out monthly subscription fees for the right to use Adobe’s new Creative Cloud, which replaced the Suite’s bundled licensing with a cloud-based subscription to an even broader range of the company’s software products. The Cloud was offered at a price that was perceived to be a significant premium for any newspaper that used only three or four of the core applications from the Suite and was in the practice of letting a few years go by between upgrades.

I wasn’t alone in my concern about being forced to shift from perpetual licensing to a subscription.

“There was a lot of pushback when it was announced,” said Kevin Slimp, director of the Institute of Newspaper Technology at the University of Tennessee, and a sought-after tradeshow speaker, newspaper technology consultant and trainer. “I had all kinds of group—like the National Newspaper Association, and other groups and their boards—writing me and saying, ‘What are we going to do about this? This is a terrible thing!’”

At the time, Slimp said he resigned himself to the shift, but he wondered if Adobe had left a door open for its once-dominant competitor, QuarkXPress, to return to favor.

“I thought that would be a really good time for Quark to come out with some strategy that would compete against the Cloud,” he said. Quark, for its part, retained its perpetual licensing model, ruling out any plans to “force (Xpress) customers down a subscription-only path.” But the distinction didn’t seem to change the market dynamics appreciably. If anything, the introduction of the Cloud provided newspapers with some advantages that they hadn’t anticipated.

“I thought there’d be more resistance to paying that monthly fee, but I’d say about half the newspapers I visit seem to be using the Creative Cloud,” Slimp said.

Because the Cloud bundles a broader set of applications than were previously included with the Suite, his client papers have been experimenting with, and implementing, workflows that include tools with which they may have been previously unfamiliar or couldn’t justify purchasing individually.

Slimp said, “For instance, InCopy has always been a great (word processing) product, but it’s getting very popular now because (newspapers) see they can use it as part of their Cloud subscription. A lot of newspapers, especially weeklies and small dailies, are creating an editorial workflow with InCopy and InDesign, where they did not use a workflow like that before.”

Adobe Muse, a design-centric Web development product that minimizes the necessity of learning code, is another Cloud offering that Slimp credits with simplifying how and what his client newspapers are doing.

“Newspapers usually have some kind of IT person on staff that does things with websites,” he said, “but now you don’t have to be an incredibly skilled person to design nice websites using Muse.”

Where once newspapers “probably only purchased two or three or four” of Adobe’s core products, Slimp said, “Now you have all these applications that you can use for different things, and most newspapers that subscribe to the cloud find a way to use at least six or seven or eight of them.”

“It ended up being a very smart thing by Adobe (to bundle all these products together) because they just sold so much of it,” Slimp said.

As for the anticipated difference in costs between the Suite and the Cloud, Slimp said he found during his research that the subscription model didn’t have as much of an impact on newspaper budgets as was feared.

“The average newspaper usually used (the Suite) about three to three and a half years before upgrading to the next version,” he said. “We found out if we used the Cloud it came out almost the same in terms of what you were spending with your monthly fees. It just seemed like a lot more when you’re paying it per month.”

That finding contradicted my own paper’s research into the same question, but the quibble is academic now that Adobe is no longer offering an upgrade path for the Suite. Eventually, when the current version becomes obsolete, my paper will need to subscribe to the Cloud or else find another alternative.

Scribus vs. InDesign or QuarkXPress

If you talk to Richard Cichelli, co-owner of Software Consulting Services (SCS), whose company writes software and provides support services to the newspaper industry, he makes a compelling case to look beyond InDesign or QuarkXPress as page layout or ad building tools, recommending Scribus, a free, open source desktop publishing application, instead.

As a developer of Quark XTensions and InDesign Plug-ins that work with his ad dummying solution, Layout-8000™, he has some insights into how the three applications compare.

“I consider Scribus every bit as good a tool for building ads or paginating newspapers as any desktop publishing tool,” Cichelli said. His developers, installers and trainers who work most closely with SCS’s newspaper customers will tell anyone who will listen that, “There’s no reason why, from an aesthetic or production point of view, you wouldn’t want to use Scribus.”

Cichelli said, “If you’re an operator, you might say, ‘Oh, I’m so familiar with InDesign; I want to stick with it.’ But if you’re the owner of a newspaper group where you had a design center in New Jersey with 60 people sitting in front of workstations running InDesign, you might say, ‘Gee, that’s not such a good idea. I don’t want to pay that $70 a month.’”

Price, though, is not the most important consideration in choosing between these products, according to Slimp. “The cost of software is such a minor aspect of the finances of a newspaper that that’s not what drives them so much. If something works a lot better and they have to pay for it, they’d much rather pay for it than get something free that might take a little bit longer to use.”

Slimp said his most recent experience testing Scribus was a couple years ago, and the software wasn’t quite mature enough at the time to recommend to his newspaper clients. “I wasn’t really impressed with how it would work in the newspaper workflow. It just seemed kind of clumsy compared to working with InDesign and QuarkXPress.”

“It may be a totally different product by now,” Slimp said. “If I test Scribus—which I plan to do—and I find out that it is comparable to the other products, you better believe that I’ll be telling everybody about it.”

Pointing out that he isn’t compensated by any software company, he added, “It doesn’t matter to me what people use. I try to stay up on what’s good so I can give my clients good advice when they ask me about that.” For example, he acknowledged that the free, open source version of Photoshop, GIMP, is comparable to Adobe’s commercially available product.

For the most part, Scribus has advantages other than its cost that clinch Cichelli’s emotional and intellectual investment in it. The fact that Scribus documents are human readable in XML format, and the application is scriptable in Python, make it a choice desktop publishing platform for developers, according to Cichelli.

“It’s a lot easier working with Adobe than it is with Quark, and it’s certainly a lot easier to work with Scribus than it is with Adobe. And that’s the equation,” he said. “If you think solutions for newspapers will come more readily out of Adobe than SCS, fine. I don’t have a problem with that. I just know it’s not true.

“I can’t see anything that wouldn’t make you want to love this because the price is right. And the (open source) community is large and very effective, and incredibly cooperative.”

Scribus runs on Mac, Windows, Linux and other operating systems.

A factor that can be expected to impede wide adoption of Scribus as a page layout and ad building engine is newspapers’ standing investments in editorial and advertising systems that are based on other platforms. Lee Enterprises, for example, uses TownNews’ BLOX Total CMS for building pages for print and online content. The page layout engine for that product is InDesign.

But according to Michele White, VP of information technology at Lee, Scribus isn’t really on the chain’s radar for another reason: regulatory standards and how they apply to publicly held corporations like Lee.

“From the business system and production system side of the house, we have not been big into open source,” she said. “Audits and controls are on the top of our minds all the time.  Open source presents some level of risk that we’re not real excited about.”

Efforts at Centralization

Where Lee and SCS’s interests do align, however, is in focusing on centralization and regionalization efforts, and the cost savings benefits that chains are able to realize from initiatives in that realm. Lee has moved virtually all of its ad layout systems and page building services to three design centers at some of its larger, Midwestern properties in Lincoln, Neb., Madison, Wis. and Munster, Ind.

“It suffices to say, for the most part, the whole company uses one of those three design centers,” White said.

“We did partner with Layout-8000. We wanted one standard (ad dummying) system for the whole company, and so instead of buying 48 copies of it, 48 servers, etc.—we bought three, housed them in the design centers, and standardized it across the board,” she continued. “From a systems standpoint, that’s our reality today. Everything we buy needs to be able to be efficiently used regionally or centrally. There’s just no appetite and there’s no time to do what we used to do with locally installed and managed systems.”

Accommodating the chain newspapers in that effort has been a central focus for SCS in recent years, said Cichelli. “We wanted to make this kind of work environment easier because we were getting business from Tribune, Gannett, Lee, Sandusky, and so forth that were consolidating these sites.”

He estimated that 89 more publications have gone live with Layout-8000 since January, and 35 more will be added before the end of the summer, owing to the chain papers consolidating to centralized or regionalized design centers.

“We scale to the high end with these design centers and it’s because of that that we have so much traction in this area,” Cichelli said.

That’s a focus in which the chains and independent newspapers are substantially different. Where the chains concentrate on centralization, regionalization and efficiencies that can be gained from those initiatives, Slimp pointed out that there are more newspapers that are not doing that.

“Most people are shocked when they hear that most newspapers are not part of large groups,” he said. “You’ll find that more than half of newspapers are independents—just one (stand-alone paper). Most of the rest of them are part of small groups of three, four or five, maybe six papers.” That’s the core of Slimp’s client base, and he thinks those papers are serving themselves better by focusing on training. “That’s what I see happening,” he said.