By: Wayne Robins Oxygen is: 1) A cable TV channel and Web site aimed at women.
2) In short supply on Mars.
3) The internal name by which Tribune Interactive refers to its new content management and publishing platform.
4) All of the above.
If you guessed "All of the above," congratulations: You'll be a contestant, along with the rest of us, in "Survivor 2002," in which editors, publishers, journalists, advertisers, investors, and techies try to figure out how to survive in a world in which our companies and our lives are turning into our own private Kandahars.
Oxygen is Tribune Interactive's means of speeding content to 11 of its newspaper sites, using a uniform though flexible platform with centralized support, so a glitch in Orlando or a gremlin in Los Angeles can be eliminated by a tech team operating from Tribune Co. headquarters in Chicago.
It was only last year, after all, that Tribune bought Times Mirror Co., expanding its English-language newspaper Web sites to 11 from four. "What we wanted to do in the spirit of the merger was to operate more efficiently, getting all the newspaper sites using the same basic platform," said Rebecca Brown, Tribune Interactive director of product development.
It makes for a good match. The
Los Angeles Times,
The Sun in Baltimore, and
Newsday in Melville, N.Y., were already great newspapers, but online development lagged under shortsighted Times Mirror management. (Exception:
The Hartford [Conn.]
Courant, with its innovative, statewide ctnow.com partnerships.) The
Chicago Tribune and Tribune's Florida papers, the
Orlando Sentinel and
South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, were ahead of the curve in leveraging their newspaper, TV, and Web assets.
Brown, a former "Arts & Entertainment" editor at the
Sentinel and
Tribune, sees Oxygen enriching the sites by making quality journalism from each of the papers and sites available to all the others with the push of a button.
The uniform platform is a boon to the ad sales staffs as well. What Brown calls "the right rail" on each four-column site is for advertising, and there are accommodation for banners in the header and footer areas as well as section sponsorship opportunities at the top left of each site's home page. Smaller sites may be the first to benefit most. Tribune's two small Connecticut dailies,
Greenwich Time and
The Stamford Advocate, had neither the technical nor the editorial resources of the larger papers. The Shared News group, out of Chicago, packages photos, text, and multimedia from each Tribune paper and site for use on any of the sites for an enhanced experience.
"It was a perfect platform to increase performance in back-room efficiency while providing our viewers with a terrific online experience," said Charlie Ponger, interactive general manager at Tribune's Southern Connecticut Newspapers Inc., which have a combined daily circulation just under 40,000. "We're a staff of four, and it looks and feels like we have 15 or 20 in the back room."
The Connecticut papers can also post items from nearby
Newsday's deeper well of sports and news staffs. They are just a stone's throw across Long Island Sound, with converging regional interests. Now they have a virtual bridge: more traffic, no fumes.
On the run...
The synergy between Lee Enterprises Inc. and CityXpress.com Corp. continues with the launch of "Our Time," a senior-living special section that will be launched by all 28 Lee newspaper Web portals by the end of the year. One new wrinkle is that "Our Time'' will also be a print supplement to all the newspapers. First looks are available at sites including madison.com.
...Osama bin Laden isn't living in a mere cave -- he's in a mountain fortress George Lucas would be hard-pressed to imagine. Check out the fascinatingly detailed graphic at The Times of London Web site (
http://www.thetimes.co.uk). Mr. Bond? We have an assignment for you, 007.
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