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New connectivity tools bring outback staff closer to home
Action in the field of telecommunications has been heating up the last several years, with mergers and buyouts vying with technological innovation for space on the business pages.
That technical innovation, showing up as faster connections at lower prices, is ever so slowly making its way into the news operation as well.
In the not-too-distant past, reporters outside the main office had little access to archives, research material or much of anything else. Contact between the reporter and the main office was by phone, courier and fax machine.
The pipelines used to send data back and forth were more like soda straws. Increases in modem speeds came along as slowly as modems moved data, and higher speed solutions come with a corresponding cost and complexity. But faster communications technologies, such as Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), cable modems and satellite telephones, are converging with Internet technology to give newspapers the opportunity to improve things.
Newspaper bureaus at many papers have already benefited, with T1 lines, Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDN), frame relay and other communications services tying them closely to the main office. And the lone reporter in the field slowly is becoming able to call on the resources of the newsroom, and call on them at speeds unheard of as recently as two years ago.
Most newspapers, however, are just starting to look into the higher-speed pipelines and have not committed to much of anything yet.
Still chuggin' along at 1200 baud
The Orange County Register is fairly typical of the newspaper industry, with little in place now, but plans to aggressively move into faster technologies.Much of Southern California's Orange County is wired for cable modems, a technology that provides connections to the Internet seven to 10 times faster than ISDN at a fraction of the cost, but other hurdles had kept the paper from taking advantage of it.
"Right now, we are still on Atex," said Val Cohen, newsroom systems manager for the Register. "Atex gives us a spanking-hot 1200-baud interface regardless of how we get there."
Since reporters spent most of their time dealing with Atex, faster connections were not yet necessary, Cohen said.
The paper uses frame-relay technology and T1 lines to connect some of its bureaus to the paper's wide area network, giving people in those bureaus access to the same information as staff members in the main office.
Outside those bureaus, the setup is less advanced.
"Our communications systems so far are pretty limited, but that's because the systems we have for reporters to hit are pretty limited," Cohen said. "People have limited access to wires through AAI (an Atex interface allowing limited access through a dial-up connection), but it's not practical. They have limited access to archives through a separate dial-up at 1200 baud, and they can get e-mail through another dial-up."
Although not doing much yet, the Denver Rocky Mountain News (the paper changed its name just last month) is looking at improved communications as a possible tool in its newspaper war with the Denver Post. Tom DeFeo, assistant managing editor at the News, points to the combination of cell phones and digital photography as something that gives them an edge.
"We're having a fair amount of success with digital photography," DeFeo said. "In Denver it's not a good idea, it's a necessity. And the best way to [get images back] is get back to the car or a quiet place, hook up the cell phone to the laptop and go for broke. Other than that, we're pretty low-tech."
Other technologies were being considered, he said. Reporters on the road could use a dial-up connection to get to the Internet, the paper's intranet and wires, but that was about it.
DeFeo said quite a few people are using cell phones, notably the baseball reporter, but that he did not count on cell phone connections.
"I've been to three or four national political conventions and you might as well take cell phones and throw them out the window," DeFeo said. "We had terrible problems with them when the pope was here, and during the [G-8] economic conference you couldn't get a connection."
But, as DeFeo pointed out, cellular phones are just one path and there are lots of paths out there. For static locations, there are myriad connection methods, with DSL and cable modems joining ISDN, frame relay and T1 lines for high-speed access and at much lower rates. And the choices for mobile users are growing, too, with spreading cellular service, satellite phones, wireless modems and two-way pagers.
Bringing those outside, inside
The New York Times, with its far-flung empire of foreign and national bureaus, is taking advantage of all of these tools. The paper views it as a necessity in order to maintain its position in the marketplace."Care and feeding of foreign and national correspondents is a serious business need," said Terry Schwadron, the senior editor for information technology at the Times. "We can't do the best of what we do unless we can make sure that folks who are on the move are able to communicate easily with the folks who are making up newspaper pages and newspaper web sites."
Schwadron said the idea was to give reporters outside the paper's Times Square offices access to the same tools as reporters inside the building.
For years the Times has had wires, messaging and archives available to reporters through dial-up connections to a bulletin board system, through Newscom and via Lexis-Nexis. These are being augmented through an aggressive use of the Internet and the company intranet.
Reporters already have access to the newspaper's internal archive through a web browser, as well as Internet-based e-mail, an extensive collection of wires, internal communications and a collection of databases. Schwadron intends to add substantially to that, as well as ensure they are available to staff members working in the building or remotely.
To that end, the Times is leaving no stone unturned.
"We have a variety of connections available, from an 800 number with 28.8 modems to some cases with ISDN and a few bureaus with frame relay connecting back." Schwadron said. "We're seeing cable modems connecting through a VPN [Virtual Private Network], and we still use Newscom, giving us a relatively high speed [56k] connection. There also is a lot of communications over the phone, whether telephone, cellular or satellite phone."
The Times had experimented several years ago with wireless modems for laptops, looking at several that use the pager networks to send and receive e-mail and stories, but has not put any into general use. The modems had the advantage of working when cell phones couldn't, but were painfully slow.
Satellite phones, however, have become commonplace at the paper. Costs of such phones have dropped considerably in the last few years and connection speeds have gone up, prompting some reporters in remote locations to use the satellite phone instead of local phone systems because it is cheaper and more reliable.
The company began using them during the Gulf War and has become quite aggressive about it. The Times now owns about 25, and assigns them to most of the foreign bureaus as well as national bureaus such as San Francisco and Los Angeles so natural disasters won't put the bureau out of operation.
Unlike cell phones, the sat phones work during hurricanes, earthquakes, political conventions and other natural disasters. Of course, the user needs to be either outside or in a window facing the equator, something cell phones can ignore.
Fewer choices in the outback
Most newspapers, however, are not the New York Times, having to support extensive bureau operations. Smaller papers often have neither the need -- nor the deep pockets -- to establish that sort of communications setup.ISDN is a dial-up service that works much like Pots (Plain Old Telephone Service) but is faster. DSL and cable modems are still relatively new technologies and so are unlikely to be in areas with smaller papers.
They also are dedicated connections to the Internet. To give staff members access to newsroom tools with these technologies, a newspaper would need to set up an intranet and some decent security, items that may not be at the top of the list for most publishers.
"I hate to be backward, but we're nowhere near where we want to be," said James Michels, editorial systems manager for the Evansville (Ind.) Courier. "We have two bureaus and they have basic phone lines. They are as fast as we can get them, but it's basic phone lines."
People outside the building can file to the paper, but can't get things back -- what Michels calls a one-way street. That may change, however, with planned upgrades to the Quark Publishing System editing environment at the Courier, from version 1.12 to version 2.0.
Access to the library is limited, although the paper is experimenting with using it through Lexis-Nexis over an Internet connection.
Michels said he makes use of cell phones, but not for data transmission.
"We experimented with cell phones and cell phone modems, and we were not happy with the results. We've backed off from that," he said. "We have a lot of little towns where we go in and the cell phones don't work. You can only do that once or twice. We've gone back to regular modems and transmitting. Again, it's a one-way street."
But the needs in Evansville are far different than the needs of a paper like the Times.
"Our world of live coverage tends to be much more regional in scope. In most cases, stories are filed by coming back into the office," Michels said. "By and large, we're not sending people into Outer Mongolia."
As for cable modems or DSL, he does not see either of them in the near future. "We just had a new communications company come in the area and announce plans, but they haven't started yet," Michels said.
At the Kansas City Star, things are pretty good in the metro bureaus, with T1 or 10-megabit lines tying them closely to the main office.
Reporters outside the bureaus don't have it quite so good, though Rob Perschau, systems editor at the Star, said they have converted everything to TCP/IP, and the library is now available on the Internet.
"We still fax some library stuff to people who aren't connected, but it doesn't have to be that way," Perschau said. "Sports reporters rely on the Internet. Everything that used to be faxed they now get on the Web. Our next step is to put up an intranet."
Building for future
Intranets and the Internet figure prominently in the plans of most newspapers, and the new technologies are part and parcel of those plans.Michael Kerr, assistant managing editor of the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., is using PCs running Reach-Out, a remote access/remote control program, to give staffers outside the building access to tools inside.
"We have a bank of 16 PCs that are dedicated for that purpose," Kerr said. "Some have 28.8 modems and some are 56k, but the effective hookup speed is governed by quality of the phone line. It gives them access to archive, intranet, e-mail and the front-end system, just like they are working here in the building."
Much of Memphis is wired for cable modems, and Kerr wanted to take advantage of it, primarily for better speed.
"We're not happy relying on voice lines. In some parts of town you can only get a 21K, in others 49K," he said. "For things like the archive and e-mail, it's not bad, but we need better."
The Denver Post also is looking for something better, according to Eric Strom, assistant managing editor for pagination. The paper's metro bureaus have access to the newsroom's System Integrators Inc. front-end system through computers running Windows 95 and Coyote/3 software.
"It is kind of dicey because the metro bureaus have been running over phone lines into Shiva [modem] servers," Strom said. "We're moving them over to ISDN into Ascend servers," which Strom expects to improve things.
The Ascend servers also allow the use of virtual private networks, something else that appeals to Strom.
"If we have a guy in Europe, he can pick up his phone and dial us up and dump his story into the system," Strom said. "But with a VPN he can pick up that phone and hook into the whole world -- and the Denver Post, too."
-- Steven E. Brier
From THE COLE PAPERS, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.
Last modified: July 24, 2008