+ Page 54 + --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ####### ######## ######## ########### ### ### ## ### ## # ### # Interpersonal Computing and ### ### ## ### ## ### Technology: ### ### ## ### ### An Electronic Journal for ### ######## ### ### the 21st Century ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ## ### ISSN: 1064-4326 ### ### ### ## ### July, 1995 ####### ### ######## ### Volume 3, Number 3, pp. 54-63 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published by the Center for Teaching and Technology, Academic Computer Center, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057 Additional support provided by the Center for Academic Computing, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 This article is archived as DRESSER IPCTV3N3 on LISTSERV@GUVM (LISTSERV@GUVM.GEORGETOWN.EDU) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- DIGITAL ALCHEMY: CAN CONTENT BE TURNED INTO GOLD? Shiela Dresser, City Desk, The Baltimore Sun Several years ago, a friend and I walked the halls of The Baltimore Sun casting visions of the future - and spinning dreams of how the newspaper could thrive in it. How about "Dining on Disk?" he asked. "Take the content from the print "Dining Out" guide and recycle it. Make it a searchable computer program. People who bought the disk could use it to figure out where they want to eat out, what they want to eat and how much they want to spend. We'd give people something fun and useful, and make money too." "Great idea," I told him. "It's yours," he said. + Page 55 + By the time I was appointed electronic news editor, my friend, Bill Pardue, had left The Sun. But I remembered his idea and used it as soon as I could. The result is "Dining on Disk," the first multimedia computer disk produced by The Baltimore Sun. Few newspapers have tried such a project. A couple years ago, the Wall Street Journal hired a multimedia company to put one of its special sections on a disk, and friends at The Washington Post have mentioned a regional business disk. The Sun is a lot smaller than these media mastodons and has little money to use on experimental projects. We had to be a little more creative and resourceful if we wanted to try something like this. When we were finished, I realized that though the heart of the program is content from the print Dining Out guide, "Dining On Disk" is so different in its look, organization, functions and capabilities that it had become a different creature altogether. "Dining on Disk" is digital alchemy. This is an account of how the project came together and an evaluation of whether or not it succeeded. Not every newspaper will want to do something like "Dining on Disk". But we proved that even a newspaper with limited resources CAN do such a project. You just need the right kind of idea and a little ingenuity. Circumstances The Electronic Information Services department has a staff of 2 (myself and an editorial assistant) and a small budget. Though the department's small size is restrictive in many ways, it has advantages. Fewer management layers mean a quicker process of approval. And my small budget gives higher management the comfortable feeling that I can't do too much harm to the bottom line. + Page 56 + As EIS editor, I'm also in contact with many talented young people who have a can-do attitude, lots of time and energy, and loads of ambition. In fact, the spirit of the entrepreneur seems inherent in many projects in my field. The razor-wire fences at most newspapers that keep newsroom people and advertising people apart haven't been erected yet. As a result, I've worked closely on several projects with colleagues all over The Sun. That network made it possible for my small operation to carry off this project. More than two dozen people helped to launch "Dining on Disk", and they came from the newsroom, marketing, advertising and information systems. None answers to me, and all were busy with other projects. But they all came through when asked. In the summer of 1993 I had a chance to work briefly with a brilliant young graduate student named Gary Rosenzweig, who was finishing up an internship. He had a computer science degree from Drexel University and was halfway through his master's in journalism at the University of North Carolina. Creative, driven and resourceful, Gary wanted to start his own multimedia company and was eager for business. I couldn't pay him much, but since his goal was experience, he agreed to do "Dining on Disk" for $3,500. For that amount, Gary gave us three weeks of design and programming in Macintosh and Windows, and all the support and fixes we needed after that. + Page 57 + Newspapers, magazines and books start with a big advantage in the Digital Age. Many multimedia developers have great ideas but no content. For us, that's no problem. We've got years' worth of content collecting digital dust in our electronic archives. Because The Sun was already publishing a paper "Dining Out" guide and had previous reviews and photos on hand, I figured we were all set. Mostly, that proved true. However, I did end up leaving out the reviews of freelancers, from whom we had not yet procured re-publication rights. We couldn't have accommodated all of our region's restaurant reviews anyway, however. One of my specifications for Gary was that the project had to fit on one disk for convenience. And the color photos, music and text made it a tight fit. I wanted to launch "Dining on Disk" the same day we published the paper Dining Out" guide, September 18, 1994. That gave us six weeks to pull this project together. 500 dots to a disk When Gary arrived in Baltimore at the end of July, we had already conducted a lot of preliminary business by e-mail. So all I had to do was give him the specifications: "Here's the scenario, Gary: I'm a Sun reader who bought "Dining on Disk". Let's say I live in Towson. I pop in the disk. I don't want to leave the Towson area, and I'm in the mood for Italian food. Give me a list of Towson-area Italian restaurants." Click, click. Oh, and I don't want to spend the mortgage on dinner, so leave out the expensive ones. Click. "Il Travatore? What does the restaurant critic say about it? Click. Where is it? Show me a map. Click. And print that map out so I can take it in the car. I want the restaurant's address and phone number too, in case my husband won't pull over and ask directions. Click. "That's what I want, Gary. Make it for Mac and Windows machines, use color photos and music. And fit it on one computer disk. I'll see you in three weeks." + Page 58 + Gary shook his head. "No way you can do all that on one disk," he said. There are 500 restaurants in that list. Even by tweaking the program and fiddling with resolution there's no way you can get 500 color maps on that disk. You don't need a map anyway if you've got the address. "I really want the maps, Gary. See what you can do." Though Gary went away muttering, I had confidence that he could figure out a way to do what I wanted and still keep the program on one disk. And sure enough, about half an hour later he came back with a plan. The people who buy "Dining on Disk" will see that each restaurant on a map with a blinking dot showing its location. What these folks DON'T see is that there are really only six maps. But there are _500_ blinking dots. Here's Gary's simple but ingenious plan to resolve the map squeeze: We mapped our region into six sections on paper and plotted all the restaurants into those sections. Then we called up the working prototype and located each restaurant with a blinking dot by using the paper coordinates. It sounds cumbersome, but was really quite simple. And the maps enhanced the program so much that they were well worth the extra trouble. The process of completing the disk wasn't much different from that of publishing a news story: rough draft, to working copy, to edited copy, to finished copy with art. Gary created a prototype, then a working program. I suggested changes to give it more of a multimedia feel. The newspaper's graphics staff cleaned up the typography and design, and then we put the database in. Meanwhile, I was demonstrating "Dining on Disk" for the advertising staff. I had hoped to have at least one advertisement, and the advertising staff was enthusiastic about the potential for + Page 59 + targeted advertising. But their deadline was just a day or two away, and I knew we wouldn't be ready in time for them to sell ads. They did, however, PLACE one ad. Because we had left space for an ad at the close of the program, the advertising staff used the spot to reward a major advertiser from the print "Dining Out" guide. The advertiser's agency got excited about "Dining on Disk" and came into the newsroom to work with my staff on color reproduction and appearance. By the beginning of Gary's third and final week in Baltimore, "Dining on Disk" was coming together nicely. A computer systems manager who composes music on his Macintosh digitized Mozart's" Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" for the opening theme, which I chose because it's in the public domain and it's great dinner music, too. Gary spent the third week programming the Windows version of "Dining on Disk", using a Hypercard-like program called Asymetrix Toolbook. Hypercard (Mac) and Toolbook (PC) charge no royalty fee for developers who use the programs for commercial projects. Macromind's "Director", which many multimedia developers prefer, does have a royalty fee. Our project was experimental, and we had no idea if we'd sell enough to pay the cost of development. So we chose the less expensive program. Le Deluge Gary finished his work, my summer intern left, and my assistant, Laura Barnhardt, and I were left with a mess. Just when we thought we were swinging along pretty well, we realized that the program had almost no restaurant reviews. Most had been missed during a search of the archives, and a new search had to be done. The additions squeezed the space on the disk, which was already near capacity. Straightening out the mess cost us a week. By now, Gary had left Baltimore, so we had to send him the revised programs for re-compiling and re-compressing. By tweaking like crazy, he managed to fit them on a single disk - with about 3k to spare. + Page 60 + The prints and the paupers Finally, we were ready to do a brochure/manual. I wanted to keep it simple, since so many people don't read manuals. And I wanted to keep The Sun's printing costs down. My editorial assistant found a franchise printshop that would do our job at a good price on upgraded paper. We ordered the brochure in black and white, kept it to one sheet and had a staff artist design it in about half an hour. And it looks great. The total cost of our first print run of 100 brochures and 100 labels was $80.16. We tried to be resourceful in other ways too. Instead of hiring a disk-copying company to duplicate the master disks for sale, we made copies ourselves using shareware programs for the Mac and PC. Finally, the time came to price the disk. A colleague who has a software business advised us not to price it too cheaply or computer users would think it had no value. Marketing people reminded me that Baltimoreans like a bargain. Suggestions ranged from $4.95 to $29.95. I picked $9.95 -- low enough that price wouldn't be a factor in the decision whether to buy it, but high enough to indicate confidence in the product and leave a nice profit margin on the production costs. To advertise and market the disks, the advertising staff ran an eighth-page ad in the print guide to announce "Dining on Disk". And the Features Department published a notice about the disks at the end of our restaurant critic's Sunday reviews. Some of the paper's representatives attended a big state tourism convention and made a pitch for licensing the disk. But even though hotels and tourism officials liked the program, they wanted a more customized one that deleted reviews and listings from outside their own areas. And, of course, they weren't willing to pay for the cost of producing a whole new disk just for themselves. + Page 61 + Generally, I count the project a big success. The fact that we did it at all is pretty amazing, given our staff and resource constraints. But it also turned out so well that the Marketing department has decided to update the disk every other year and make a bigger push to sell it. The only big problem we had came from the Windows version. One Mac is much like another. Generally, what works on a Mac Quadra with System 7 will work on a Mac IIfx with System 7. But PCs with Windows can have slight differences. Even though we beta-tested the disks on several different PCs with Windows, we soon discovered from customer complaints that that hadn't been enough. We also had had to move the program off a busy PC in the news Library, and the shift corrupted something. The upshot was about a dozen disgruntled Windows customers. All the staff involved in this project were, by experience and inclination, Mac people. We don't know from Windows, in other words. We were also, except for Gary, who lives hundreds of miles away, proficient as users but not programmers. But with a dozen unhappy customers, I figured we had to fix the program's bug if we wanted to have any chance at doing another one. So Dave Zidek, a friendly PC genius who works in our finance department, figured out the bug for us. We kept track of all customer complaints, refunded money to those who didn't want to wait for a fix, kept the more patient ones informed about progress in correcting the problem, and then sent the new program by overnight mail. Several called and wrote notes thanking us for good customer service, and only a few decided they wanted their money back. Even better, many have called to ask for yearly updates. Results My evaluation of the project is that "Dining on Disk" was a success by some measures, but not all. On the negative side: * We didn't sell thousands. As of mid-June 1995, we had sold only 172 disks * Though we had hopes of multiple sales and licensing to hotels, concierges, Bed & Breakfast inns and tourism bureaus, none were interested. + Page 62 + * We weren't prepared for the intensity of customer service in the software business. There was lots of hand-holding, which overwhelmed my staff of 2. On the positive side: * We did it. * We produced a multimedia disk - primitive multimedia, but multimedia all the same - at minimal cost. * We found a credible, useful way to re-use content The Sun had already created, thereby increasing the shelf-life of our staff's work. * Departments that normally don't work together cooperated freely to do the project. * The people who bought the disk generally love it and have asked when an updated version will be out. The clearest measure of success is that The Sun has given the go-ahead for an update this year. Even if "Dining on Disk" isn't digital alchemy, it's not fool's gold either. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Sheila Dresser has since rejoined the mainstream, and is an editor on the city desk at The Sun. Editurz@aol.com + Page 63 + -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright Statement -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century Copyright 1995 Georgetown University. Copyright of individual articles in this publication is retained by the individual authors. Copyright of the compilation as a whole is held by Georgetown University. It is asked that any republication of this article state that the article was first published in IPCT-J. Contributions to IPCT-J can be submitted by electronic mail in APA style to: Susan Barnes, Ph.D. Editor IPCT-J, SBB3007@IS2.NYU.EDU _