In the mid- to late 1990s,
newspapers faced the same type of hosting situation as any other business. The
options consisted of a) buying relatively large amounts of bandwidth and
hardware on the open market from vendors such as Sprint, AT&T, Ameritech,
Cisco or 3Com and creating their own hosted environment, or b) entering into a
co-location agreement with a company like Exodus, Level 3 or some other smaller
local or regional Internet Service Provider with appropriate bandwidth. As more
and more papers came onto the Web, service providers specific to the business
developed what are more accurately called “hosted solutions,” which mean not
only does the paper get a place to host their site, but also gets management
functions included in the price.
The advantages are many. The
newspaper doesn’t have to invest in the bandwidth required to serve many
visitors, nor in the capital hardware and software, and the continual upgrades
that are associated with those purchases. The requirements of 24/7 uptime are no
longer in-house either, so staffing needs can be lighter. On the negative side,
hosted sites often use a template type of arrangement, so if special
modifications are not made, all the papers can take on a very generic look and
feel. Some systems are very dependent on the cut-and-paste type of arrangement
to upload data, so that there may be no time savings over a more efficient
export/import arrangement. Most developers would claim that having the Web
server in roughly the same physical location (or at the very least, network
node) as the editorial front end makes data sharing a great deal easier than if
long-haul connections have to be established. When a paper is with a
third-party-managed host, they are at the mercy of that company’s timetable
and technical ability when it comes time to develop and implement new features,
such as polling or special sections.
With the demise of ZIP2/Myway in
December 2001, consolidation has begun in the industry. The two major players in
this space today are TownNews, based in Moline, Ill., and PowerOne Media
(created in November 2001 by the merger of PowerAdz and AdOne) from Troy, N.Y.
Both companies are privately held and backed by well-known names: PowerOne is
backed by names such as Belo Corp., E.W. Scripps Co. and Hearst Corp., among
others. TownNews is majority-owned by Lee Enterprises. Both vendors offer a
fairly complete range of services, with predesigned template-driven sites
available at fixed price points and customization available at additional cost.
TownNews currently hosts close to 700 sites, and PowerOne counts over 1,600,
although that’s not a one-to-one measurement since PowerOne has classified
services that are not full-hosting solutions. According to PowerOne Chief
Executive Officer Mark Chudzicki, around two-thirds of those 1,600 clients use
the full suite of services, which would put their count slightly over 1,000.
TownNews added over 250 papers to their network in 2001, according to Chief
Executive Officer Mark Wilson. They are currently working on putting on all the
papers from the Boone Newspapers Inc. group of Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Lee’s
acquisition of Howard Newspapers will add another 14.
Kevin Hoppes is the corporate
Internet director for Nepanews.com, the new media division of the Times-Shamrock
group, which owns 29 newspapers and 10 radio stations. Prior to transitioning to
PowerOne, most of the sites were self-maintained and thus time-intensive to
manage if technical problems arose.
“We were looking to outsource to
have something that was centralized and easy to manage, and we were looking for
a formula that would work in terms of both revenue creation and technical
considerations,” Hoppes said. “We take care of training all our individual
properties on how to get content up on their sites, but they are responsible for
the content.” Hoppes evaluated a number of vendors before choosing PowerOne.
“One of the things that I really like is that they have the best-integrated
advertising packages I’ve seen. We also have had good feedback on their
network, even on Sept. 11 when we got an e-mail from a family that was traveling
in Europe at the time and said they couldn’t reach major network sites to get
the news, but that our local site was still reachable, and we had complete
packages on the event ready to go. There were some growing pains early on, but
through it all their response has been excellent in terms of getting things
resolved and being upfront with us.”
Edith Klein, online production
manager of the Princeton Packet (www.princetonpacket.com), had a similar
challenge with aggregating a number of sites onto the PowerOne platform.
“We were just extracting the
stories right from our Harris system and posting them in straight [HyperText
Markup Language], copying and pasting manually. At the time, we weren’t
getting the kind of support we needed from our classified vendor, so we decided
to look for another solution, which turned out to be PowerAdz. Then we added the
ZWire! functionality, which was the content management side.”
The conversion happened in a short
timeline.
“We ended up consolidating all the
papers to one ZWire! site where entertainment, business, marketplace and
classified are used by all the papers. We do have 11 URLs, they just point to a
specific section of the consolidated site, and we had that all done in about
three months.”
Wick Communications Co., based in
Sierra Vista, Ariz., operates in 13 states and owns 40 daily and weekly
newspapers, plus niche publications and a radio station. A number of their
publications were hosted for several years by AnytimeNews.com, before TownNews
purchased AnytimeNews in 2001. They started looking for a new Web host for the
rest of their operations almost a year ago, and ended up with three finalists.
They settled on TownNews.
“The top managers at TownNews are
former newspaper people,” said Tom Lee, group manager for Wick. “So when you
are concerned about issues like switch advertising, they’re instantly speaking
your language.” Lee didn’t pull any punches when speaking about experiences
with other hosting providers and less-specialized Web vendors.
“Some of the Web-hosting companies
are made up of a handful of techie types who never leave the building, don’t
care to interact with customers, and leave all of the PR to a sales rep who is
constantly on the road and a marketing person who is too busy to deal with
customers. They leave you with the feeling that the dot-com dummies are still
among us.”
