by Hays Goodman
Associate Editor

The very act of publishing a daily newspaper is often referred to in the business as “the daily miracle,” and with good reason.

A vast range of resources provided by a wide range of individuals has to flow ultimately into a single path, converging at a single point: the printing press. Within the past five years most newspapers have added an additional step to that procedure — simultaneously updating a Web site, often on a more frequent basis than the print product. Many of the editorial and publishing systems were installed at these organizations before Web site production became commonplace, necessitating a number of interesting techniques to get information out in a usable form and manage it.

Bob Cauthorn, vice president of Digital Media for the San Francisco Chronicle, which has been owned by the Hearst Corp. since July 2000, has had overall responsibility for all of the paper’s digital media efforts since he came aboard in September of that year.

“We get the text shipped to us early every morning, on which we run processing to strip out any artifacts from the editorial system. One of the interesting flukes in the way we’re structured here, which is quite unusual in the business, but ends up being a benefit for us, is that we actually get our material from the library archive, after they’ve processed it first thing in the morning,” he said.

Cauthorn pointed out the benefits of getting the information at that stage.

“What’s enabling about that, is that we have a lot of additional meta-information that the library has provided that would not be in there if we were simply grabbing the text at the typesetter, which has been the case in other operations I’ve been involved in,” he said.

This provides some benefits to the online editors and ultimately the readers as well.

“For example, when we get a (San Francisco Mayor) Willie Brown story, or maybe it’s a city government story and Willie Brown’s name isn’t mentioned, there’s additional information there that the library has provided, and I can do things with that information.”

Cauthorn also described how pictures get from the photographers to the Web site.

“We have remote access to the photo front end, since we’re housed in a separate building than the main newspaper plant. Unfortunately it’s not quite as well--organized as it could be, but we’re working with the photographers and news desk to get that fixed because we spend too much time searching for these photos. We grab them; we color correct them … we don’t do any cropping because we want the photo to reflect what was in the newspaper. We’re coming up with a ‘foldering’ system, which will allow our photographers to submit to us, in these times of tight newsprint, photos that can’t end up in the print newspaper,” he said

The Web site, www.sfgate.com, is run as an in-house-developed system and does not use a third-party workflow manager.

Moving from the West Coast to the Midwest, NewsOK.com is the combined news portal of The (Oklahoma City) Oklahoman and News 9, the local CBS affiliate and has been operating since August 2001 as a limited liability company. There is a high degree of integration between the two operations, according to Ron Cariker, managing editor for NewsOK, and that affects how daily site management is performed.

“Our content management system was done in-house, by a programmer who is no longer with us,” he said. “It’s a very simple text editor, straight [HyperText Markup Language]. Its interface was set up and designed to interface with the newspaper’s export system and the way their content is done, through Harris. There’s a translation table that allows the content to be exported to us where we can categorize the content from the newspaper. They put identifiers on different sections, such as the sports section, which would be labeled ‘SPT.’ From there the editors can go in, enhance the story, clean it up and then put it in the different categories that we’ve created.”

The export occurs during the overnight hours.

“The newspaper is printed overnight, so the export process happens a couple times because of the multiple editions. The actual export that’s sent to us happens around 5:30 a.m. every day, and it dumps into categories that aren’t live on the site. Between three and four editors come on about the same time, and from there it’s pretty hands-on as to the amount of work that goes on.”

The site handles photographs in a similar manner.

“Photos are exported along with the stories but in a separate database, and our editors can go in and pick and choose whatever they want to use,” Cariker said.

NewsOK.com is built on a very traditional and text-friendly programming language.

“Perl is the main programming language for how our site functions, as far as the way it pulls in a template around a story, the way a lot of the nuts-and-bolts work,” said Cariker. “Since we have so many different functions behind our site, though, there’s some ASP, some Java as well … we’re always trying new things to see what works best and gives us the most options down the road.”

Azcentral.com is the home page for The (Phoenix) Arizona Republic, a 451,000-circulation daily owned by Gannett Co. Inc. Gannett also owns KPNX-TV Channel 12, the Phoenix ABC affiliate that partnered with azcentral.com in March 2001 to provide streaming video and other content from KPNX newscasts.

“In the newsroom we have a CCI Europe front end that is able to export [eXtensible Markup Language] and from there we take it into a homebrew content system,” said John Leach, senior editor for online news at azcentral.com. “Before we developed our own system around two years ago we had been through a number of systems, including most recently IPS Xcelerate from FutureTense. There were issues of speed and user interface that made us think we could do better on our own.”

Like others, azcentral.com gets the data right before it gets typeset to reflect the latest editing changes.

“XML tells us what section of the paper the content is from,” Leach said. “It drops the headline into a headline field, byline into a byline field and so on. We pull just about everything … some graphics don’t make it, some photos, but by and large the site is a reflection of the print edition.”

Automation is heavily used with the text, but manual intervention is still performed with photo content.