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Online operations at many newspapers have adopted open source software as a critical component of their content management systems.

Nando Media’s Digital Workbench, for example, is built on top of open source tools. Cofax, the content management app used by Knight Ridder’s online publications, is an open source project, too, and there are countless other examples as well.

Yet for a variety of reasons, despite inroads on the online side, the print side of the operation has not as readily adopted open source software.

By neglecting some very important and very useful open source tools, newspapers are missing an excellent opportunity to reduce IT expenditures and streamline internal processes.

From the publisher’s perspective, open source software means high-quality, free software. In all fairness, however, it almost always requires more development work to get it right for any given project, so it is not without some expense.

Numerous studies have shown that users can save a substantial amount of time and money through the sensible use of open source software.

The high quality comes from the openness of the development process - on active projects, hundreds of developers participate in a continual process of improvement. Everyone benefits by sharing their work, rather than keeping it proprietary for themselves. There is a remarkable collegiality to the process - people are glad to help and share their knowledge.

One particularly useful open source project is Cocoon, which bills itself as a content publishing framework. Cocoon is a project of the Apache Foundation - most well known for its Apache Web Server software, which is used by more than 64 percent of all Web sites, according to the Netcraft Web Server Survey (news.netcraft.com). Apache develops high-quality open source software, and it enjoys widespread support, both important considerations for mission-quality software.

Why Cocoon?

Cocoon is based on XML and related open standards. If you are not familiar with XML, it is an official standard from the W3C Consortium, the standards-setting body for the World Wide Web. While it can be used for many things, XML is most commonly used as a mark-up language for documents. As a result, a number of news industry standards have been established using XML (Editor’s note: See Think to Ink, page 42, for more information on XML).

For the newspaper industry, one of the most compelling XML standards is Prism, or publishing requirements for industry standard metadata.

Prism, which includes standards for newspaper content, was beefed up late last year when the W3C released Prism Aggregator DTD, for document type definition, governing the correct structure to be used for Prism files.

Time Inc., Hearst  and LexisNexis are just a few of the companies that were involved in the development of this standard, which will be used by content aggregators as the standard format for exchanging magazine, journal and newspaper content.

This brings us to Cocoon. This is an app designed to process XML documents. From the very beginning it was designed to give publishers the ability to take in a variety of different types of content, transform it and then export it for use in different media.

Cocoon refers to this as the Cocoon Pipeline, which is a helpful way to think about it.

Presto change-o!

At one end of the pipe, content comes in, some magic occurs in the middle and then something entirely different comes out the other side. In practical terms, this means that if you have a database of old stories written in a legacy text format, Cocoon could be used to take that information, convert it and output an HTML version for the Web, a WML version for mobile phones and a PDF version for print.

It really becomes powerful when you’re using an XML standard, such as the one developed by Prism, because that means you can easily develop automated processes that take in as input Prism files and automatically prepares them for use in all of your publications, both offline and online.

Since Cocoon is good at transforming content of all types, it can be particularly useful as the “glue” that connects the different pieces of your publishing process, automating many parts that are currently handled manually.

It also opens up the possibility for newspapers to develop new revenue streams. Since Cocoon can create PDF files on the fly, it is perfect for use with on-demand printing applications. That eliminates the often-costly steps required to prepare and produce reprints, for example. The result: higher profitability.

Prepare your own

With XML, Cocoon and on-demand printing, virtually any content can be offered as a reprint. Customers can even develop their own collections of favorite articles to be printed and delivered. Since there are no fixed costs associated with this process (no minimum press runs or inventory expenses), there is no risk to the company of having to write-off unsold inventory and every item sold means positive growth on the bottom line.

Cocoon is just one example of an open source project that could mean solid savings plus revenue growth for newspapers. The open source movement is dynamic and new projects are being announced daily. While not every project is as useful, or of the same quality as Cocoon, it always pays to investigate open source possibilities when embarking on a new development project.

Mark Choate is a principal consultant for Quoin Inc., an application integrator and consultancy. Choate was vice president of interactive media at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., where he worked for 11 years. He can be reached via e-mail at mark.choate@quoininc.com.