Maybe some things were never meant to be. Colorado newspapers recently reported that bankrupt United Airlines finally threw in the towel on its $200 million automated baggage handling system at Denver International Airport.

Over 12 years ago, the system, manufactured by BAE Automated Systems Inc., delayed DIA’s opening several times and cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars in addition to becoming a running joke in late-night television monologues. This fall, United will switch back to a low-tech, tug-and-cart process, even though it’s still responsible for a $60 million annual payment for the automated system.

Score one for a manual process over automation.

Some hard lessons

Though it has little or nothing to do with the newspaper business, the DIA baggage handling fiasco might have some lessons for us.

Perhaps there are a few things in your plant that you would be better off abandoning, despite the money sunk into the project.

We all have come to that point where, in a blinding flash of epiphany, we realize we are throwing good money after bad.  

Maybe it is right after someone spent several hours and hundreds of dollars replacing the video card on an older CPU to get it to run a modern operating system and then realized it would have been less expensive to buy a new machine.

Or perhaps the “eureka” moment occurred after your antiquated page layout software could no longer read or render one of your top advertiser’s vector graphics.

Then there’s the education that occurs after one more fight with a balky inserter or the weariness associated with trying to sell a special section that used to be golden but is now a nearly impossible-to-sell dog.

The hope is that you are able to come to that realization long before your customers and competitors discover it as well.

Keep or junk?

That still leaves you with the fundamental question: What technologies do you embrace and which ones do you abandon?

Take online considerations. JupiterResearch recently reported that the number of online adults who prefer the Internet as their main source of news has grown more than 35 percent in the last four years, at the expense of television and newspapers.

The study also said that more than 26 percent of online adults prefer the Internet to get their national and international news, compared to 19 percent in 2001.

Young adults, not surprisingly, are fueling the trend, JupiterResearch said, with 33 percent of people aged 18 to 24 saying they prefer the Web as their primary source of news; 40 percent said they prefer television and only 10 percent cite newspapers.

Holding the bag

Which technologies should newspapers use to capture that market? Something like SmallTownPapers Inc.’s approach? The Seattle company specializes in helping smaller newspapers digitize their content and make it available to readers.

Is that the direction in which to head? Or do we adapt another plan or take the best pieces from many models?

One thing is for sure. None of us wants to get stuck holding the bag on an “advanced” system that we must abandon long before we are through paying for it.