The Cole Digest, July 26, 1995

Gentle Reader,

In late December, after almost seven years of development, the Chicago Tribune accepted the Dateline editorial front-end system developed by CText Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich. Eventually the Trib will have more than 450 Dateline workstations.

Installation and training at the 691,000-circulation morning daily began in early January. Tribune executives plan to shut off the paper's elderly Hendrix Edit 5 system late this summer.

Envisioned in the late '80s as one of the first true client/server editorial systems, CText and the Tribune began working on Dateline together with some relatively untried technologies.

"It took so long because several pieces of the system had to mature," said Dean Gerdes, the paper's director of operation services. The Trib wanted to resolve three basic issues before it would accept the system, Gerdes said: response time, functionality and stability.

Response time was measured against the Hendrix Edit 5, which because of its proprietary nature was one of the fastest editorial systems ever made. "We have gone through two upgrades of our Tandem processors," said Gerdes, to get the kind of response time needed by Tribune editors.

The installed Tandem technology -- the new Himalaya RISC system -- includes 10 processors, as well as 10 gigabytes of mirrored high-speed disk drives linked to those processors.

As for functionality, CText's Jeff Litvak said the company hadn't "added a new feature in a few years." Gerdes said that in early 1993, missing functionality included a macro recorder and a table editor, but "we went into fall '93 watching those pieces come together."

The last issue was stability. Much of the problem there stemmed from OS/2, CText's chosen operating system. OS/2 was conceived as a joint project between IBM and Microsoft, with the goal of making it the next generation of MS-DOS.

When Microsoft elected to extend its Windows technology in the early '90s, IBM was left to finish the system -- and firms like CText were left in the lurch. Over time, IBM did come through with improvements to make OS/2 viable.

The goal of the stability tests, Litvak said, "was to get an average user through a week's worth of work without having to reboot more than once."

How is the newsroom handling the prospect of moving to a new editorial system? "We'll see when it goes live," said Tribune Systems Editor Paul Dix, who has been with the project since its inception.

Newsroom people are being provided a minimum of eight hours of training in two sessions, one for OS/2 and one for CText. Four more hours are given to those who must understand composition.

"As a general rule," said Dix, "following their first class, their new machine is sitting on their desk."

Dix sounds skeptical about CText Dateline, but he attributes that to the cynicism in his journalist's blood.

"When have you known editorial people to say anything except, 'If your grandmother says she loves you, check it out?'"

Onward.

\dmc

[THE COLE DIGEST is written by consultant David M. Cole, editor and publisher of the industry newsletter THE COLE PAPERS. The DIGEST is made available to PressLink subscribers every Wednesday at no extra charge. Send comments by e-mail to cole@plink.geis.com. The COLE DIGEST is the property of The Cole Group, a California sole proprietorship. Reproduction in whole or in part without the written permission of The Cole Group is prohibited. Copyright (C) 1995, The Cole Group. Opinions expressed are those of The Cole Group, unless otherwise noted.

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