Establishing and maintaining a content database

Under the shadow of a looming strike, planners were changing culture, workflow and technology to launch the "Freep," on-line publication for the Detroit Free Press.

As new media director Laurie Bennett describes the process, the on-line entity required cooperation and change from all the newspaper's departments, from simple things like getting photographers to name their digitized images in specific ways to system redeployment like the RS/6000 bought to hook an existing Atex front-end to a Mac pagination system now feeding the Web effort as well.

The Free Press kept its on-line editing in the newsroom, rather than spinning off a separate division. Positioning the Freep the first and last edition of the newspaper, Bennett

runs all content through copy editors and emphasizes breaking news. Fresh information on big events, such as the Detroit Redwings' Stanley Cup win and tragic injuries of its players just a few days later, has built traffic to a surprising 30,000 to 40,000 visits per day, Bennett said, and so far traffic is doubling every quarter.

You can't spend too much time organizing a site before launch, she said. The Free Press lets InfiNet of Norfolk, Va., do the technical job of hosting, and it found a great organizational aid in Pantheon's Builder. Site indexing, content organization and story updating, especially after redesigns, are major labors.

Builder helps designers pre-build templates, then automatically generates indexes by subject and date. With it, five people produce two sections and they concentrate on the creative stuff, not manually generating HTML, Bennett said. In Detroit, editors wait until after print deadline to put stories on-line, which places a premium on interesting, more detailed reporting than other on-line news providers can give.

Good features of Builder, also found in other site management software brands, is the automatic indexing, and forwarding of stories to "yesterday's news" sections, and ways to break up long directories with ad positions, so they don't fall far to the bottom.

One unexpected time expense for the editors is placing ads. Products such as NetGravity can help with this function, Bennett said, but ad handling probably will take longer than you think.

Tools from other companies help build content, including merging Freep's information that of sister newspapers. While the automotive section, Auto.com, is hand-built to include reviews from several Knight-Ridder newspapers, the section gives entry way to search several newspaper databases through MediaStream's SAVE archive system. Features of SAVE help the librarians process Free Press stories, such as folders that automatically attach keywords to files placed their for processing.

Open to all newspapers, the SAVE system stores and delivers stories while InfiNet handles billing the customer for downloaded selections. Increasing demand for the archive has been a good revenue source, as well as the advertising income.

The promise of database tools shows best at the San Jose site. Searchable listings of movie reviews, restaurant reviews, music listings and events listings will tie into mapping software from Zip2. Not only will a reader see a list of places to his or her taste, the program maps where a particular restaurant is and the easiest route from house to table.

With customers' growing interest in such "do it yourself" searching, the database is the Free Press's most valuable asset.

"Librarians can't believe this yet, but we're trying to convince them," Bennett said.

A production of The Cole Group, Copyright (c) 1997, All Rights Reserved.

Last updated: 25 June 1997.

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