Chris Gulker checks in

Dave-

Thanks for the mention on Scripting News... Really am quite pleased with Radio, and I’m hoping to have some time in February to really re-acquaint myself. I’m stepping back from full time at my current startup to do some research and writing that have been on a back burner for a while.

Re: Examiner – our ‘upstreaming’ was really quite primitive compared to Radio. Nevertheless, Frontier made it possible for one person to manage the roughly 50% of the paper that came out of Macs – and be a photo editor and help lay out the front page of 4 editions a day. By comparison the Tandem mainframe’s SII system – which produced the other 50% - had about 20 full-time programmers and sysops who added nothing to the editorial appeal of the paper.

Frontier created a file structure on the main production server: the only rule in the newsroom for Mac users was that you had to get the final, edited version of your work in the right folder – news, business, features etc. - under the right date. A few days after the paper had appeared, another Frontier script deconstructed the pages and archived graphics, photos etc. alphabetically.

A third script pulled all the text off the mainframe, rendered it as HTML and built a linked index of stories for examiner.com. Another script managed the wirephoto flow, including one fun script that used fuzzy logic to read photo captions and decide whether they were news, sports or whatever (with surprising accuracy – these were the days before AP and Reuters included routing codes).

True story: 2 years after leaving the Examiner, I got a call at Apple from the Examiner IT guy: the archive server, a UNIX box, was full and needed additional HD space. And while they could see it electronically, they had no idea where the physical server was: it – and the Frontier scripts - had chugged along that reliably.

I recently gave a presentation on advanced production systems, and talked about something I called lightweight content management systems: I mentioned my experience with the Ex systems – the lightweight Mac system that fast, flexible, easy to change and inexpensive. It may not have dotted every ‘i’ and crossed ‘every ‘t’ but it allowed the Ex to add new products – like the Web site - quickly. SII was a system that was slow and expensive to change: I wrote our crude HTML rendering scripts the night of the strike - SII promised HTML for 3 years before finally going into Chapter 11. Changing fonts on SII could take a month.

In fact, the SII system is still going at the Chron because it will be so expensive to shut down – mainly the cost of laying off its staff of 20. Tandem no longer supports its OS (‘Guardian’), and their software vendor is belly up, but they keep it alive – itself an expensive feat. Successful media companies will have to both create – and kill – products quickly and inexpensively in the future to be competitive. The cost of the SII system at the Peninsula Times Tribune may have been the last straw that caused it to fold.

Hopefully I will be using Radio to flesh out and publish some of these ideas in the future – including an idea based on emergent behaviors I’ve been working on for a while (and the Radio and Manila communities are like a Darwinian laboratory for some of this work).

Anyway, my best to you in the New Year! I’ll drop you a line early in February if I manage to go back into semi-retirement... Maybe we can manage breakfast at Bucks or something...

Chris

-- Chris Gulker
http://www.gulker.com/