“Memos, Presentations” Items

Emerging Tools and Technology. Presentation in 2000

As vice president of CNI Ventures, I was charged with looking for and understanding new technologies that might impact the newspaper industry and, more important, Central Newspapers, Inc. I gave a presentation to the Interactive Newspaper Conference in early 2000 that explored a few of these new tools, including:

  • Brightstreet, a coupon site
  • NexTag, a shopping comparison site
  • Everstream, an audio streaming service
  • Kabango, an Internet radio
  • Palm Pics, a device from Kodak to allow the Palm Pilot to take pictures
  • Webphones, a Nokia device [way before the iPhone]
  • E-Ink, electronic ‘ink’ display [think Kindle, which used that technology]

Of all of the technologies discussed, E-Ink has proven the most successful.

NewsU Story Contest Finalists

Poynter’s News University liked to celebrate its users and held a couple of contests to get compelling stories from its students. This document is a worksheet for those at Poynter who were tasked to pick the best stories. [The stars note candidates that I thought were solid entries.]

“You May Need to Rethink Your Whole Organization”

I wrote an article the American Society of News Editors [ASNE] in October 1996 about how organizations need to rethink their structures and workflows when the introduce new technologies, such as pagination. Here’s my lead:

Pagination is an “old” technology. More importantly, pagination will not help a newspaper in the “new media” landscape of today. What’s really important are the opportunities of a publication database system. We can develop all the online, fax, and other new media products in the world, but unless we are lucky enough to be hiring dozens of new employees over the next ten years, we need to figure out better ways of using our existing resources of staff and equipment.

The article was based on a speech I gave at a Seybold Conference earlier in 1996.

Central Newspapers and Technology

This is a memo sent by Louis [Chip] Weil, the President and CEO of Central Newspapers [CNI] to newspaper analysts at Capital Guardian, a mutual fund. The memo was a copy of a presentation I did about the technology at CNI. As Director of Information Technology at Phoenix Newspaper, part of CNI, I outlined the various initiatives to harness technology in various departments.