Such thinking was crystallized early in the year at the meeting of the American Newspaper LayOut Managers Association held in March in San Antonio, Texas.

"The two great myths of pagination are that you're going to reduce FTE's (employees) and you're going to reduce time' in production said Nina Brooks, advertising services manager for the San Antonio Express-News... 'It doesn't reduce anything -- it shifts them..." (Editor and Publisher, March 22, 1997 page 18.)

The industry adopted QuarkXPress as its "pagination standard." And now the results are in. Using a single-user desktop publishing package with a closed file format that defies database structure, doesn't really pay off. Operators may like it and it may be easier to find employees who are already trained in it, but it really doesn't allow pagination to have an ROI.

But not everyone adopted QuarkXPress. And many who did, "hit the wall" with Quark pagination and were sufficiently dissatisfied to make a change. Not everyone in the industry was willing to put "popularity" before profits. The result is that there is a growing number of publishers who know that the common "wisdom," about pagination not saving money, doesn't have to be true. They know that pagination done with a propper database foundation does indeed allow newspapers to save real money.

That is the primary reason Digital Technology had a record year in 1997, enjoying 182% growth over 1996 along with continued profitability. The fact that DT pagination systems actually save our customers significant money is the primary reason they chose us instead of the "popular industry standard."

Digital Technology believes that "electronic paste-up," as offered by QuarkXPress really doesn't save publishers money. But "computer-assisted pagination," made possible by a powerful, fully integrated database architecture, does. The experiences of many, many publishers has now borne this out.

That is the real wisdom of 1997.