This approach applies to advertising as well. The relationships advertising departments have with local print advertisers can be effectively expanded to include Web advertising. DTI’s Web Publishing System enables both the editorial and advertising sides of printed publications to use the Internet as a tightly integrated extension of their publishing operations. This is much more cost effective than running separate operations, and it capitalizes on a newspaper’s core strengths.

DTI realizes effective newspaper Internet Web sites must serve a unique role beyond just publishing the news and ads. They must become portals for the communities they serve, to information that won’t go into the newspaper. These sites should serve as an entry point into many other community and national information sources. But it is the fresh news and latest ads that give a newspaper the power to keep readers coming back daily and makes their sites the portals the public chooses to come to. DTI’s system supports the dynamic publishing of news and ads into Web sites that are broad-based portals of information and links.

Contrary to DTI’s approach, many publishers have chosen to operate Web publishing systems separate from their print publishing operations. The result has been big operating losses and low synergy between their print and Web publishing and ad selling. The Web people have had access to the newspaper’s content, but the net effect is more competitive than complimentary. The attempts to build brands and portals, which is important, has been done in a way that capitalizes on the printed newspaper’s cash rather than its talent. The potential to make the newspaper stronger through coordinated print and electronic distribution to an expanded audience for both gets neglected with this approach.

A major reason separate systems were created by publishers may have been the lack of any technology that could bring print and Web publishing together into one system.

DTI has now addressed that issue. It provides one system that can publish to both fully paginated print pages and completely dynamic Web pages. And it has laid the foundation for further convergence extending to publishing to radio, television and other digital information distribution channels.