DTI’s new generation WebSpeed Web Publishing architecture is based upon our Liquid Media data flow technology, which means that newspaper groups can begin reaping the benefits of Liquid Media while they are still using their existing print publishing systems and print-oriented data content silos. Editors and ad sales people can keep using their in-place systems, but start having that data liquefied and flowed online wherever it is needed. Liquid media can start to transform how newspapers publish to the Internet and how they profit from it. Web publishing is an area that most newspapers identify as needing urgent improvements, and the process can effectively begin there.

But consider possibilities besides just the Internet. Ad sales reps sell more effectively when they present a great looking ad idea to a client instead of just selling space. So why is it so hard for reps to get the spec ads they need to improve their new sales results and upsell existing clients? What if sales reps could get ads from any other newspaper in their group and use them for spec ads in their area? Liquid ad flow could enable that.

What if national sports results tables, box scores, and league standings could be made up just once and flow to every newspaper in a group, instead of being created separately at each newspaper? What if special sections (for Mother’s Day as one example) could be editorially created just once, but have the ads sold locally in every market? What if food pages or book reviews could be created in one newspaper but used in another newspaper, and have the presentation take on the look and feel of each individual newspaper? What are the possibilities for saving costs in print, if newspapers have a liquid media architecture that allow their content to flow from whereever it is to whereever it is needed and take on the shape it needs when it gets there?

Or consider archives. What if an editor or writer at any newspaper could do a single search and find the information that is stored in any or all of the group's silos anywhere? What if that included photos and multimedia as well as text?

And what if publishers could add considerable value to the information that is stored in their archives? For example, newspapers publish records of births, marriages, and deaths for individuals. But those events are usually stored decades apart in a newspaper’s archives. What if the liquification of data could allow the papers to package a dossier on any individual? And since people move, what if the content anywhere in any of the newspapers could be used to locate this information? In fact what if the information in any newspaper in the world could be searched from a query made at a single newspaper Web site?

This points to another advantage for liquid media. Newspapers not only have a great deal of archived information, this information is considered reliable and from a trusted source. (Google and other aggregators can offer no reassurance whatsoever for the validity of the information their searches turn up.) However, newspapers have not been able to capitalize on the trust of their brands beyond their printed sheets. What if the newspaper industry as a whole could offer their validated news information, available through any newspaper site, that would return trusted results from any other newspaper anywhere? Technically, Liquid Media data flows could accomplish that without any consolidations of systems and without any elaborate agreements beyond those of basic security between different newspapers. If newspapers think that cooperating with Google has value, how much more value would there be in cooperating with each other?

Next: The enabling technology behind the Liquid Media solutions