Unified Data: An Important Consideration for Successful Newspaper Production

People who produce and publish newspapers often ask, “Why should I buy your system?”

A newspaper’s most valuable assets are information, and the ability of writers, editors and advertisers to tailor that information to suit the needs of its readers. Newspapers devote significant resources in providing for the presentation and delivery of that information. But often these resources are used in ways that are too expensive, or more importantly, in ways that inhibit a newspaper’s ability to provide the information services that are at the core of the newspaper business model.

This is what the phrase “Unify Your Data” is all about. Newspapers have always used production systems that have taken this valuable information and locked it into a format that is designed for essentially one purpose: to put news on paper. This is not the same thing as discussing whether a production system is open or proprietary. It is a matter of determining whether a newspaper’s information is unified, or single sourced for singular usage.

Why is it so important for a newspaper to unify their data? What does it mean to unify your data? Why is having unified data so important for newspapers? How does a newspaper go about the process of getting unified data? When a newspaper uses a production system based on the unified data model, there are productivity and creativity gains today and incremental revenue opportunities for tomorrow.

What does the phrase “Unify Your Data” really mean?

The first step in getting a newspaper’s information into a unified form is to get the data together. Perhaps the most significant inhibitor to effective information management at newspapers is that newspapers generally do not have a production system, they have a different production system for every different type of data!

Newspapers can overcome this obstacle by getting the data in a database -a central location, managed centrally, copied for fault tolerance and duplicated for redundancy. This is the first step in getting a newspaper’s information into a unified form.

To protect the value of the data, it must be unified in an open-standards database. The current standard for open-standards in database technology is SQL.

SQL databases are designed to handle many types of data in multi-user environments like the collaborative writing and editing environment at newspapers. Digital Technology has chosen SQL-Server from Sybase, Inc. to develop its database-centered newspaper production systems.

Why is it important to “Unify Your Data” today?

Database-centered systems are more flexible than the file-passing systems made popular by desktop publishing technology, and more open than proprietary editing, classified and production systems still in use at most daily newspapers. This database-centered system from Digital Technology consists of software that runs on popular desktop hardware and is designed to allow newspapers to unify their data.

One of the most important virtues of having a system that unifies the data in an SQL database is that the data becomes independent from the program that created it. This means that information presented as a display ad or news page layout is not locked into that format when the data is stored in the database.

The data is able to take on the form requested by the client computers networked to the database computer. The same data in the database can also be converted to spoken text by a computerized voice synthesizer and read over the phone as a part of a news service for the visually impaired. Data for story layouts for the newspaper can be reformatted for fax on demand, home computer, interactive cable television, and other delivery channels or for access in an on-line service such as Prodigy, America Online, CompuServe and others.

The key to presenting data in all these different formats is to unify the data in a database that allows the information to exist independently from the presentation of the data. Information in the database is presented in different “views” depending on the needs of the person who needs the data from the database.

How does a newspaper go about the process of getting unified data?

Cost savings and increased capabilities today as well as incremental revenue opportunities in the future are only possible with a system that can unify the data. Newspapers that agree with the unified data approach need to start the process of unifying their data.

Digital Technology International has developed a newspaper production system that follows the unified data model. When a newspaper is able to move their data into an open-standards database, they will realize significant enhancements to their system productivity today as well as organize their information into a unified format that will help delivery, presentation and competitive strategies in the future.