You can check out
our new venture at www.publishingsystems.com.
The classified ads that appear in each issue of Willamette
Week provide important services for our readers. They
offer houses for sale and for rent, jobs to fill, cars to
buy, places to stay, services to use and people to meet.
Not surprisingly, the process of sorting these ads for
publication and billing is labor-intensive. So it was a
major catastrophe when WW's computer system for its
classifieds went down for two weeks last November. The crash
repeated itself a month or so later.
Although we were able to repair the system, we became more
aware of its inadequacies. The software we use is cumbersome.
We cannot be assured it is Y2K-compliant. Nor is it easy
to service or Internet-enabled.
This last point is particularly important. Because they
are sorted into so many categories and are so specific--and
thus would benefit from the sort of searching that the Web
allows--the classifieds are the section of any newspaper
most vulnerable to competition from the Internet. Also,
because a true Internet-enabled system would allow people
to place ads directly online, the convenience of such a
software program would be a vast improvement.
When we began to look for replacement software, we were
unprepared for what we found: Despite the existence of thousands
of weekly newspapers in this country--most of which rely
heavily on classified advertising--there appears to be no
commercially available classified software that meets all
our needs and is reasonably priced.
Necessity may have been the mother of our invention, but
technology proved to be its midwife. Jim Abeles, then WW's
classifieds manager, and Matt Navarre, a local software
developer who for years has given us valuable guidance on
computer-technology matters, felt they could develop software
that would meet our criteria. Given that we also needed
new classified software for our paper in New Mexico, we
accepted their proposal.
It also seemed wise to figure out a way to defray some
of the costs of the new system. In early April, inspired
by Customers.com, a wonderful book by Patricia Seybold
about how the Internet will affect the current business
environment, we decided to offer our product to other weekly
papers.
Here's where the Internet and the better-faster-cheaper
mantra of the Information Age comes in. Typically, once
a business develops a new product, it then has to create
a huge infrastructure to market and sell it. In our case,
however, within days of giving our new venture a name, we
had information about it up on the Web. Almost immediately,
e-mail inquiries started coming in from papers in Africa,
Asia and Europe, as well as from the United States. At the
end of May, we showcased our software at the annual alternative-newsweekly
convention in Memphis and were pleased with the level of
interest.
Last Friday, we e-mailed a demonstration version of PublishingSystems.com's
Core Sales Module, along with a digital version of the software's
60-page user manual, to more than a dozen papers that were
seriously interested in having it installed. This week,
we're demonstrating the system to a nine-paper newspaper
group on the East Coast.
We hope to have the software up and running at Willamette
Week by the end of July and installed at the Santa
Fe Reporter in August. Soon after that, it will be available
commercially. Such a short development cycle would have
been impossible just a few years ago.
What's the meaning of all of this? Mostly that the world
of the Internet is fraught with risk, but also with opportunity.
In the case of WW's classifieds, our risk is that
we lose readers and revenue to the Web. Our opportunity
is that, for a reasonable cost, we can try to control our
own destiny. The financial stability this should provide
will help us continue to provide journalism that makes a
difference.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published June 30, 1999 |
