Reducing IT costs with Open Source

Let's get right down to the meat of the issue shall we? No sense in flowering up the subject with pretty words, after all, I'm a newspaper network engineer, not a reporter or editor.

The costs of IT are going to have to come down in the coming years for newspapers. It's that simple. The days of the feast are over, and we have to get leaner to do our jobs.

Yep, that means you won't be getting your new editorial workflow that costs a quarter of a million dollars this year. And you probably won't be getting the 16 core server either. Nor all the software upgrades you'd like.

Oh how will we ever survive?

The answer is simple, creativity and open source.

We have begun deploying a Drupal based editorial workflow solution to our newspaper group. Not only does it do a pretty solid job of an eds for pressitorial workflow, it has some pretty cool advantages. Like what you ask?

The first clear advantage is that it acts as a central repository of information for all of our papers, and the stories and be sorted and filtered in a multitude of ways. This means we can begin reducing the cost of the Associated Press by providing our own regional coverage.

Second, it outputs a series of feeds which populate our website for us. Stories go through the editorial process on the back end, and when they are in their final state, they feed into our website like magic, ready to be published to the web.

Third, we have created a series of XML export files which get used for pagination. An editor/paginator can download their export file from the workflow, and import it into InDesign. From there they can drag and drop stories on to the page, pre-styled and ready to go. It cuts down on man hours used producing pages for press that could be better used generating content.

Lastly, it is free. It was built on 100% open source software, so it won't cost us five employees to roll out. It's web based, so operating system changes and browser upgrades have minimal to no effect. And one of our reporters is now filing stories from the field on a $250 Chromebook, and it works perfectly. Talk about reducing costs, improving efficiency, and getting more mobile right?

We are also beginning to work towards centralized PDF generation using Linux and the ps2pdf command line functionality. Why you ask? Because with Adobe moving to Creative Cloud, the price tag for Acrobat Pro / Distiller may skyrocket to an annual fee that can be easily reduced with an open source alternative.

For a group of more than 20 newspapers, that $800 a year savings can add up to a part time employee.

I can't recommend more robust publishing software to be replaced by open source just yet. Scribus is just not a viable alternative to InDesign for print heavy newspapers, especially dailies, but it's come a long way in the last three years, and it's another open source alternative worth keeping your eyes on in the next three years.

OpenOffice, for most operations, can be just as effective as a more costly Microsoft Office solution, and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It's helpful to tweak your settings so that files save as Office native formats rather than the default ODF format, but that's an easy fix to apply to save $360 a year on Office 365.

GIMP is not ready to replace Photoshop on the mainstream, but if you give your photographers a chance to get used to it by playing a little bit, you'll find they crop functions, sharp unmask, and most of their basic photo editing functions are very familiar to them. No, I wouldn't design ads in GIMP, but I wouldn't recommend designing them in Photoshop either.

If you are a newspaper IT professional, and you want to see your job last a good long time, then begin looking at ways to reduce IT spending and save your company the money. The days of the big servers and expensive software are over, and now we have to learn to live on tighter budgets, just like every other department in our business.

The Role of IT in Newspapers

It's no secret by now that print publications are struggling. We've seen many metro newspapers close down or reduce to three day a week printing, and community newspapers are downsizing en masse.

It's the world we live in. People want their news immediately, not 16 hours later when the presses wind down and the newspaper has been placed on their doorstep.  It's the instant gratification mixed with a sense that we can learn all we need to know about the important things in our lives in 140 characters or less.

More and more people report they are turning to Facebook and Twitter as their main source of information. That, my friends is a very dangerous thing. In 2011 when the Moment Fire gripped Southeast Arizona and evacuated homes, a Facebook page was launched almost immediately to inform those effected of the dangers. The problem is, the news was mostly unreliable. People evacuated homes and sought refuge in areas that weren't in any threat zone, because people reported rumor and myth online.

Yes, it was a source of "news", but it wasn't trusted news. The newspaper I work for was openly lambasted by local readers for not posting evacuation notices fast enough. Again, the problem wasn't the speed of the information, it was the reliability. They were upset we didn't post evacuations in places that weren't being evacuated, but they had heard on Facebook their house was about to burn down.

It all culminated when a local competing on-line only news source reported one of the largest gas stations in town had exploded in the fire. This gas station sits just down the road, hundreds of feet, from one of our largest elementary schools. Parents flocked to the school fearing for their children's safety creating a large traffic jam that even emergency vehicles couldn't clear quickly.

This traffic jam was along the main route that firefighters were using to put out the real flames, which were in an empty field on Fort Huachuca, and the gas station was in no danger at all, a large four line bypass separate the two. It would have taken 60 foot flames to jump that road, a road that was now packed with terrified parents, hundreds of cars, and stood in the way of emergency workers who needed to make sure the flames didn't become dangerous to an entire military base.

The misreporting of news online has become a dangerous problem to society, and it is still the job of the traditional newspaper to get the story right, not spread fear and chaos, and report responsibly. But it's also our job to report as quickly as possible, to inform, and to quiet the fears being spread by the uninformed.

The role of IT in newspapers today has changed quite a bit. We are no longer just here to fix your printer, or calibrate your monitor. We have become a source of the information flow. It is our job to drive new technology that can provide a community with quality information quickly and easily.

My newspaper won a national newspaper website award for the work we did during the Monument Fire because of our use of email alerts, SMS messaging, and social media to help inform the community. We used digital maps of evacuation zones, and hosted live chats with our reporting staff to give people the most up to date and sourced news that we could. And a lot of that fell directly in the lap of IT... me.

When Gabrielle Giffords was shot, I was called into the office early on a Saturday morning to help direct the flow of information. Our reporters and editors were busy trying to gather the news and verify it through multiple sources, and it became my job to get it online, to send out SMS alerts to the community, and to keep web servers that were under an amazing amount of stress up and running.

We live in Gabrielle Giffords district. This was our Congresswoman. And it was a mad house. Newspaper websites in larger cities like Tucson and Phoenix crashed under the weight of the page requests flooding in, and we became the place people could get news from. We did nearly 200,000 page views that day, when we normally do about 500,000 per month. It was a huge task to keep the information flowing, but we did it. And I think we did a damned fine job.

IT people in newspapers are no longer just the nerd sitting in a cold server room watching bits of data move from disk to disk. We are no longer just writing snippets of code to produce a better PDF. We have become the forefront of major breaking news. We are now part of the communication process, and our communities rely upon us to provide the best ad fastest news to them, from the hands of the editor, to the eyes of the reader.

In the coming years, that will become even more true. As newspapers cut back costs, we will be called upon to replace expensive legacy systems with open source alternatives that do a better job. We will be asked to integrate systems that exist independently and were never meant to work together. We will be asked to be the bandaid for the monetary bleeding, and reduce costs of hardware and software, rather than people and jobs.

We will be called upon to be MacGyver, building elegant workflows out of antiquated parts, a little duct tape, some chewing gum, and a paper clip, and to make it work better than the million dollar solutions smaller newspapers can no longer afford. There will be crappy photos taken on smartphones from reporters trying to get the story, and we will be asked to make them look good in print, converted to CMYK, and blown up to a front page story.

This is our task, and it's an important one, because the newspaper must survive in order for a community to be informed. There must still be a place of trusted information, both online and in print, for the future of intelligent and informed people all over our country.

We will work with our sales departments, our editorial departments, our circulation departments, and our production departments to improve the quality of our paper, but we will also be the front lines of major breaking stories, quarterbacking the plays and making sure we not only get it right, but we get it quickly.

If the Monument Fire taught me anything, it was that I am not just a code monkey and server mechanic any more. I am a webmaster, a photographer, a communications specialist, and often, the first point of contact for a very scared group of people who need a voice of reason.

And it feels pretty good to be able to be that person for my community.