The Digital Edition Dirigibles
At the highest inhabitable level of the Empire State Building in New York City is something redolent of the University of Missouri's new EmPRINT digital edition project.
When the Empire State Building was designed in the late 1920s, architects gave its top floor a function that nowadays makes sense only in retrospect of their knowledge of what was then the highest technology in transportation media. The architects gave it a dirigible docking port.
Read the history of aviation until 1930 and you might understand why the architects' belived that lighter-than-air crafts were the transportation medium of the future. For nearly one and a half centuries — ever since 1783 when two Frenchmen became the first world's aviators, using a linen balloon to ascend into the skies over Paris — balloon-format aircraft had been the top technology for air transportation. Though the Wright Brothers invented heavier-than-air aircraft only 27 years before the foundation of the Empire State Building was laid, that was only as long ago as 1988 is now. When Charles Lindbergh flew his tiny heavier-than-air craft solo across the Atlantic 42 months before the Building was completed, dirigibles had already been ferrying hundreds of paying passengers in comfort across the world's oceans for nearly a decade.
During 1929 alone, the Graf Zeppelin logged more than a million miles and hundreds of transoceanic and transcontinental flights. At 776-feet long, it was the size of an ocean liner (the steamship Titanic was only 106 feet longer but 18 feet less taller) and had many of the creature comforts of a steamship. Passengers aboard it and sister ships such as the Hindenburg traveled in ornate individual cabins with shower baths and clubrooms featuring grand pianos, with meals cooked aboard by expert chefs. No wonder that the architects of the Empire State Building thought dirigibles would be the transportation medium of the future and built a docking port, aerial gangway, and customs shed atop their iconic skyscraper.
No wonder too that the architects of the University of Missouri's EmPRINT digital edition may think that Adobe Acrobat editions will be the future of news communications media. Indeed, the newspaper design has been the primarily format for news vehicles during the past half millennium. During that time, there's been no better vehicle for conveying news than ink on dried sheets of cellulose pulp.
It can’t travel fast, but the newspaper format has more room in it than any other news vehicle. It's not as fast or timely as a broadcast, but it convey news and opinion in a statelier fashion. If you’re above a certain age (test: were you alive when Nixon was President?), then you probably feel that newspapers are the most comfortable of all vehicles conveying news.
Yet, how does someone propel an old format in a new century? A decade before the first girders of Empire State Building were delivered, balloonists attempted to answer that question by attaching the newfangled diesel or gasoline engines to their lighter-than-air crafts. The era of ponderous dirigible was born. Ten years ago, some veteran newspaper executives tried to answer their equivalent question by attaching the newfangled Adobe Acrobat graphical rendering software engine to printed newspapers. The era of ponderous digital editions was born.
The Count Zeppelin of these newspaper experiments is Roger Fidler, formerly the first corporate Director of New Media for Knight Ridder newspapers, now professor at Kent State University's School of Journalism and Mass Communication and director of its Institute for CyberInformation, and nowadays the inaugural Visiting Fellow of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. EmPRINT is his Fellowship project.
Like Count Zeppelin in transportation media, Fidler is a true pioneer in news meda. In 1979, he joined Knight Ridder's videotex development team and served as the first Director of Design for that company's pioneering consumer online service, Viewtron, and as Knight Ridder's first corporate Director of Design and Newsroom Technology. Four years later, he founded the first computer news graphics service (now Knight Ridder/Tribune Graphics). Then in 1985, he founded the first global online service for the newspaper industry, PressLink. He established Knight Ridder's Information Design Laborator in 1992. As Fidler's bio at the University of Missouri states, "I have pursued the development of digital alternatives to traditional ink-on-paper newspapers."
What he launched earlier this week in Missouri is a digital doppelganger to traditional ink-on-paper newspapers — specifically a weekly Adobe Acrobat version of the University’s Missourian daily newspaper. If you like to see soaring examples of huge digital editions, then this 126-page, 12.7-megabyte virtual dirigible is for you. Even the language of its associated website FAQ is soaring: " The Missourian was one of the first newspapers in the world to launch a news Web site. Now the Missourian is the world’s first newspaper to launch an EmPRINT edition."
That's a big shadow to cast. EmPRINT is an operable, but huge, slow, and ponderous high-tech vehicle for conveying newspaper news. EmPRINT stands for 'Electronic Media Print'. It's emphasis truly is on older vehicles in its medium. Just as the users of dirigibles enjoyed many of the comforts of steamships, users of this EmPRINT edition enjoy many of the comforts generally enjoyed when reading dried sheets of cellulose pulp. Fidler calls it "an innovative, new digital publishing standard that brings together the familiar qualities of printed publications — newspapers, magazines, journals, books, etc. — with the interactive, multimedia features of the Web."
The Missourian EmPRINT edition has colorful, portrait-format pages and layouts lifted from newspaper design; it even has newspaper-style display ads. But does it offer any advantages over cellulose pulp editions or newspaper websites?
Except for better graphical resolution, there are none that I can find.
Unlike websites, the EmPRINT edition can be read when offline; but so too can any other digital edition such as the the dozens of newspapers and magazines offered by Newsstand.com. Or the Microsoft Reader editions that used to be published and e-mailed by the Hampshire Chronicle in the UK could also be read offline. Or any newspaper website converted into full MHTML and e-mailed as an attached file can be read offline. Most of those require far smaller files than this inflatible's 12.7 megabytes!
Though it is true that users of broadband can download a 12.7-megabyt file in a minute or less, what about the 55 percent of American Internet users who don't have broadband access at home? (After a Zinio executive once boasted to a publishing conference that one of his company's users downloaded a digital edition via a mobile phone modem while on safari, I was impolite enough to question him publicly about how long that must have taken via a remote African cellular phone connection: one or two days?) Or is EmPRINT designed only for broadband users in homes or offices?
Although the EmPRINT project's website states that EmPRINT offers "...the interactive, multimedia features of the Web," I'm at a loss to find those features in it. The only hyperlinks appear to be those denoting 'next page' or when a story jumps ('continued') from one Acrobat page to another. This EmPRINT edition is basically a flat file, like newsprint. It doesn't really utilize the Web hyperlinking or embedded multimedia features of Adobe Acrobat.
The project's website offers as an advantage that, "There is no page scrolling and no distracting computer or browser clutter." What that really means is the reader loses the navigational controls he used to download the EmPRINT edition and to go elsewhere online once he's reading this edition. That's not an advantage.
Unlike digital editions from Newsstand and Zinio, EmPRINT's format uses far larger text fonts, which does make it easier to read onscreen but also creates the large number of page in this edition. Reading it, you don't have to scroll (you can't), but you will have to click to new pages very often per story.
Why does EmPRINT so electronically replicate the flat newspaper format?
I think the answer is because its the culmination of a many decades quest to do exactly that. It's a project that dates back from when the Web, external hyperlinking, embedded multimedia, true interactivity, individualization ('personalization') of content,
tagged file format ('cascading layout flow'), and RSS didn't exist. If that's the case, then the Missourian EmPRINT project is a conceptual success.
But time and newer online media technologies have flown past it. While there certainly is a future for a portrait-formatted, electronically delivered news vehicle that can read offline, EmPRINT isn't it. EmPRINT instead is a 21st Century electronic replica of a 20th Century communications medium. Like the Graf Zeppelin or Hindenburg, it's a magnificent culmination of an antiquating idea.
The 20th Century ('modern') newspaper format evolved to be used as a fixed format for conveying news via dried sheets of cellulose pulp. Some layout lesson for 21st Century electronic media can be utilized from it, but not as much as some might think. EmPRINT is a magnificent attempt to carry too much of an old idea. Its concept might years ago have seemed practical, but it is no longer.
Soon after the Empire State Building opened, its owners abandoned the idea of using its top story as a dirigible dock (despite concocted publicity photos such as the one shown here). The winds 1,224 feet (373 metres) above the man-made canyons of Manhattan Island made airship docking too difficult for passenger carrying dirigibles to attempt.
Only once, in 1931, did a small, privately-owned dirigible momentarily dock there. It dropped a long rope, which three building crewmen, after a half hour struggle, caught and held onto. The small airship was able to stay moored to the Empire State Building for three minutes.
Even had a passenger carrying dirigible been able to moor to the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building, its very brave passengers would have had to transfer down a narrow, open gangway floating gangway floating in the wind currents a quarter mile in the sky. After squeezing through a tight door, they would have to descend two steep ladders inside the mast before reaching the elevators. "Can you see some of the 75-year-old dowager doing that?" asks Alexander Smirnoff, the current telecommunications director of the building.
The era of dirigible travel ended on May 6, 1937 when the Hindenburg burst aflame 200 feet above its landing site in New Jersey, within sight of the Empire State Building. A few years ago, scientist from NASA confirmed the findings of the 1937 inquest into that crash: Contrary to popular belief, the airship probably caught fire not when a spark from a ground rope ignited its flammable helium core, but when that spark ignited the alumnized varnish covering the dirigible’s skin.
I think the wrong skin will also be the downfall of EmPRINT. Its digital editions aren't likely to burst into flames, but a newspaper format is likely the wrong skin for an electronic news vehicle.