Introduction
We didn't set out to build ZENPRESS. In fact, we really wanted to buy a solution that would help us do online editorial production. Unfortunately, back in 1997, we couldn't find one that was available for purchase and would meet all our needs.
Here's how it all started...
For many years, Denise Amrich and I managed the editorial process for a series of newsletters (also called "journals") published by The Cobb Group division of Ziff-Davis. We weren’t employed by Ziff, but managed the process on an outsource basis. These newsletters included Workspace for Lotus Notes, The Insider for Lotus cc:Mail, The Notes Report, and (in a completely separate vein) a CD-ROM publication done in association with IBM/Lotus called The Notes Enthusiast.
The folks at The Cobb Group had a very specific formula for how they produced their publications. Each journal (that is, each title) had a defined number of pages per issue. The ones that we did were either 16 or 20 pages long. They had a series of articles (usually three to five articles), plus a variety of small tips stuck in to fill in space in the publication. They were printed in two colors (black and a signature color of some form). Workspace was green. The Insider for Lotus cc:Mail was orange, and The Notes Report was a sort of maroon color. Each publication had a Table of Contents listing articles and the pages they appeared on. By the time we moved to The Notes Report (which was our last publication for Cobb), each item in the Table of Contents had a small one-or-two sentence description of what the article was to be about.
Most Cobb publications (those done by the internal Cobb editors) didn’t have bylines on the articles, but because we used outside authors extensively, we bylined each of our articles with the individual author’s name. Each article listed both who the author was and included a short author bio at the end of the article. Each publication also had a masthead with various credits, editorial titles, and copyright information.
These were real-live paper, printed publications. These were printed in 8 1/2 x 11 format on 11x17 paper, saddle-stitched, and mailed. As has now become part of the ZATZ corporate legend, the Ziff-Davis management at some point realized that the Cobb Group was not quite as profitable as they would have liked. Our belief is that publishers of journals that needed to have subscription prices of $50 to $100 a year found it impossible to compete with content that’s available for free on the Web. Eventually, the Louisville main office of The Cobb Group was disbanded. Hundreds of people were laid off. A very small portion of those people moved to Rochester. We no longer had our journal-editing gig.
What Denise and I did for The Cobb Group was produce the content. I wrote some articles. I determined, generally, the vision and focus of the publication. Denise managed the authors, getting the content in from the authors -- kicking them, cajoling them, bribing them, teasing them -- until they got something turned in.
And then we’d start the edit process. Here’s how that worked:
- She did one rewrite or format run on it.
- We would send Microsoft Word files off to the Cobb Group.
- They would then do their edits and send the edited journal back to me.
- I would review their edits, send it back to them along with a page plan which would determine which articles went on which page so that the page layout person (who laid the stuff out in PageMaker) could place the articles.
- They would then do what they called a “PageMaker”, which was the page layout version of the nearly finished journal, and then send that back to me.
- I would do a quick review to make sure they hadn't radically changed anything and then send it back to Cobb.
- Only when this entire process was completed would the finished journal go to press. Cobb handled all the press work (films, scheduling, printing, shipping, mailing, and so on).
That was how it worked for about 4 1/2 years. Working with Cobb contributed a considerable amount of our company’s overall income. When the Cobb Group folded, it became necessary for us to reevaluate our strategy.
It was clear that we wanted to continue to produce journals – it was something we were good at, liked reasonably well, and made money at (overall, a good combination of factors). At that time (which was 1997), we had really two choices: we could do a print journal (and, in doing so, clone the Cobb format almost down to the font) or we could do a Web-based journal since by that time, the Internet was showing considerable promise. Alternatively, we could do a hybrid, a variation of both.
It turns out that print journals are very expensive to produce. You've got to typeset them, generate film, print thousands of copies, and then you've got to ship them – there are many physical, real-world production issues that go into producing a traditional, printed publication. With Cobb’s demise, we were clearly losing our existing income stream; we really didn't have the budget to do that.
Our first thoughts about a Web-based publication
So we opted, with some trepidation, to do a Web-only publication. At first blush, the idea didn’t seem too outrageous. After all, HTML (the language that Web pages are made of) was relatively straightforward. The state of Web sites hadn't advanced to the level they are today. In theory, all we had was a bunch of articles. We'd put them into something like Word or FrontPage or any of the HTML production tools that existed at that time. We’d type them up, and BOOM, we'd have a journal online.
Then we started thinking about what an online journal really should be and the job, it became apparent, was going to be much larger than we had first thought.
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