http://www.yelvington.com/20060912/there_is_no_magic_bullet

“Here’s what we should not do: force newspapers onto a single publishing platform. That would lead to catastrophic failure by killing what little creativity we have.

Change doesn’t come from the center. It works its way in from the edges. That’s why you see companies like Yahoo and Microsoft constantly acquiring startups. Neither has much of a track record of invention. Big established companies suck at creativity. If they didn’t, Vignette would have invented “Web 2.0″ instead of contributing so well to a depressed housing market in the Austin suburbs.”

Standardization and consolidation of systems for both web and print is a general direction many pubs are moving towards. Clustered editorial publishing environments like Gannett is using at Utica, Binghamton and Elmira and the ad clusters used by Journal Register allow economization and improvement of IT support for their systems without building wholly redundant infrastructures at each location. Let the servers and the databases sit at one location and serve multiple regional nodes. This makes even more sense in web publishing, because after all, who really cares where the server lives, be it Boston or Bangalore, so long as it works properly and the cost is right.

Web-based, Service-Oriented Architecture apps go even further. They allow publications like the Wall Street Journal to decrease their IT costs by simplifying client maintenance. Think about it, if a computer breaks down, why not just pull another out of a closet, point it at the ad booking intranet page, and get the user back to work. Systems have come full circle to the old dumb terminal model. The dumb terminal just happens to be using a browser as its interface to the app.

This standardization and centralization makes it easier to keep the systems up to date, makes it easier to enhance them and generally increases the institutional knowledge base associated with them. All of which are good things.

Of course, it can go a little too far…the Tribune has packed its circulation phone room off to the Philippines, while Reuters has sent many of its editorial positions to India. Certainly ambitious cost-cutting endeavors, but it remains to be seen how if these moves impact readership.