New York: a peek at publishers 

By Chris Gulker

On the way back from the DRUPA conference, I stopped for a couple days in New York. 

                                      While there, I dropped in on publishers: 3 different businesses at the New
                                      York Times Company, The Daily News and two Web publishing companies,
                                      New York Web and Busy Box Productions. 

                                      The NYT Co. is trying to leverage its core product in new media. The Times'
                                      fax edition offers an 8-page edited brief of the paper, which is also available as
                                      an Acrobat file from the Times' fax Web site. 

                                      The Times is also drawing on its core competence: Times Custom Publishing
                                      authors magazines for other enterprises, and may soon author new media as
                                      well. 

                                      Both enterprises are examples of what I feel publishers will be doing to
                                      succeed in the future. Publishers will have to find new ways to add value to
                                      their products and new ways to market them. 

                                      In Tribeca, I visited Todd Carter and David Moscovic, two new media
                                      publishers working in a loft above Broadway which is home to the New York
Web. 

Todd is one of the driving forces behind Busy Box Productions which is busily turning code and content into a new look and
feel for the WWW. Busy Box's home page, which runs on a pair of Mac 6100s has lots of innovative features, including
animation and a background which changes with every access, among other things. 

New York Web has brought up 1-800-FLOWERS, a site that allows secure online ordering of flowers and gifts nationwide.
The Web system integrates seemlessly with 1-800-FLOWERS nationwide fulfillment system. The system is new and
unpublicized, but is already doing a couple thousand hits a day, and about 100 orders have been processed. 

                                                     New York Web is also home to Feed, a new 'zine that has
                                                     great promise. New York Web has lots of other features,
                                                     and seems to be growing in leaps and bounds. The scene in
                                                     the loft is that of a modern day atelier, or a Paris studio in
                                                     the 30s, with lots of creative people busily crafting the
                                                     future. 

                                                     The people are hunched over Macs or serious-looking
                                                     UNIX computers rather than granite or canvas and they
                                                     clutch keyboards instead of hammers and chisels or
                                                     paintbrushes. Art and craft are clearly being practiced here.