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In the beginning, PressLink was an in-house system to distribute text and graphics among Knight-Ridder Inc. newspapers.
Then it became an independent on-line news and graphics service selling to all comers.
Now PressLink regards itself as an "electronic marketplace" where newspapers and other information consumers go not just to buy--but to sell as well.
At this week's Nexpo conference in Las Vegas, PressLink will be giving the first hints of yet another direction--this time into a still somewhat undefined environment in which information providers and consumers do not have to abandon their primary task just to make transactions.
"Our goal is to make it really an on-line service, a marketplace for mapping content," new PressLink president Richard Cates said in an interview.
"IPs [information providers] will put their information instantly on line, making it available for sale in the commercial marketplace. Information consumers can navigate in a straight-forward fashion, conduct the transaction. completely on line...a digital on-line fulfillment," he said.
It will be a "normal" way to work. Cates says, as opposed to the interruptions even digitally transmitted data now require.
"What people are forced to do is break from their normal duties, move over to another system to do something else, [rather than] what they normally do, which is to edit, or process photos or assemble film clips," Cates said.
"The current generation of systems don't provide that," he added.
INTEGRATED TOOLS
What PressLink is working toward, Cates says, is a set of tools that would make the on-line delivery system appear to be...