Two weeks ago, I stood in a room in San Jose with my team as Tony Ridder, Knight Ridder’s Chairman and CEO, presented us with the James K. Batten Excellence Award for Technology Innovation. It was the fifteenth annual awards competition, and the Cofax team won it.
Two years ago, I received this same award as an individual. The jury said I had “done more in four years than some do in a lifetime.” I was 24 then. That award meant a lot to me.
This one means more.
My first award was as an individual contributor. This one was with my team as the team leader. If there is a third, I want it to go to someone I have mentored, not to me.
The Team
The award went to the Cofax team, and I want to name every person on it, because they are the reason we won.
Patrick Carter, Senior Director of Technology. Patrick is one of the most experienced technology leaders I have worked with. He brings a steadiness and depth of knowledge that kept the project grounded when the scope and complexity could have overwhelmed us.
Karl Martino, Developer. Karl writes clean, thoughtful code and thinks carefully about architecture before writing a line. He has been one of the strongest developers on the team since the early days at Philly.com.
Don Henry, Senior Producer and Project Leader. Don is the bridge between the development team and the newsroom. He understands both sides, and he keeps us building the right thing. Without Don, Cofax would be a technically solid product that nobody in a newsroom could use.
Hung Dao, Developer. Hung contributes solid development work across multiple components of the system. He is reliable, skilled, and the kind of engineer every team needs.
Charles Harvey, Manager and Leader of Site Operations. Charles makes sure Cofax runs at production scale. Building software is one thing. Running it reliably across 20 newspapers with live deadlines is another. Charles handles that.
Derek Dinh, Developer. Derek handles systems administration and database administration alongside his development work. He is fast, resourceful, and essential to keeping everything running.
Robert Tartamosa, Web Site Usage Analyst. Robert helped us understand how the system was being used and where the bottlenecks were. He has since moved to Comcast, but his contributions to Cofax during the critical growth period were valuable.
These are the people who built Cofax. I led the team, but the work was theirs.
What We Built
The jury’s citation said: “The product they developed has been a tremendous help to all of Knight Ridder’s newspapers. It saves time and money, and will be a revenue stream when sold to other publishing companies. We are impressed with the innovative, entrepreneurial spirit of the team.”
What Cofax does is straightforward to explain: it automates the process of publishing newspaper content to the web. What used to take eight hours of manual work for a single newspaper now takes 45 minutes. Newspaper staff can focus on journalism instead of reformatting stories and uploading files.
By mid-year, 20 Knight Ridder newspapers are running on Cofax. Another 10 are scheduled by year end. We open-sourced it so that newspapers outside Knight Ridder can use it too.
The scale of the deployment is what makes me proud. It is one thing to build a system that works for one newspaper in Philadelphia. It is a different thing to build a system that works for 30 newspapers with different workflows, different technical environments, different newsroom cultures, and different deadlines. Every deployment taught us something. Every newspaper’s quirks made the system better.
Deploying Cofax across that many newspapers took the full team. Sam Cohen handles the integration with editorial systems that makes each deployment work. Toan Dang is one of our strongest engineers on the core platform. Bobby Cherian keeps the operations and IT side running so the rest of us can focus on building.
What This Award Means
When I won the individual award in 1999, I wrote that the work was never just mine and that Fred Mann and my colleagues at Philly.com deserved the credit for creating the environment where I could do the work. That was true then, and it is more true now.
The individual award recognized what I could build with my own hands. This team award recognizes what I could help a group of talented people build together. That is a different skill, and I think it is a more important one.
I have been thinking about a progression. My first award was as an individual contributor. This one was with my team as the team leader. If there is ever a third, I want it to go to someone I have mentored, not to me.
I am not there yet. But that is the direction I want to go.
The Dinner
The awards dinner was on October 22 in San Jose, hosted by Tony Ridder. There were 14 winners across the company, including three teams. The top prize, the John S. Knight Gold Medal, went to Bob McGruder, executive editor of the Detroit Free Press, for his leadership and commitment to diversity in journalism. The other winners represented work in sales, community service, circulation, journalism, and innovation across Knight Ridder’s newspapers.
Being in that room with the other winners reminded me why I like working at this company. Knight Ridder takes the time to find and celebrate people who do good work. Not just the editors and reporters, but the technology teams, the circulation managers, the advertising people, the community volunteers. The awards cover the full range of what makes a newspaper company work.
And for the Cofax team to be recognized alongside those people is something I will not forget.