I spoke at NAA NEXPO this year. The Newspaper Association of America’s annual technology conference brings together people from newspapers across the country to talk about what is working, what is not, and what comes next for digital publishing.

My session covered web publishing technology and the open-source approach we have taken with Cofax at Knight Ridder. The audience was a mix of technology directors, web producers, and a few editors who wanted to understand what the technology people are doing. That mix makes for an interesting room. The technologists want architecture details. The editors want to know if it will break on deadline night. The producers want to know how it changes their daily work.

I learned something about presenting to newspaper people. They are skeptical in a specific way. A room full of software engineers will argue about technical tradeoffs. A room full of newspaper people will ask you whether it actually works. They have seen vendors promise things that never materialized. They have lived through failed system migrations. When you tell them that Cofax reduced publishing time from eight hours to 45 minutes, they want to know which newspaper, which month, and who they can call to verify it. I respect that. It is the same instinct that makes good reporters.

The questions after the talk were better than the talk itself. Someone from a mid-sized paper asked how a small IT team could support an open-source system without a vendor holding their hand. That is a real concern, and I gave an honest answer: it requires people who are willing to learn the system, and it helps to have a community of other newspapers running the same software. Another person asked about integration with legacy editorial systems. That conversation alone lasted ten minutes and covered problems I had not considered.

Presenting at an industry conference is different from presenting to your own company. Inside Knight Ridder, people know the context. They know what Cofax is, why we built it, what problems it solves. At NEXPO, you start from the beginning. You explain the problem before you explain the solution. That discipline of starting with the problem, not the product, is something I want to carry into every presentation I give.

I came away from NEXPO with a list of things to think about and a few contacts worth following up with. The newspaper industry is full of smart people solving hard problems with limited resources. Conferences like this are where those people find each other.