Psst. Want to Buy a Printer-Shredder?

By Steven

July 11 -- Reading the newspaper this morning, seeing yet more corporate executives hoisted on their own petards, I started thinking of a project some friends of mine once dreamed up.

A few years back, I was working on an Internet startup carved out of a fairly well-known media company. Although I think newspapers will be around for quite some time, we need to look for better ways of doing business. Hence the new media initiatives at newspapers and TV stations.

We were developing new technologies for publishing, helping set the newspaper standards for NITF, NewsXML and even working on the MPEG specification (for the lay people among us, those are standards for formatting and transmitting text, video and audio so they can be quickly used in different media and displayed on different devices).

We were spending money like madmen and stealing smart people from departments throughout the operation, We also had to have Internet-style salaries and perks to keep our engineers and programmers from walking down the street to AOL, Yahoo and the other guys, as well as have the touchy-feely sessions that are an anathema to traditional newspaper people. To the journalists – some of them lifelong friends – sitting across the street in the highly profitable TV and newspaper newsrooms, we were more than a threat, we were an affront.

Even within our own division, those of us in the technology group stuck out, having been recruited from newspapers and universities across the country, with reputations for being big-time hotshots. We were used to playing in the majors, and expected a certain level of commitment, from ourselves, our staffs and our management.

If my boss, a longtime friend, wanted another $10 million for the content management system we were developing, the money would come out of the budget of one of the other groups within our division. If we wanted a direct feed from the newspaper classified system, or a couple extra servers to handle data from the newspaper front end, it would all be found.

Needless to say, we weren’t exactly popular.

We needed to keep our projects under wraps, protecting them from the carping and turf battles that could arise. At first, we put our own high-speed printer in our set of cubicles, trying to keep misrouted sheets and extra copies from floating around the office.

Hence, the printer-shredder. I don’t remember which member of our crew came up with the idea (it wasn’t me), but the printer-shredder was the perfect solution. Instead of the paper tray for printed pages, this would have a document feeder that mounted to a cross-cut shredder.

Anytime someone tried to print something flagged as confidential (heck, even something that was a bad idea), the system would route it to the printer-shredder. Printed pages would come out of the printer, but instead of dropping into a tray where anyone could peruse them, they would land in a document feeder attached to the shredder. Exceptions would be made for vacation forms and anything related to the budget. Those would go directly to the secretary who signed them all anyway.

The printer-shredder never got built. Somewhere about that time, we discovered that a four-processor Sun server, along with the Oracle database, software and licensing information, had gone missing. By the time we finished inventorying all the equipment and located the misplaced server, there had been yet another shakeup, and the need for a printer-shredder was gone.

It’s a shame, though. I liked the elegance of the design. Even though it wasn’t truly a closed loop – we weren’t making new paper out of the old – I would have liked to see it in action.

And I bet I can look in tomorrow’s paper and see a few executives and politicians who wish they’d had one.