The NewsMaker Story


NewsMaker Technologies was founded by Dean Kolkey and Tony Chick.  Dean and Tony were true pioneers in newsroom production technology, initially for Newspapers and later for Television and Radio news.

Dean started his professional career in 1974 with Autologic, Inc. a leading manufacturer of computerized typesetting equipment used from high volume operations including newspaper production..  His initial assignment was to spearhead Autologic's contributions to the Newspaper Systems Development Group (NSDG) project. NSDG was a joint project between IBM and several major newspaper chains including Knight-Ridder and Scripts-Howard. The goal of the project was to develop a comprehensive newspaper production system capable of processing all elements of a newspaper and outputting them from the typesetter as a full page, with all graphics in place. Dean was responsible for interfacing the APS-4 phototypesetter to the IBM 370 mainframe and for the introduction of half tone and line art graphs to the typesetter control program.

Meanwhile Tony was working as system administrator for a newly installed newspaper production system at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. The system was called Text-II system and it was from System Development Corporation (SDC) of Santa Monica. SDC was an offshoot of Rand Corporation and was their attempt to move from government work into commercial products.

Dean and Tony both joined SDC in the summer of 1976 and anchored the Text-II customer support department.  Later they would become project Managers with Tony responsible for the installations at The Lakeland Ledger, Gainesville Sun and Des Moines Register & Tribune and Dean was responsible for installations at The Philadelphia Enquirer and Pasadena Star-News.

SDC over committed new features and under delivered so by 1979 they were exiting the Newspaper Newsroom Systems business. Dean and Tony left SDC and founded ADComp Systems.  Adcomp initially developed add on product developments for the SDC Text-II system, doing projects for many of the SDC installations.
One project was the development of a composition subsystem that supported the Information International, Inc. (III) full-page layout system at the Pasadena Star-News. Implementation required interfacing to the III PDP-15 an 18-bit machine. Tony was challenged by the variable translation for the 16 to 18 translations but the project was delivered on -time.  The combined system was used on January 1, 1992 to produce the world’s first fully composed newspaper page, typeset with all elements, including graphics, in place.  What was envisioned in 1974 by NSDG became history in 1982.

In 1984 as this work began to fade away, Dean took a job back with Autologic as Director of software development where he was responsible for the Americanization and importation of the German Alfa Systems Partner newspaper systems and a year later, as Vice-President of Software, he founded the American operation of the Australian Cybergraphics Systems Newspaper system.

Dean rejoined Tony in 1986 and began development of a PC based, newspaper production system.  Early versions of the QMgr product were marketed by III and installations were completed at Sear Roebuck for production of their catalog and at Josten's Printing and Published where it was used to produce school yearbooks.

Development of the QMgr product continued and the company was renamed NewsMaker Systems. Marketing attempts within the newspaper industry were attempted with minimal success.  At that time the Apple Mac was becoming the industry standard for newspaper production and the Windows based QMgr  wasn't a good market fit. So in 1989, at the suggestion of friends, Dean and Tony were invited to show their product, now named The NewsMaker Electronic Newsroom, within their friend’s booth at the NAB show.

Two sales were made after that show. The first was KESQ-TV Palm Springs, CA and the second was CBS Sports, New York, NY. CBS installed the system in their studio at the New York Broadcast Center to produce in studio shows including The NFL Today. CBS Sports used NEN as their primary production system NEN also became the backbone for all CBS Winter Olympics broadcasts, including the Albertville, France; Lillehammer, Norway; and Nagano, Japan games.

The company grew Tony became the foundation of the development department as Chief Technical Officer while Dean made use of his Business Finance education as company President.

Sales continued to be strong and the company continued to grow.  Additional capabilities were added and NewsMaker developed a reputation for device control. They pioneered the fully automated 24 hour news channel production model first installed at the Time Warner Cable news channel New York 1 News and later adopted by many other stations including Channel One (London), RNews (Rochester, NY) BayNews 9 (Tampa, FL), OCN (Orange County, CA).

This strength at device control led to the development of the  StarDrive Automation Subsystem. StarDrive included linked the NEN NCS to production devies including, Video Routers, Video Switchers, Master Control Switchers, Video Tape Machines, Video Cart Machines, Video Servers, Character Generators, Stills Stores and Robotic Camera Systems.  Where others had difficulty in developing device interface, for NewsMaker it was their strength.

In 1999 Dean and Tony sold NewsMaker to the Norwegian company Nexus ASA. Nexus ASA was the parent company of their German competitor Nexus-Infomatics. By this time the NEN systems was installed at over 120 stations worldwide and was being used to produce thousands of shows per day.

Dean and Tony were two of only six recipients of the Pioneer in Industry Award given by NewsWorld at NAB 2000. This honor recognized the individuals that created the earliest Newsroom Computer Systems and the other recipients were the creators of the Basys, NewsStar and Nexus-Informatics Newsroom Computer Systems.

Dean and Tony left NewsMaker in 2001 and founded Relativity System.  Relativity was responsible for the development of several products that were marketed by other companies.  These included a Cuts-Only proxy browse editor for Leitch (now Harris) and a low-resolution browser for Panasonic.  Both of these products were ActiveX plugins targeted for MOS compliant NRCS.

NewsMaker Systems was renamed ANN Automation and then StarDrive Solutions before finally folding in 2005. Dean and Tony were long gone by then and the company that folded bore little resemblance to what Dean and Tony had built.

With the departure of NewsMaker Systems, Dean and Tony renamed Relativity Systems to NewsMaker Technologies to reflect their roots.  In 2007 the NewsMaker NewsGateway was first exhibited at NAB and product development has continued since then.