crontab problem with stdout

I am getting screwed up trying to get around the problems with
stdout using cron. What I want to do is periodically fetch
a formatted web page, process that, and send the result
to a file. I use w3m to format the page:

w3m -dump http://somepage

First I tried processing that via a pipe:

w3m -dump http://somepage | process >>final.result

But the stdout for the input to the pipe gets lost.

Then I tried to chain two steps:

w3m -dump http://somepage >tempfile ; process >>final.result

Where now process picks up tempfile and writes to final result.

The chaining of these steps doesn't work.

So I have been trying every way that I can think of to
cause cron to chain the two:

(first ; second)
(first && second)
exec ( first ; second)
exec first && exec second

Nothing gets the second step in the chain to execute.
I get the intermediate tempfile, but I never get
to process that file.

Can you suggest what I am missing.

Thanks.
.