Events | The Digital Futurist

Saying Goodbye to Great SF Chronicle Photographers

One of my great joys working at the San Francisco Chronicle was the photography department. I was the first real photo editor at the paper and one of my goals was to improve the opportunities for the photographers to contribute to the paper’s journalism. [Before I arrived at the paper, photos were often dropped off at the news desk into a wooden box. I like to joke that I put that box out of a job.]

The photo department did a visual goodbye when I left for The Arizona Republic in June, 1987. It was a great team of friendly and hard-working journalists. These photos are by Gary Fong, the chief photographer. Gary and I remain friends. He is in the front row, in the center.

On the far left side is another friend, Bryan Moss. I hired Bryan as a food photographer, with no experience in food photography. But that’s another story.

Learning Culinary Confidence

And now for something completely different.

During the “sectional revolution” at the Chicago Tribune, there was an opportunity for those with a little extra time and some energy to write articles for the paper’s new feature sections. Since I liked food, I offered a couple of different stories, including a review of high-end hamburgers. I also got an opportunity to write about a newly developed passion for cooking and took a cooking class.

Like most Americans, I was raised on a steady diet of meat and potatoes, all cooked in the same basic manner: unexciting. It wasn’t until I opened the doors to a variety of food palaces here and in San Francisco that I began to enjoy food, even look forward to it! But eating out puts a cramp on the budget.

So confronted with bankruptcy or more meat and potatoes, I took up ethnic cooking and soon discovered that all knowledge does not come from a cookbook. I decided it ’twas time for a cooking class.

It was a fun class and lessons learned are still applied today. And it was a fun assignment to write about my experiences.

NewsU Makes the Connection to Educators at AEJMC

The initial plan for News University, the e-learning site created at The Poynter Institute and funded by the Knight Foundation, was to focus on professional. We didn’t think there we had much of a role to play in helping educators. That turned out to be wrong. And by the time I presented NewsU to educators at the Association of Educators of Journalism and Mass Communications [AEJMC], we knew our e-learning would be helpful in training the next generation of journalists. Here is a tidbit from the AEJMC Reporter, which was the convention newspaper:

hif pyramid of training reach 08_03_2006 — The Pyramid of Training Reach at AEJMC 2006

“Initially, NewsU was about professionals, but we wanted to reach out to the academic community,” said NewsU director Howard Finberg during a presentation Wednesday. “We did this for two reasons. First, journalism students become journalists. We want to get them early. Secondly, teachers need help.”

This presentation was one of the first public showing of my “Pyramid of Training Reach,” a device to help explain how different training methods have different audience potential and different intensity of experience.

Helping the Newspaper Industry See into the Future

Randy Bennett, a friend and industry colleague for more than 20 years, ran an interesting project at the Newspaper Association of America during his time as a vice president. Randy created the Horizon Watching initiative, with the hopes of being a ‘early warning’ system for newspaper executives.

Task-force participants, including newspaper executives and NAA associate members, set out to help publishers understand the external strategic forces that will shape the future of their industry.

I was delighted to serve on the committee. It was an interesting group to work with and I loved looking at the future. I’m not sure the group got a chance to make the impact that I hoped would be possible. Presstime, the NAA publication, wrote about the project about a year after it started.

Changing indicators mean different things in different markets. “There is no right answer,” said Howard Finberg, director of technology and information strategies at Central Newspapers Inc. in Phoenix. The important point, from the task-force perspective, is to grapple with the indicators and create a process for dealing with their business consequences.

I did argue this point as well, often in various meetings:

“We’re trying to challenge the industry to think differently,” Finberg explained, adding, “We have no right to survive.”

Crisis at San Francisco State: Instant Book

Going to school at San Francisco State University was a great and unusual journalism education. What made it special was not the classroom work, which was good. The real training was in covering the drama in the hallways, the excitement on the campus commons and the turmoil on the streets. My journalism education was attending a college that saw the longest campus strike in United States history. Here’s how the SFSU describes the strike, some forty years later:

…the five-month event defined the University’s core values of equity and social justice, laid the groundwork for establishment of the College of Ethnic Studies, and inspired the establishment of ethnic studies classes and programs at other universities throughout the country.

The Black Student Union and a coalition of other student groups known as the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) led the strike, which began Nov. 6, 1968 and ended March 20, 1969. Clashes between the strikers and San Francisco Police tactical squads made national news. Students, faculty and community activists demanded equal access to public higher education, more senior faculty of color and a new curriculum that would embrace the history and culture of all people including ethnic minorities.

Those clashes between strikers and police were covered by professional and student journalists. For students it was a great training ground, as you could compare your work against the professionals. After the strike, a number of journalism students, most of whom worked on the journalism department’s newspaper Phoenix, wanted to publish a more interpretive look at events.

We decided to publish a magazine or “instant book”. I was the publisher and editor. But one of driving forces was Steve Toomajian. His writing and hard work helped make the concept a reality.

We called the publication “Crisis at SF State.” We got some money from a distributor, found a printer and published in the summer of 1969 [I think]. Actual dates have been lost. The book is still in a few libraries, but the publication mostly lost in the dustbin of history. Here’s Stanford University’s library record:

Cover title: An interpretive look at San Francisco State College crisis… A collection of articles, essays, interviews, and photographs on the student strikes at San Francisco State College, 1968-1969.

I also put a copy in the library at The Poynter Institute. And I’ve posted a copy on this site.

Creating a Foundation to Support SND

One of the challenges of any journalism association is funding. Not just year-to-year funding but long-term support. In 1992 SND created the Society of Newspaper Design Foundation to become the research and educational arm of the society. I was named the foundation’s first president. It was my first attempt at non-profit fund-raising.

Beginning in 1993, some educational programs currently conducted by SND will be transferred to SND Foundation. Among those initially targeted to become Foundation projects: The Directory of Newspaper Graphics and Design Internships, Research Grant program, Travel Grant program and the Student Awards for Excellence in Newspaper Graphics and Design.

We didn’t do as much as we dreamed, but it was a start and the foundation continues today.

The Digital Future: The Next Technological Steps

At the request of John Oppedahl, my boss at Phoenix Newspapers, I wrote a very long memo about technology and the company’s newspapers, The Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette. The memo was 25 pages.

Technology influences the newspaper in many different ways: From offset presses controlled by computers to database programs that help circulation, independent components become part of an interdependent system.

This connection is the strongest between the newsrooms and production. We are linked, tied electronically by common systems, common needs and common problems. In the same way siblings share bloodlines, editorial and production share an electronic network of bits, bytes and data.

I wanted to outline what technologies the company needed to invest in. I wrote about pagination, text editing systems, color systems, advertising needs and more. I framed the report on the idea of a new newsroom.

More important than relationships between computer systems and more interesting than the technological feat of pagination is the way the newsrooms are organized to produce the newspaper. Using new technology to produce a newspaper in the same method utilized 20 years ago or 5 years ago is a tremendous waste of money, manpower and creativity.

The top of the memo has lovely saying: “Man plans, God laughs” -Old Yiddish saying

The complete memo can be read in this PDF.

Great Honor for a Student Journalist: Kilgore Award

In late summer, I received notice that I had won the Barney Kilgore Award sponsored by the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation [later renamed as the Society of Professional Journalists Foundation]. The award included $2,500, which would be presented at the SDX national convention in November in Chicago. The convention would present an opportunity that would change my life. Learn more about Barney Kilgore here.

In a statement of journalistic philosophy that accompanied my entry, I wrote “a good newsman and a good newspaper will provide the news with creativity, honesty and integrity.” I also said:

A good newspaper must be aware of the changes in its community. It must be able to present facts without fear or bias and interpret the news so that its readers can understand their every-changing and complex world.

Those words still work, 45 years later. I also wrote:

For some people, newspapers are the only to government.

Sadly, too many people in too many cities have no daily newspapers and hence little access or oversight of their government officials.

The Graphics Editor Takes Charge

The Washington Journalism Review ran a story about how newspapers were turning to graphics [and graphics editors] to give readers new ways of getting information. The late 1980s and early 1990s were exciting time for graphics editors, thanks in part to the influences of USA Today and the Chicago Tribune.

Improved presentation of information is clearly a response to market demand. At the most successful papers, graphics are grounded in journalism and not in decorative arts. Content, not design, comes first, graphics editors say.

One of the article’s authors, James K. Gentry, interviewed me for the article and I ended up being the lead for the story. That is pretty heady stuff, even for me.

In 1974 assistant picture editor Howard Finberg took on the task of making the Chicago Tribune more visually appealing. “I was clearing the field of rocks and stumps,” he says of his pioneering position as graphics editor. “I don’t think anybody else was doing anything remotely similar at the time.”

Top management wanted more visual awareness from the newsroom staff. Finberg says they accomplished this through “daily evangelizing.” He wrote his job description as he went along. A good deal of what evolved was acting as liaison between the newsroom and art department.

What interests me about the article 30 years later is how the newspaper graphics editor job was a catalyst for change. Graphics editors were the change agents in many newsroom. Today, change agents, if there any left, are working in online departments.

Graphics have mostly disappeared in today’s newspapers — victims of lack of space, fewer artists and, perhaps, the disappearance of the graphics editors job. Gentry and his co-author, Barbara Zang, conducted a survey of newspapers about the graphics editor role in newsrooms. It would be interesting to do another survey to see what remains of the “informational graphics revolution.”

Gentry and Zang concluded the article with an interesting observation about management:

Redefinition of the manner in which news is presented will demand newsroom managers who can function in a constantly changing environment. “The better managers adapt, the others don’t,” says Dave Doucette of the Salinas Californian. “The success of managers, of papers, means the ability to change.”

Finberg, the self-proclaimed old man of graphics editors. says the next wave of graphics editors must be able to edit tighter and make decisions faster. “We have to make the best use of finite space,” he says. “Maybe a whole new type of editor is needed for the future.”

I guess we still need that new type of editor.

Chicago Tribune Launches Graphics Service

The launch of the Chicago Tribune Graphics Service [CTGS] provided an opportunity to learn about customer service and satisfaction. With real money on the line and a desire to grow the number of clients, thinking beyond the Tribune’s own graphics propelled me into a touch of entrepreneurial journalism. It was my first “start-up” experience.

The graphic service is sold to daily newspapers across the country. The graphics all are illustrations that appeared in the Tribune, They are sold through the Tribune Company Syndicate lnc. (formerly the Chicago Tribune-New York News).

Each week we would select 12 to 20 graphics that would be printed on slick paper that aided reproduction and express mailed to clients. In the first nine months of the service, the newspaper and the syndicate split $60,000 in revenue [$150,000 in 2013].

The in-house publication of the Tribune, the Little Trib, did a nice story about the CTGS. I liked how they named the graphics desk staff.

But the early success came from hard work — from all those involved in the service: in the city newsroom, Finberg, Kathleen Naureckas, day graphics coordinator, and Marty Fischer, night graphics coordinator, now had to consider not only which graphics would be best for the Tribune, but also be alert to which graphics should go into the package to subscribers.

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