“Graphics Editor” Items

Chicago Tribune Graphics Service’s 1st Catalog

The success of the Chicago Tribune’s graphics desk allowed the company to offer a service.  We would send out slick sheets of graphics via express mail service on Saturday.  The first index provided a catalog of the more than 1,000 graphics sent to subscribers in the 70 weeks since the service started.  What we have tried to do is provide a list of the material that has some shelf life [usable after a period of time] or a graphic that could provide the base for  a graphic  that can be updated with  new information.

Here are the folks who made it work:

This index was put together under the direction of  Howard Finberg, Graphics Editor of the Chicago Tribune, with the appreciated assistance of Mark Maynard, an editing  assistant. Larry Townsend, Director of the Graphics Service and editor of the KNT News Wire at the Tribune, has had the difficult task of updating the file weekly and trying to make the project as handy for other editors as it has been for us. Tony Majeri has provided help in the graphic  look of the  project.

Every Friday Larry and I would gather up velox copies of the various graphics published or planned for the Tribune.

How a Graphics Editor Works at the Chicago Tribune

The first edition of the journal of the Society of Newspaper Designers (SND) featured excerpts of a speech I gave the the organization’s first convention.  The gather was held in Tribune Tower, in a meeting room called Campbell Hall (if memory serves).  That meant we probably had no more than a couple of hundred folks in the room.  The editors of Design took a transcript of my speech and turned into an article.  However, I didn’t know any of this until publication.

Reading it over today still gives me lots to cringe about — I was a bit arrogant.  OK, I was a full of self-importance about this new role.  The Chicago Tribune was the leader in informational graphics.  And I was the Graphics Editor.  I wished I had remembered to talk about how this was a team activity, not a solo sport.

However, I still like my conclusion, that all of the work we do is about making it better for the audience:

You can have the prettiest looking graphics in the paper and it doesn’t mean anything  if  it doesn’t  communicate with readers. That’s the most important thing as far as the Tribune and the graphics editors go. If we’re not communicating  with  the reader, we’ve lost it all. It’s my job to go for it.

Not sure what I was going for, but I guess we did.

Here’s the article from Design