“Newsrooms” Items

Big City Newspaper: Chicago Tribune in 1975

The Chicago Tribune Marketing Department, sometime in 1975 [my guess] produced a guide to the newspaper for the educational services department of the company. It was a look, written for consumers [young ones] about how the Tribune was created — from reporter to editor to presses. The guide even had instructions on how to fold a newspaper page into a pressman’s hat. What’s nice about this guide is the photographs of so many of the people I remember working with. [And it does have a picture of me looking at a picture page.]

The Tribune at this time was publishing both morning and afternoon editions.  We called it the 24-Hour Tribune.  There were even t-shirts. Here’s a bit about that unique time:

In 1974, the Chicago Tribune became a 24-hour newspaper with fresh editions morning, afternoon and evening. The shift from being a morning newspaper to the24-hour publication cycle meant that The Tribune was available whenever a reader wanted it.

The publishing cycle begins in late afternoon with the Green Streak edition which contains late stock market quotations. Next off the press is the Midwest edition, designed primarily for circulation outside Chicago and suburbs.

The Three Star Morning Final comes next–it’s the edition you’ll find delivered to your doorstep in the mornings. The Four Star Morning Sports Final follows; you’ll find it on the newsstands in the morning with the night’s sport results. The Five Star Morning Turf Final is available later in the morning. Completing the 24-hour publication cycle is the afternoon 7 Star Final for afternoon home delivery customers and afternoon newsstand sales.

The publisher at the time of publication was Stan Cook; the editor was Clayton Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick was the person who hired me in 1972. There a nice picture of Bill Jones, one of the best editors at the paper during my tenure. Jones, who became managing editor, died way too early at age 43.

If you want a look at what it took to produce a daily newspaper, this is a good guide. For me, it is fond memories.

Pagination and a Look Into the Future of Newspapers

In 1999 I was asked to contribute to a book about pagination being published by the Society of News Design and the Association of News Editors. You can download the entire book from here.

At the end of the article I made some “bolder, out-on-a-limb” predictions:

  • Design as a unique job function in newspapers will slowly dissolve into other editing responsibilities.
  • Editing will encompass more than the technical aspects of copy editing and take on more responsibilities for the entire infopacks.
  • Computers will automatically handle most of the routine production responsibilities, freeing editors to do lust what we have always wanted them to do – make journalistic choices on behalf of their readers and the community.
  • Most, if not all, maps and charts will be produced by software. There will be fewer artists at newspapers doing “art work.”
  • The presentation of information will be of such importance for the organization that the senior editor with such responsibilities will report to the publisher.

I like my final paragraph:

Newspapers are on the verge of freeing themselves from the limitations of their production equipment. While I would not predict the end of newsprint as we know it, the era of print-centric delivery is coming to an end. We need to look beyond technology to find the solutions to organize and motivate our workforce for the new millennium. If we are successful, this is the last pagination book you will ever read.

Technology and Pagination

In 1999 the Society for News Design and the American Society of Newspaper Editors published a book about how managers could more successfully integrate new technologies into their newsrooms.  This project include a number of chapters from the leading technologists in the newspaper industry, including:

  • David M. Cole
  • Heidi de Laubenfels
  • Olivia Casey
  • Ed Kohorst

While pagination, strictly speaking, is an outdated technology, the concepts about workflow and organization are still very valid. 

I wrote about Embracing Change when it came to future technologies. There were a few things I got right:

  • Working at home, even doing newspaper design
  • Always connected to a network
  • Using databases to edit and present content
  • Constant feedback on what consumers are reading

“You May Need to Rethink Your Whole Organization”

I wrote an article the American Society of News Editors [ASNE] in October 1996 about how organizations need to rethink their structures and workflows when the introduce new technologies, such as pagination. Here’s my lead:

Pagination is an “old” technology. More importantly, pagination will not help a newspaper in the “new media” landscape of today. What’s really important are the opportunities of a publication database system. We can develop all the online, fax, and other new media products in the world, but unless we are lucky enough to be hiring dozens of new employees over the next ten years, we need to figure out better ways of using our existing resources of staff and equipment.

The article was based on a speech I gave at a Seybold Conference earlier in 1996.

Chicago Tribune Photo Request Form, 1985

An example of the Chicago Tribune’s photo request form used in 1985. Picture assignments were made through the picture assignment desk, either in the main city room or in the suburban Hinsdale, IL, bureau. Assignments were requested by either the reporter working on a story or by the source editor who is handling the story.  However, according to note Howard Finberg wrote in 1985, “the picture assignment editor of the picture editor controls photo assignment traffic and determines which story takes precedent when time and manpower are short.“

Changing The Chronicle’s Visual Image. Or Not.

In late 1986, I wrote a memo to the paper’s publisher (Richard Thieriot) and editor (William German) urging a discussion about the design of the San Francisco Chronicle.  It was a memo deeply rooted in understatement as both Thieriot and German saw little need to change the appearance of the newspaper. I urged a gradual approach, an evolutionary method of updating the typography and design of the newspaper.  Part of the argument for change involved addressing the weakening economic aspects of the paper.

However, now is the time in which we must look ahead and decide on the type of newspaper we wish to present to our current readers over the next several decades. And we need to decide on what type of paper
will be necessary to attract new readers among those who live in the Bay Area but do not read The Chronicle.

While change would eventually come to the paper, the reaction to the memo was mostly silence.

I did like making this point about the importance of design:

While design cannot keep readers, but it can attract them to the paper and let the content and editing hold them. We are missing out on readers who move to the Bay Area from other parts of the country who are accustomed to a more organized, easily readable design in their daily newspaper.

To the casual reader, the images in the memo aren’t very dramatic.  However, if you knew the Chronicle from that period, you would remember they were still using wavy rule boxes around photographs.  Yuck. Kudos to John Sullivan for his work on the prototype pages.

How the Arizona Republic Installed its 2nd Gen Pagination System

One of the most read newspaper industry technologist is David Cole, who published “The Cole Papers.”  In 1997 he sent one of his reporters, John Bryan, to write about how Phoenix Newspapers replaced its first generation of pagination with a new system from CCI Europe.  One of the reasons we selected CCI in 1995 was its ability to hold items in a publishing database. Here’s one of my quotes from the article.

Chief among the Republic strategist is Howard Finberg, longtime industry pundit, designer and evangelist who professes to be interested in pagination only as a means to an end.

“We don’t want to paginate anymore,” the paper’s director of information technology said. “I believe in publication systems that slice information into smaller and smaller pieces,” which can be used by an infinite number of information “products,” such as a web site, CD-ROM or whatever comes down the pike.

The article described how we made the transition [not quite complete when the reporter visited] and our vision for the future of newspaper publishing.