Archival Documents | The Digital Futurist

Editor & Publisher syndicates and news services page from April 8, 1995, reporting United Media's World Wide Web site launch

Early Syndicate Efforts on the Web, 1995

A syndicates and news services page from the April 8, 1995, issue of Editor & Publisher, reported by David Astor. The lead story covers United Media‘s April 1 launch of a World Wide Web site at http://www.unitedmedia.com — an in-house operation for the E.W. Scripps Co.-owned syndicate — carrying the work of nine comic creators and 10 editorial cartoonists, along with feature previews, background information, photos, graphics and feedback areas.

Comics from United Feature Syndicate and Newspaper Enterprise Association were to be collected in a two-week archive and posted online one week after newspaper publication. “The Comic Strip” section included an enhanced “Dilbert Zone” devoted to Scott Adams‘ strip, with biographical material, early sketches, a “tour” of the studio and an interactive map for locating “Dilbert” client newspapers; Adams also maintained a presence on America Online. “The Inkwell” area featured the editorial cartoonists, among them Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Benson of the Arizona Republic.

From United president Doug Stern:

“We are using the digital power of the Internet to reaffirm the awareness of an ageless art form for a new generation. It’s a way for readers to see talented cartoonists that they might not see in their local papers, and a way for us to create even larger followings for those of our strips they read every day.”

Lisa Klem Wilson, United vice president/sales and marketing, framed the audience question:

“We’re reaching a demographic — young, computer-savvy readers, who may not be subscribing to daily newspapers — and pulling them back to comics pages.”

Alma Derricks, United’s director of new media development and head of the Internet project, said the site could eventually add animation, contests, a columns area, licensed product sales and ad sponsorships:

“Six months from now, the Web site could be a much different place. We’re using only 10% of our capacity so far.”

The rest of the page carries shorter items: centennial-of-comics events announced by the Newspaper Features Council, including Sunday night live chat sessions with cartoonists on America Online beginning May 7 with Mort Walker, an AOL centennial area starting May 5, a Library of Congress comics exhibit, U.S. Postal Service cartoon stamps, and an October comic fair in Bryant Park; Universal Press Syndicate‘s new statistics column “Unconventional Wisdom” by Washington Post polling director Richard Morin; Tribune Media Services‘ new panel “True!” by Daryl Cagle; the debut of Tool User Comics, an “online comic book publisher” on the Web; Ray Walker’s promotion to news editor of Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service; and “Jill Jackson’s Hollywood” from the King Features Weekly Service.

Cover pages of the Associated Press Managing Editors 1995 committee report on journalism education

APME’s 1995 Report on Journalism Education

The 1995 Journalism Education Committee of the Associated Press Managing Editors set itself a straightforward assignment: go back to the committee’s own 1984 study of journalism schools and see how it had held up. Ham Smith of Washington and Lee University, who wrote the lead section, answered in five words — “Mostly, it seems, not much has changed.” The committee was chaired by Deanna Sands of the Omaha World-Herald, with vice chairmen George Kennedy of the University of Missouri, Marcia Bullard of USA Weekend and Mary Dedinsky of Northwestern.

The report opens with a line that still describes the terrain pretty well:

Journalism education has been called everything from an oxymoron to the last best hope for professional ethics. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere between the extremes. One sure thing, though. Thereu2019s no better way to stir up a passionate discussion than to ask educators and professional journalists whatu2019s ahead.

Smith lays out the structural mismatch between newsrooms and J-schools: about 80 percent of entry-level daily newspaper jobs went to journalism majors, while fewer than 20 percent of journalism students were in the news-editorial sequence. Small papers wanted graduates who could work the first day; big papers wanted an education and hired five years later from the small papers. Paul LaRocque reports on a survey the committee mailed to 202 journalism schools, accredited and non-accredited, which drew 128 responses u2014 a 63 percent return u2014 measuring schools against the 1984 recommendations.

The sharpest material is about accreditation. Bob Giles, then editor and publisher of The Detroit News and president of the accrediting council, had told a February gathering of deans at the University of Maryland something the American Journalism Review called an extraordinary statement:

u201cJournalism education still seems to fall uncomfortably between universities and the industry. Neither has embraced journalism education. Too many universities seem more comfortable with the idea of mass communications as a research-based discipline, while the industry wants graduates who can do journalism, but is not willing to make a full commitment of support.u201d

u201cAs the number of accredited programs has increased … it is clear that we can no longer give that assurance.u201d

George Kennedy’s chapter tracks the fight over Giles’ proposal to recognize merit beyond the minimum standards u2014 first framed as a u201ctwo-tier system,u201d a phrase quickly abandoned. Florida A&M Dean Robert Ruggles: u201cYouu2019re either accredited or youu2019re not. Degrees of accreditation make no sense.u201d Jerry Ceppos of the San Jose Mercury News, APME’s representative on the council, was on the other side: u201cAny time you can get journalism education to raise standards, thatu2019s a good thing.u201d Maryland’s Reese Cleghorn had advice for editors who wanted to help u2014 get to know the programs, support the good ones, u201cAnd increase starting salaries.u201d

Berl Schwartz of Michigan State interviews Giles at length. Carol Nunnelley of The Birmingham News profiles the University of Alabama’s Institute for Communication Research, whose biggest customer was Southern Progress Corp. And Dick Thien of Nebraska closes the report with u201cA Dangling Conversation,u201d a bus ride in which an editor and an educator answer for each other’s sins without knowing they are seated side by side. It ends with both of them giving the same answer to the same question:

u201cI love it u2014 and if I do it right I can make a difference.u201d

Two passages date the document usefully. Lawrence McConnell of the Tampa Tribune, whose paper u201cled Media Generalu2019s leap into cyberspace with Tampa Bay Online on Prodigy,u201d says flatly: u201cIf there is such a thing as journalism school graduates prepared for this field today, I have yet to meet them.u201d And John Driscoll, retired from The Boston Globe, notes that ASNE offered a videotape on the future of journalism at cost, $10, hoping it would spark curriculum discussions. u201cAlas, only 70 were sold.u201d

I keep this one because the argument in it never ended. A decade later I was at Poynter building News University, and much of that work was aimed squarely at the gap this committee was describing u2014 professionals who wanted training and educators who wanted respect, with not much traffic between them. Reading it in 2026, with journalism programs still being merged, renamed or closed, and with AI now doing to the newsroom what the Internet was doing in 1995, the committee’s central finding holds up better than anyone should want it to.

Editor & Publisher Covers the Traveler’s Gazette Fax Newsletter, 1994

A short item by M.L. Stein in the December 17, 1994, issue of Editor & Publisher, headlined “Phoenix papers’ fax free guide to guests in 20 hotels,” describes the Traveler’s Gazette, a two-page newsletter produced by Phoenix Newspapers Inc. and handed to guests checking into Phoenix-area hotels.

The newsletter carried news briefs compiled from the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette, along with information about area restaurants, tours, entertainment, TV highlights, and nearby family outings with maps included u2014 plus an Airport Outlook column reporting weather at various U.S. airports and a box promoting the papers’ Pressline audiotex service.

The article credits the origin of the product to a pair of Phoenix Newspapers staffers:

Lavelle said that last spring Howard Finberg, senior editor/information technology, and Dave Gianelli, new ventures/project manager, hit on the idea of offering current daily information on what’s going on around town to hotel and resorts for distribution to their guests each day.

Chris Lavelle, associate editor/special sections and a member of the development team, described the early steps:

“They ran the idea by a couple of hotel managers, who agreed to look at a prototype and consider testing it with their guests.”

According to the item, a test phase began the previous May with four hotels; content was adjusted over the summer based on feedback from guests, concierges and hotel management, and time was spent refining the information-gathering and fax systems. At the time of publication the newsletter was faxed free via modem to 20 hotels, mostly in Scottsdale, reaching more than 4,000 guest rooms. Some hotels delivered it with a complimentary newspaper; others made it available at check-in. Presentations were being made to additional hotels.

Editor & Publisher clipping from April 3, 1993 reporting contradictory expert advice on open-system pagination at the NAA pre-press symposium

Open-Systems Experts Give Practical/Contradictory Advice, 1993

A pair of items by Mark Fitzgerald in the April 3, 1993, issue of Editor & Publisher, both reported out of the Newspaper Association of America‘s pre-press symposium in Phoenix. The first story catalogs the advice dispensed at the two-day symposium about implementing open-system pagination and other electronic prepress operations — and notes that much of it directly contradicted itself.

JUDGING FROM THE contradictory practical tips dispensed at the Newspaper Association of America’s recent pre-press symposium in Phoenix, expert opinion on open systems is every bit as confused as that of newspapers.

The story is built as a set of matched pairs: don’t anoint a “champion” (Bob Yoder, director of marketing for Baseview Products Inc.) versus appoint one (Bill Stroud, Philadelphia Inquirer director of publishing systems); scrap your old systems entirely (David Latcha, production director for J. Walter Thompson in Detroit) versus treat pagination as evolutionary; run pagination from the copy desk versus don’t. Houston Chronicle operations vice president Jack Stanley supplied the line about stringing PCs along a network:

“What you’ve got [then] is a thousand chickens pulling a plow,” said Houston Chronicle operations vice president Jack Stanley. “Shrink wrap is not the answer.”

Under “Some consensus,” the story lists points the speakers agreed on: paginators and designers must be journalists as well as technologists; training, training, training; careful workflow planning; plenty of memory from the start; and ergonomics. I was quoted twice, as assistant managing editor for the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette.

“They are out there walking that fine line between handling production of the paper and influencing its overall content and direction,” said Howard Finberg, assistant managing editor for the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette.

“You can’t spend too much time and money on the ergonomic issue. If you don’t do it up front, you’ll spend much more in human suffering and money to fix it than you saved in capital expenditures,” said Finberg.

The second item, a sidebar headlined “Pagination survey,” reports results from the annual Society of Newspaper Design survey, which I presented at the same symposium. The 600-member survey had a 35% response rate. It found 9.7% of newspapers with full text-and-graphics pagination, 16.9% with fully paginated text, 22.9% paginating at least some text and graphics, and 14.8% with incomplete pagination of text only. A plurality — 23.3% — were still in the planning stages.

Perhaps the most surprising result of the survey, however, is that fully 12.4% of responding newspapers not only have no pagination at all — they have no plans to paginate at this time.

Editor & Publisher News/Tech article from September 26, 1992 on full-color desktop pagination at the Christian Science Monitor

Full-Color Daily Pagination at Christian Science Monitor

A “News/Tech” article by Lawrence J. Goodrich in Editor & Publisher for September 26, 1992, describing how the Christian Science Monitor produced its 20-page weekday tabloid entirely on desktop systems, with full color on every page. Goodrich was publications editor of the Monitor.

The article traces the production chain: Scitex software and equipment for color separations and plotting negatives, and QuarkXPress on Macintosh II computers for layout and pagination, in place since January 1989. Slides from staffers, Agence France-Presse and photo agencies were scanned on Scitex scanners, while the electronic photo desk downloaded digital images from AFP and Reuters via PressLink, using PressLink Access, Adobe Photoshop and TOPS software on Mac IIcis. Artwork was created in Adobe Illustrator and sent over the network directly to makeup.

“Color is technologically as easy for us today as black-and-white,” says Monitor editor Richard J. Cattani. “It brings a sense of activity to the newspaper, and of equivalence to television and glossy magazines in visual veracity and impact.”

Goodrich also reports on the advertising case for color, quoting ad sales manager Nicholas Drinker:

“It’s a well-known fact that color sells more effectively than black-and-white.”

The piece details remote transmission from the Republican presidential nominating convention in Houston, where photographers scanned color negatives on site with a Nikon 3510AF film scanner into an Apple PowerBook 170 and sent images to Boston over AppleShare into a DEC VAX — about 40 minutes per uncompressed photo, resulting in 13 convention photos published. It also describes page-by-page deadlines, proofs in 15 to 20 minutes, release for color processing an hour after copy deadline, output on a Scitex Raystar plotter, and delivery to Gannett Co.’s Boston Offset plant in Norwood and, by satellite, to Gannett’s Phoenix Offset plant.

On paper stock — Abitibi-Price’s Premium 70, a special 35-lb., 70-brightness newsprint — Wayne Kayser, assistant director of print publishing for the Christian Science Publishing Society, is quoted:

“This newsprint has the characteristics needed to accept full four-color printing and does not yellow as soon as conventional newsprint. It is also highly compatible with the soy-based inks we use in our color.”

NewsInc. September 1992 article spread headlined "Differences?" examining why women were leaving newspapers

Looking at the Newspaper Gender Gap,1992

An article by Susan Hansen in the September 1992 issue of NewsInc., examining why women were leaving newspapers and what editors were — and weren’t — doing about it. The piece opens with the Knight-Ridder/Tribune wire’s short-lived “Woman-Advisory” alerts and moves through the task forces, consultants, seminars and targeted sections that chains large and small had launched, driven less by principle than by economics.

The powers that be have lately concluded that women a) vote, and b) spend money.

The numbers cited: a Newspaper Advertising Bureau study showing an almost 18 percent drop in daily readership among adult women between 1970 and 1990, compared with a 12.5 percent decline among male readers; women holding only 10 percent of editor and executive editor slots at papers with circulations of more than 250,000, per the National Federation of Press Women; and a Women, Men, and Media Project survey of 20 front pages in February 1992 that found women claimed just 34 percent of bylines and only 13 percent of those referenced or quoted.

Quoted throughout are consultant and former Gannett executive Nancy Woodhull, St. Paul Pioneer Press managing editor Mindi Keirnan, Los Angeles Times associate editor Narda Zacchino, Washington Post columnist Judy Mann, Knight-Ridder vice president for news Jennie Buckner, and Georgetown linguist Deborah Tannen. Keirnan on the “no time to read” explanation:

“I don’t buy it when a woman says she doesn’t have enough time to read the paper… It’s a polite way of saying it’s not interesting enough for me to set aside.”

Much of the industry’s response, the article reports, centered on reviving women’s sections — ASNE‘s $200,000 “You” prototype for the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, and the Chicago Tribune‘s “Womanews,” which about 60 newspapers signed on to syndicate in its first year. Critics warned of ghettoizing serious coverage. Zacchino:

“I find women saying we need to do more in the rest of the paper. We should start on the front page—make women feel this entire newspaper has something of interest to them.”

A companion feature, “Advice and Dissent,” gave 10 newswomen free rein to critique the front pages of The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. The panel: Deborah Howell of Newhouse News Service; Jacqui Banaszynski of the St. Paul Pioneer Press; Amy Kisman of USA Weekend; Nina Bernstein of New York Newsday; Emilia Askari of the Detroit Free Press; Renée Loth of the Boston Globe; columnists Judy Mann, Robin Abcarian of the L.A. Times and Betty Bayé of the Louisville Courier-Journal; and graphics director Laura Varon Brown of the Detroit Free Press. Their consensus was to focus on real people, replace foreign roundups with enterprise, and give women a presence.

“The truth about why women are leaving newspapers is self-evident,” says Washington Post columnist Judy Mann. “I don’t exist on these front pages.”

The article closes with examples of papers changing beats rather than adding sections — a full-time day care reporter and family page at the Charlotte Observer, expanded women’s sports and personal finance coverage at the Rocky Mountain News, and at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, reduced local political coverage, doubled education staffing, a new women’s health care reporter, and new consumer and local transportation beats. Keirnan on what convinced her staff, after she made line editors and reporters interview women readers and nonreaders directly:

“When people say to you ‘I read the paper while I blow dry my hair,’ you get religion.”

Editor & Publisher clipping from August 1992 covering an INMA conference panel on how to reinvent the newspaper for the next century

Advice for Next Century: An INMA Panel on the Future

An Editor & Publisher story by Ann Marie Kerwin, published August 8, 1992, reporting on a session at the International Newspaper Marketing Association conference in Dallas. The question on the table: how to reinvent the newspaper for survival in the next century’s media environment, at a moment when audiotex, videotex, databases and fax services were all competing for newspaper investment dollars.

The main speaker was Michael Schrage, a visiting scholar at the Center for Coordination Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who argued that newspapers and media should be in the community-building business rather than the information business.

“New media technology is a medium for relationships. New media affect how people communicate with each other, how people relate to each other. If you change the medium, you change the relationship. … New technology creates new relationships.”

Schrage said the Information Age never happened and isn’t going to happen, that the real value of a medium is not in the information it carries but in the community it creates, and that designing a newspaper for a faster read is the wrong goal — papers should invite readers to spend more time with them. He dismissed the fax newspaper as “a pure packaging job,” suggesting instead that fax be used for polling or for services like menus and maps tied to a restaurant review.

“Humans are information processors, but anybody who defines them that way would be better off programming a computer instead of editing or publishing a newspaper.”

The second half of the story covers the Gannett Company’s News 2000 project, then being implemented at all Gannett-owned papers, with community at the center of the effort. Betty Liddick, executive editor of the Stockton (Calif.) Record, described arriving in Stockton a year earlier:

“I was stunned by reader reaction. Many folks weren’t indifferent to the paper as many readers have become these days. They bitterly hated us. So much so, staffers said they often were reluctant to tell people outside the paper where they worked.”

Readers complained of too much negative news about their community and home, and didn’t want crime news to be the only thing the paper covered. At a meeting with readers and top editors, one man stood up and said, “Show us our heroes.”

Pages of an early-1990s seminar handout on the status of informational graphics in U.S. newspapers, drawn from the textbook Visual Editing

Status of Informational Graphics in the U.S.: A Swiss Seminar Handout

In the early 1990s I presented a seminar in Switzerland. Sadly, I don’t remember exactly when or where — which is why this file is going into the Archive section until more information turns up. The handout given to seminar participants also served as my speech. It draws on my then-newly published textbook, Visual Editing: A Graphic Guide for Journalists (1990). The document credits Thomas Hermann with the invitation.

The talk traces the evolution of informational graphics — diagrams, maps, charts and tabular lists — from a murder-scene diagram on Page One of The Times of London on April 7, 1806, through William Playfair’s 1786 The Commercial and Political Atlas, to war maps of World Wars I and II, the space program, and the arrival of USA Today on Sept. 15, 1982. Along the way it notes that the Chicago Tribune created a graphics editor position in 1974, one of the country’s first full-time visual journalists.

One of my favorite quotations, from the Austrian statistician Otto Neurath in 1925, appears early in the text:

“Words divide, pictures unite…to remember simplified pictures is better than to forget accurate figures.”

The handout also reports survey findings from more than 350 members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, done in connection with the American Press Institute’s 1988 J. Montgomery Curtis seminar: 92 percent expected to use more informational graphics within five years, and 90 percent said graphics would play a greater role in their newspapers in the year 2000.

And a warning that still holds up:

When we run misleading graphics because of a lack of data points or “empty graphics” that are merely type-breakers, we communicate very little and take up precious news space.

The remainder of the handout is drawn from the textbook: chapters on how a graphics editor works — gathering and editing information, request forms, working with artists, fact checking — and a section on choosing the right device, with examples from The Arizona Republic illustrating tables and lists, line/fever charts, pie charts, pictograms, map graphics, and vertical and horizontal bar charts.

Editor & Publisher page from September 1988 headlined "Will artists become computer nerds?" on Macintosh use in newspaper art departments

Will Artists Become Computer Nerds? —E&P, 1988

Two related stories by Mark Fitzgerald in the September 3, 1988, issue of Editor & Publisher survey what happened to newspaper art departments once the Macintosh arrived. The first piece, “Will artists become computer nerds?”, reports that artists had largely embraced the machines — Miami Herald graphic reporter Jeff Glick hadn’t used his drawing table in three years — and asks what the shift did to line quality, typography and editorial judgment. The second, “Graphics software,” catalogs the strengths and shortcomings of MacDraw, MacDraw II, Adobe Illustrator 88, Aldus FreeHand and Cricket Draw 1.1, and asks whether vendors were paying attention to the newspaper market at all.

I’m quoted throughout as assistant managing editor at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix, along with David Gray of the Providence Journal, Tony Majeri of the Chicago Tribune, George Rorick of the Knight-Ridder Graphics Network, Richard Curtis of USA Today, Marian Wachter of the Seattle Times and Ray Chattman of the Society of Newspaper Design.

“Yeah, I’m afraid we’re becoming the nerds we all dreaded,” said Howard Finberg, a pioneer in computerized newspaper graphics who is now assistant managing editor at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix.

“The readers don’t care if it was created on Illustrator 88 or FreeHand [software packages] — or charcoal or a pen or a No. 2 pencil.”

On the trade-offs of the technology:

“I think the Macintosh has been both a boon and a bane for information graphics,” said the Arizona Republic’s Finberg. … “The bane has been that the quality of typography and the quality of illustration has suffered.”

And on how the change arrived in newsrooms:

“This revolution in newsrooms in terms of using computer graphics is very interesting because it did not come from the bottom up — it came from the top down.”

The software story records a Society of Newspaper Design member survey taken at the previous fall’s convention: the Macintosh was used by 86.7% of respondents, IBM by 9.2%. It also quotes Rorick’s standard for the Knight-Ridder network — “The bottom line here is, if it looks like a computer graphic, we failed” — and my own less optimistic assessment of the tools then on the market.

“I’m not sure there is a perfect program out there. I don’t know if there ever will be a perfect graphics program,” said Howard Finberg, assistant managing editor at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix.

Cover of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau's October 1987 report summarizing the 1987 Newspaper Inventory Survey of U.S. daily newspapers

Daily Newspapers ’87: Taking Stock

An October 1987 report from the Newspaper Advertising Bureau summarizes the findings of NAB’s 1987 Newspaper Inventory Survey — a mail survey of every daily and Sunday/weekend newspaper in the United States and Canada, and the fifth in a series that began in 1967 and continued in 1974, 1979 and 1983. This volume covers local, English-language weekday editions in the U.S. only; a companion volume handled Sunday and weekend editions.

The survey’s original purpose was commercial: give advertisers and agencies a way to find newspapers carrying particular standing features, so an ad could be positioned next to the right kind of content. Later editions added questions about content, graphics and layout, positioning practices, ROP color, zoning, split runs and home delivery. The 1987 weekday inventory counted twelve kinds of sections and fifty-eight kinds of features or columns. (Pretty quaint given how ads are placed today.)

The base for the tables:

The summary tables shown are based on completed questionnaires from 987 daily newspapers representing 59% of all United States dailies and 79% of total circulation.

On content, the report found the churn of the early 1980s hadn’t slowed:

Findings from the 1987 Newspaper Inventory show that the period of rapid change in content, previously noted in the 1979 and 1983 inventories, continues unabated. Since 1983, nearly seven out of ten newspapers (69%) report substantial changes in content.

The most frequently reported changes were increased business coverage (53% of newspapers), increased sports coverage (45%), and a shift in the ratio of state and local to national and international coverage (35%).

The design numbers are the ones I keep coming back to. Eighty-two percent of newspapers — 91% of circulation — reported substantial changes in graphics or layout since 1983. More use of ROP color (61%) and conversion to Standard Advertising Units (SAU) page and column specs (60%) led the list, followed by changed mastheads, changed typefaces, more photographs, and modular front pages. And then this:

There has also been a substantial increase in use of computer graphics. In the 1987 study, 28% of responding dailies (52% of circulation) reported more use of graphics compared to 2% in 1983 (3% of circulation).

The feature tables are a time capsule. Crossword puzzles appeared in 98% of weekday circulation, spectator sports 94%, astrology 92%, TV log 92%, business and finance 89%, weather map 89%. Ninety-five percent of responding papers carried comic strips, and the typical weekday edition had three physically separate sections. Zoning was reported by 30% of dailies but 59% of circulation. The median share of weekday circulation that was home delivered: 85%.

The study was directed by Charles Lehman of NAB’s Research Department, and the report was updated by Dorothy Shea. A computerized list of editions carrying any particular section or feature was available on request — by telephone.

Reading this in 2026, what stands out isn’t just how many of these features have vanished from print (the TV log, the movie timetable, the radio log, the stock tables) but that the inventory itself was a product for advertisers — a printed, mailed, hand-tabulated database of what newspapers contained. That function moved online long ago, along with the advertising it was built to serve. The Newspaper Advertising Bureau no longer exists as a separate organization; its work eventually merged into the industry association that became the Newspaper Association of America.

Cover of Design No. 1, March 1980, the Society of Newspaper Designers journal containing the "What is a graphics editor?" talk

“What Is a Graphics Editor?” — The First Issue of Design, March 1980

This is No. 1 of Design, the quarterly journal of the Society of Newspaper Designers, dated March 1, 1980 and edited by Richard Curtis, then assistant managing editor of The News American in Baltimore. The 32-page issue includes Louis Silverstein of The New York Times on design and content, Robert Lockwood’s essay on newspaper management by design, David B. Gray of the Providence Journal-Bulletin on the photo lab as a newsroom resource, Randy Miller’s report on the Kansas City Star/Times seminar, Ed Breen of the Marion (Ind.) Chronicle on words and pictures, a rundown of the Society’s first Newspaper Design Contest, and the redesign of GRIT’s front page.

Curtis used his editor’s note to explain where the organization came from — and how quickly it had grown.

The society was founded, rather informally, in 1978 in a bar in Reston, Virginia during the first American Press Institute seminar on newspaper design.

From a newsletter that went to all 12 members, the Society had reached more than 160 members, produced a videotape presentation called “News by Design,” and mounted its first workshop — held with the Chicago Tribune at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago on Sept. 28, 29 and 30, 1979, drawing nearly 150 participants from the United States, Canada and Costa Rica.

I have a byline in this issue, on a piece headlined “What is a graphics editor?” I didn’t write it. It is a transcription of the talk I gave at that first Chicago workshop, on Sept. 29, 1979, as graphics editor of the Chicago Tribune.

My responsibilities at the Tribune are for all graphics that appear in the editorial pages. The question that often arises is, what’s a graphic? The way we define it is charts, maps, combinations… anything that is not what is described as pure illustration. In other words, if it has editorial matter — there are words with it — then it falls under the province of the graphic editor.

Much of the talk was about where the job sits in the newsroom — attending the two daily news meetings, reporting to the assistant managing editor, reading over a reporter’s shoulder before the story lands on the city desk. And about knowing when to say no:

Of course, there’s always one other function of the graphics editor that’s not as pleasant, and that’s knowing when to kill (a graphic). Because there’s nothing worse than a graphic that doesn’t work.

You can have the prettiest looking graphics in the paper and it doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t communicate with readers.

The issue closes with a membership form ($20 a year, dues covering the magazine), a jobs listing, and a promise for No. 2: an issue built around the question the Kansas City seminar had put to editors — how do we do more with less? Forty-five years on, that’s still the question, and I would go on both to write for this magazine and to be written about in it.

Typed July 1976 memo to Chicago Tribune news editor John Waggoner listing Graphics Desk projects in the works

Projects Working on the Graphics Desk, July 1976

A status memo I sent to John Waggoner, the Chicago Tribune‘s news editor, on July 26, 1976, listing what the Graphics Desk had in the works. It’s a snapshot of how an information graphics operation planned its projects — a mix of hard-news color coverage, explanatory packages, and long-lead background reports.

The list runs from the Republican convention (delegate totals for Ford and Reagan, Page One color on August 17 and 19) to a package on earthquakes aimed at back-to-school time:

Other stories on the U.S.’s biggest known quake which was in the Midwest in 1812 (and moved the Mississippi River 30 miles) and what it’s like to live in California under the threat of a major quake, written by Mike Coakley in Los Angeles.

Also on the schedule: a Labor Day report on American workers, with charts on how pay, the work week and occupations had changed since the 1800s; a page on the fight to expand the Indiana Dunes park, written by Casey Bukro; and a photo/background page on the West Bank, with maps of major trouble spots and a sidebar on Jerusalem.

The “other projects working” section is a reminder of what the mid-1970s looked like from a newsroom. The metric system:

Charts, tables, photos to make it easier on the reader who can’t tell a meter from a liter.

Plus solar energy (Bukro writing), “Weapons of the future” on Black Box technology (Jim Coates in Washington), and space after Viking, with the community turning its sights to the shuttle (Jim Pearre researching).

Copies went to Max McCrohon, Bill Jones, Joe Leonard, Denis Gosselin and Dick Leslie.

Editor & Publisher personnel page from September 12, 1970 announcing the $2,500 Barney Kilgore Award winner

Editor & Publisher, September 12, 1970: Winning the $2,500 Kilgore Prize

A short item in the personnel pages of Editor & Publisher for September 12, 1970, reporting the winner of the Barney Kilgore Award from the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation. The page around it is the usual mix of industry news: AP bureau chief moves in Latin America, a retirement at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, editor changes at papers from Corning, N.Y., to Findlay, Ohio.

Howard I. Finberg, senior in journalism at San Francisco State College, is the winner of the $2,500 Barney Kilgore Award sponsored by the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation.

The item also names the four other finalists, all senior journalism students, who received special award certificates:

Carl W. Schwartz III of Danville, Ill., U. of Illinois; Roger W. Smith of San Bernardino, Calif., U. of Southern California; Stephen E. Stewart of Monroeville, Ala., U. of Georgia, and June Ellen Tyhurst of Bartlesville, Okla., Oklahoma State University.

Editor & Publisher letters column from March 1, 1969, printing a letter about Phoenix, the San Francisco State laboratory newspaper

Out of the Ashes: A Letter to Editor & Publisher About the Phoenix

This is a letter of mine that ran in the letters column of Editor & Publisher for March 1, 1969. I was a journalism student at San Francisco State, and what I wanted the trade press to know was that our laboratory newspaper had made it through its first year.

It might be of interest to your readers to note the first birthday of Phoenix, the laboratory newspaper published by the San Francisco State Journalism Department.

The name was not subtle, and it wasn’t meant to be. The Phoenix came after the Daily Gater, and the letter says so plainly, along with a fairly honest account of how the first issue got out the door.

Phoenix, which rose out of the ashes of the Daily Gater, is a weekly devoted to interpretive reporting. We began publishing the last day of February with a prayer, some borrowed equipment and two printers (typesetters) who were unfamiliar with their machine. Somehow we came out and a new era in San Francisco State journalism was started.

What I described was a six-column, full-size offset paper, eight pages, with students doing all of the production work outside of the typesetting and the press run. The Journalism Department published it and paid for it, but, as I was careful to point out, students were responsible for the editorial content. We were pushing for advertising to give the paper more flexibility. The Phoenix was a member of AP and of National Educational Advertising Services.

The part of the letter I still think holds up is the paragraph about what it was like to be a student reporter on that campus, at that moment, with the professionals working the same story.

Student reporters covering the crisis learn quickly to weigh their words carefully and sometimes judge themselves against the professionals covering the campus.

And then, because even at that age I couldn’t resist talking about design, I spent a good chunk of a letter about a student newspaper describing its typography.

In its use of pictures and its make-up the paper is a flashy example of what one journalist has called the “look of the future.” Its make-up is the design that Howard Taylor writes about in his E&P Layout and Design column; good use of art, down-style heads, blocks of pictures and type, strong corners.

There’s a nice coincidence on the same page. The letter at the top of the column, from Roy H. Copperud of Altadena, Calif., is also responding to Howard Taylor’s design coverage — this time about the Daily Trojan at USC — and makes a point I would hear again and again in the years that followed about who actually does the work:

It was not I who redesigned the paper, but rather the editors, who have complete control over content and production.

A page of letters about student newspapers, journalism education in California, and the Wire Service Guild’s strike against the AP — and tucked in among them, a college student telling the industry’s trade magazine that the future would look a certain way on the page. The scan garbles my byline into “Howarp FInBerc,” which feels about right for a 1969 hot-type artifact making its way through a 21st-century scanner.

“Archival Documents” Items