“Events” Items

Arizona Central’s Official Launch Announcements

Even though Arizona Central (AzCentral) was live on both AOL and the Web earlier, we needed to make an official and public announcement about both services.  The Phoenix Newspapers (PNI) marketing department created an excellent package of materials, including press releases (one for each service) and screenshots of the online services.  And, of course, a FAQ about going online.  It reads quaint today, but the basic “here’s how to get online” information was essential in 1995.  The other members of the launch team were Dave Gianelli, special projects manager, Dan Hontz, online project for AzCentral on the Web, and Jeff Unger, online producer for AzCentral on AOL.

Both press releases are here: pni_annouces azcentral_12_08_1995

The FAQ about Arizona Central on AOL and on the Web are here: azcentral faq sheets_12_08_1995

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

Young Readers and the Future of the Chicago Tribune

In late 1973 and early 1974 I was part of a committee at the Chicago Tribune.  The committee members were all under 30 and most of us recent hires by the newspaper.  Our task was to explore what the paper should do to attract more younger readers.  This task was less about getting young adults to read newspapers but to read the Tribune instead of the Chicago Sun-Times.  Members of the committee: Ovie Carter, Gary Deeb, Howard Finberg, Clarence Page, Don Pierson, Bill Plunkett, Karen Schickedanz, Rick Soll and Linda Winer.  Here’s what we wrote in our summary:

Simply stated, the Chicago Tribune takes itself too seriously. This is not to diminish its role as one of the nation’s best newspapers. Rather, it is a suggestion that the time has come for the Chicago Tribune to slaughter, once and for all, many of its sacred cows.

Further on, we concluded:

What we are recommending, in a general way, is a relaxation of the restraint that prohibits surprise and thought-provoking material from appearing in the Tribune.   It is not a recommendation to relax or reduce in any  way the standards of journalism: Strict reverence for the facts, a sense of fairness, and an attention to thoro reporting.

Please note the unique spelling of thorough, as the Tribune was still gripped by a style book that used simplified spelling, a cause of the previous owner/publisher:  Col. Robert McCormick.

The  is available as a PDF file: chi trib_young readers group_02_1974

Understanding the Online Future

In early 1994 I was given the task to figure out, with help of some great colleagues, the online future for Phoenix Newspapers [The Arizona Republic, the Phoenix Gazette and the Arizona Business Gazette]. Dave Gianelli and I spent a lot of time looking at different partnerships, such as America Online and Prodigy.  And we also looked at “going it alone” also known as the Web or Internet.  Remember, this was 1994.  The Web was something newer than the online services.  We created a report to help guide the company’s decision.  In the end, we urged a dual approach — partner with AOL [for the cash bounties] and go it alone, via the Web.  At the time, it was a bold and unusual strategy.

The first section is available as a PDF: PNI Online Opportunities Report 01_09_1994

 

Future of Journnalism Education Speech

I gave keynote speech at European Journalism Centre 20th Anniversary celebration in Maastricht, Netherlands, thanks to the director of the EJC’s director, Wilfried Rutten. The speech [PDF link] gave me an opportunity to build upon remarks I made the previous year at the “Picnic” conference.  I was part of a panel that addressed the future of journalism. I also wrote an article for Poynter Online about the topic.  I must admit that I love this line: “Journalism education can’t teach its way to the future.”

Here’s the start of the Poynter Online article that captures the spirit of the speech:

As we think about the changes whipping through the media industry, there is a nearby storm about to strike journalism education.

The future of journalism education will be a very different and difficult future, a future that is full of innovation and creative disruption. And, I believe, we will see an evolution and uncoupling between the value of a journalism education and a journalism degree.

When we think about the future, there’s not a single future. The future for a 20-year-old is clearly very different than the future of a 60-year-old. Each will bring a very different perspective.

The future of journalism education is linked to the future of journalism itself. Each is caught within the other’s vortex, both spinning within today’s turmoil of change.

There is a video of the speech on YouTube.

The reaction to both the speech and the article were very good, although it was part of a swirl of postings and speeches about the topic.  With the encouragement of my colleague, Vicki Krueger, I decided that this topic needed continued study and that will lead to other reports and writing.

Printed 2008 San Francisco State journalism graduation program and typed pages of the Distinguished Journalism Alumnus speech

Adding a Sixth W: My 2008 SF State Speech

On May 25, 2008, I went back to where I started. The Journalism Department at San Francisco State University held its annual Graduation Celebration at 9 a.m. in McKenna Theatre, and I was on the program as Distinguished Journalism Alumnus, introduced by Jon Funabiki. Venise Wagner, the department chair, opened the morning. Martin Reynolds was named Journalism Alumnus of Year, introduced by Austin Long-Scott. Khari Johnson was the Class Honors Student, introduced by Cristina Azocar, and Christine Joy Ferrer was the Class Speaker, introduced by John Burks. The ceremony closed with a World Press Pass send-off by the journalism faculty.

The two documents here are the printed program
ed u2014 with the full list of graduates u2014 and my speaking text, marked 22, 2008. Speaking to a room full of new journalism graduates in the spring of 2008 meant speaking into a very bad news cycle for the news business, and I decided not to pretend otherwise.

This is a wonderful time to be a journalist. This is also a lousy time to be at a traditional journalism-based media company.

The rest of the talk was an argument for flexibility, built out of my own ru00e9sumu00e9. I told them I left school with one goal u2014 to become a news editor at a newspaper u2014 and never got there.

That was my career dream. It was a good goal, but I never reached it. I went around it. I went through it. I went over it.

Instead I counted seven careers: copy editor at the San Francisco Examiner and the Chicago Tribune; graphics and picture editor at the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times; newsroom leader at the San Francisco Chronicle and the Arizona Republic; head of information technology at The Arizona Republic; online strategist at Central Newspapers; new media consultant; and educator, trainer and director of interactive learning at The Poynter Institute. My journalism education, I told them, had prepared me for maybe two of those jobs. My wife, Kate, has her own diagnosis for this pattern u2014 she calls me a u201cpioneer addict,u201d someone who is happy only when he creates something new, and she is right that pioneers are easy to spot by the lost look and the absence of a map.

The heart of the speech was a small piece of advice dressed up as journalism 101. Everyone in that theatre already knew the 5Ws. I suggested they add one more.

What you need to add is another W, a 6th W: the u201cWhat Ifu201d.

I framed 2008 as an inflection point u2014 the moment when an industry, a company or a person has to choose between protecting the old or jumping into a future where the rules are unclear. The railroads didnu2019t make that leap. Newspapers, I argued, could have decided in the 1980s that their business was helping people make sense of the world around them, u201cand not just crushing trees and smearing ink.u201d I warned the graduates they would witness the failure of some well-known newspaper and television companies during their careers, and also the birth of new forms of journalism, including nonprofit-supported experiments then under way in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.

I also reminded them that they were the first truly digital generation u2014 born about when Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, in fifth grade when the first Palm Pilot shipped, in ninth grade when Napster arrived and took the music industryu2019s business model with it, in high school for Skype, in college for YouTube. My generation still marvels at the Internet; theirs would treat it the way we treat electricity, without noticing the lights are on.

It is your responsibility to think about what the future might hold. It is your responsibility to shape the future. Do you think that you arenu2019t ready for that responsibility? Sorry. Too late. You already have the job.

Rereading this in 2026, the predictions hold up better than I would like. Well-known newspaper companies did fail. Nonprofit newsrooms did grow into a real part of the ecosystem. The one line that makes me smile is my hope for an innovator who would combine the Wii with journalism u2014 a very 2008 way of asking a question that AI and immersive storytelling are now answering in ways I couldnu2019t have named then. The advice underneath it, though, is the same advice I spent the next decade acting on at Poynter, building News University to give working journalists a way to keep learning after the diploma. Formal education can only take you to the starting line. Preparation, as I told the class of 2008, comes from within.

January 2000 Editor & Publisher clipping announcing that Central Newspapers created CNI Ventures for internet and technology investments

Central Newspapers Creates CNI Ventures

In January 2000, Editor & Publisher ran a short item announcing that Central Newspapers Inc. had created a new business unit to handle its investments in internet and technology companies. The story was only a few paragraphs, but it marked a real shift in how the company — publisher of The Arizona Republic and The Indianapolis Star — thought about where the future of news and information might be built.

Central Newspapers Inc. (CNI), publisher of The Arizona Republic and Indianapolis Star, has created a new business unit – CNI Ventures – to handle the company’s investments in the Internet and technology sectors. CNI Ventures will focus primarily on investments that develop delivery methods for news and information.

The distinction E&P drew was an important one inside the company. The existing newspaper websites were not going into the new unit; they stayed with the newspapers, where they belonged as part of the core business.

Central’s existing newspaper Web sites, such as Arizona Central and StarNews.com, will not become a part of the Ventures division, but remain a part of Central’s core business.

The investments that did move under the Ventures umbrella were a good snapshot of what looked promising at the turn of the century: BrightStreet, described as a provider of online promotions management solutions; E Ink, a developer of electronic display technology; Event411, a creator of online event-planning tools; and WaveShift, a creator of systems and software for new media. Incpad, the company’s high-tech job site — until recently called Westech Virtual Job Fair, as the item notes — stayed with the main internet activities alongside the newspaper sites.

E Ink is the one that still makes me smile. In 2000, electronic display technology was an article of faith, a bet on a future device that would carry news and information without paper. It took a while, but that one worked out.

And then the last paragraph, which is why this clipping is in my files:

Howard I. Finberg, director of technology and information strategies, has been given the added responsibility of vice president at CNI Ventures in order to coordinate the investment committee.

Coordinating the investment committee was a different kind of work than anything I’d done in a newsroom. The timing, of course, is part of the story — January 2000 was very near the top of the market for this sort of enthusiasm. The idea behind the fund was sound: newspaper companies needed to understand and have a stake in the technologies that would deliver news next. The trick, then as now, was picking correctly.

1999 American Press Institute letter from John G. Finneman confirming participation in the Newspaper Design: 2020 seminar

An Invitation To Imagine Newspaper Design: 2020

Eleven years after API’s Newspaper Design: 2000 and Beyond u2014 the 1988 seminar I’ve already posted documents about elsewhere on this site u2014 the American Press Institute decided to run the exercise again, this time looking two decades out. In the spring of 1999, John G. Finneman, API’s director of operations and administration, wrote to confirm that I’d be part of the 16th annual J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar in Reston.

This is to finally confirm that you will be participating here in API’s 16″ annual J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar, which we’re entitling Newspaper Design: 2020, on Oct. 24-26.

The letter is explicit about the lineage, and it’s worth reading alongside the 1988 material in the timeline:

As we’ve discussed, this will be a follow-up to API’s 1988 program, Newspaper Design: 2000 and Beyond.

At the time I was director of technology and information strategies at Phoenix Newspapers, Inc. u2014 a title that says something about how far the conversation had moved from the drafting table since the first seminar. The assignment, though, was the same one: put on the collective creative hat.

During our upcoming fall program, participants once again will be asked to wear their collective creative hats and envision the “newspaper” of 2020 from a design standpoint. How is it most likely going to evolve and what might it look like?

The quotation marks around “newspaper” are Finneman’s, and they do a lot of work.

The Society of News Design was again a partner, with a study organized around three buckets u2014 design, color and infographics; technology and new media; and people. Finneman credits the framing to a conference call I’d had with David Gray:

Warren told me this is what you came up with in your conference call with David Gray.

The signature element of the 1988 program came back as well. Each participant would build a front page of the future, content mix and all, for analysis and a post-seminar book.

These pages, which will once again be featured in our post-seminar book, will be analyzed in advance by Roger Black. As he did in 1988, Roger will be leading a discussion on the body of work.

The seminar was underwritten by API’s J. Montgomery Curtis Fund, which covered tuition, room and meals at the Hyatt Dulles, plus the production of the book. Participants paid their own way there. And, in a detail that dates the letter as surely as anything else in it, I was asked to send along a glossy photo and a biographical sketch.

Looking at this from 2026, the target year has come and gone u2014 and then some. What strikes me is that the 1988 group was asked to imagine 2000 largely as a printed artifact, while the 1999 group was being asked about 2020 with the web already reshaping the question. Whether any of us got it right is a matter for the front pages themselves.

July/August 1997 TechNews magazine article about The Arizona Republic becoming the first North American newspaper produced entirely with a CCI database publishing system

First U.S. Database Publishing System

From the July/August 1997 issue of TechNews, the magazine of newspaper operations published by the Newspaper Association of America published a story about the conversion of The Arizona Republic to a CCI Europe database publishing system. This was work I led as the paper’s director of information technology. The new system replaced the Information International Inc. (Triple-I) pagination system that had made the Republic one of the first metro newspapers in the country to be completely paginated.

The Arizona Republic recently became the first newspaper in North America to be created entirely through “database-system publishing.” The Republic can now gather information once and distribute it in a variety of formats: from ink-on-paper to online, from fax to CD-ROM.

The first phase was completed June 2, 1997. The story notes that Phoenix Newspapers Inc. was doing this while also constructing a new 10-story building, launching Arizona Central, merging The Phoenix Gazette and Republic newsrooms and closing The Gazette, and moving more than 1,000 employees and their computers across the street.

Finberg described the timing of the switch to CCI’s database system as a lot like “changing the engine in an airplane at 35,000 feet. On paper it looks possible, but in your heart you know it will be pretty tricky. It is not something for the fainthearted.”

Dave Seibert, technology-development manager for news and information at PNI, is quoted on the hardest technical problem — getting CCI to talk to the existing SII text-editing system, which took about six months. David Neibergall, team leader for design, points to WYSIWYG editing, and to designers finally leaving the darkened room the staff called “The Cave,” a space required by the low-contrast green screens of the Triple-I system.

At the time of the article, the Republic was paginating more than 1,100 pages a week on CCI, with a common copy-editing and design database due that fall and reporters moving to Windows PCs in 1998. The piece closes on MediaServer and the ambition behind the whole project:

“With a database publishing system, we’ll have the tools to produce not only the newspaper, but also online editions, magazines, and more. The key is effective access to our content—text, photos, audio—regardless of the delivery method.”

Reading this in 2026, the vocabulary has changed but the argument has not. Create the content once, store it in a structured way, and deliver it wherever the audience happens to be. Every content management system and API-driven newsroom workflow in use today rests on that same idea — one we were arguing for, and building, a page at a time in Phoenix.

Editor & Publisher people column from June 1997 listing Arizona Republic appointments, including Howard Finberg directing the information services department

Second Job: Information Services at The Republic

Editor & Publisher’s people column for June 21, 1997, included a short run of appointments at The Arizona Republic — and one of them was mine.

HOWARD FINBERG, director of information technology, also will direct the information services department for the next 18 to 24 months.

Two jobs, with a stated expiration date. The same column noted other changes at the Republic, including Toni Antonellis as director of organizational development, Pat Tucker as education manager, and this one:

STEVE KNICKMEYER, deputy managing editor at the Republic, was appointed managing editor/content

A reminder that in 1997 “information technology” and “information services” were still two separate things inside a newspaper — and that somebody had to bridge them.

January 1997 memo to Arizona Republic editors on the multi-skilled journalist of the future

The Future: Journalist’s Skills

This is a January 1997 memo I wrote to Don Henninger and Steve Knickmeyer, two senior editors at The Arizona Republic and The Phoenix Gazette. It came out of a conversation we’d had the day before about the skills journalists were going to need, and it was very much part of my techno-evangelism at Phoenix Newspapers — trying to help editors prepare for changes coming to journalism and, potentially, to their newsrooms.

The core argument was that the future belonged to people who could do more than one thing:

The overall direction that I see journalism [and journalists] heading in the next five to 10 years is one of multi-skilled individuals. These will be the people that will succeed and prosper in the next century. In a sense, we will be going back to our roots — the small town publisher/editor/reporter/ad salesman — to find models that put more responsibility for all aspects of journalism in the hands of the source.

I used my own history at the newspaper as the example, which felt honest at the time and still does. Creating a separate design department had made sense when I arrived, given the technology we had. By 1997 it made a good deal less sense — and the split between the art department and the design department looked worse still.

So, in a sense, we created a “graphics factory,” because they had their own special technology — the Macintosh — to create charts and maps.

The point wasn’t that everyone should do everything. Specialized talent still mattered. What I expected to disappear were the divisions that existed only because of the equipment:

However, the artificial separation of skills based on technology will be eliminated [and much sooner than the five to 10-year time frame that I’m using].

From there the memo works through photography — why not put a digital camera in every reporter’s hands, since other delivery methods would consume far more visual material than the printed paper had room for — and then video and audio, and what editing skills would be needed to combine words, audio, stills and moving images.

The section I’m still fondest of is the one about the Web not being print and not being broadcast either.

On the Web, you tell stories in non-linear fashion. You need to tell those stories in such a way that the reader/consumer/user can understand the story regardless of where he entered the presentation. This is a different way of presenting news.

And the editing skill that follows from it, which I called “de-composing” linear stories into Web format.

Seybold Seminars publishing conference session at Moscone Center in San Francisco, September 1996

Pagination and Paradigms at Seybold

In the 1990s, if you wanted to know where publishing technology was headed, you went to Seybold. The Seybold Seminars conferences were the industry’s gathering place for prepress, typesetting and publishing systems — the vendors, the consultants and the newspaper and magazine people who had to make it all work. This session was recorded live at Moscone Center during the San Francisco show, held Sept. 9-13, 1996.

I was introduced by David Cole, the technology consultant, who took some pleasure in my brand-new and rather vague job title.

Howard Finberg is now the Director of Information Technologies, a promotion that he just received last week at the Phoenix Newspapers Inc. Maybe at some point we will be forced to ask him exactly what a director of information technologies is but until then we would like to hear about the new paradox of buying, installing, and using of a publishing system.

My answer was that I’d let everyone know what the job was as soon as I’d read the description. The talk itself was about the pagination project at Phoenix Newspapers Inc. — replacing 15 aging Information International (Triple I) page makeup workstations, the big Raytheon-built terminals the staff called the “green-eyed monster,” and the design rooms kept dark enough for those screens that people called them “bat caves.” We selected CCI Europe, and by the end of August 1996 we were 82-85% complete on the rollout.

But the point I most wanted to make was that pagination was the wrong question.

We asked ourselves this fundamental question and if you have ever talked about this, if you are thinking about this, if this is a question for you…you really have to ask “do you want to paginate?” and I contend quite frankly, honestly, emphatically that the answer is no…not interested in pagination anymore.

What we actually wanted was a publication database — information in the middle, output neutral, feeding print and whatever came next. And that meant breaking the industry’s habit of treating the newsroom as the sole owner of anything valuable.

… we have a model in our industry that says information of value resides within the newsroom. I say let’s break that model, let’s break the paradigm, and say information belongs to whoever needs it and whoever can make use of it.

Much of the speech was about people, not machines: open committees that included the library and purchasing, cookies and free lunches to get staff to vendor demos, a full-time trainer, a Lotus Notes database of threaded project discussions going back to August 1995, and two “super users” from the design department who hated the title. One of them, Eddie Rossi, was quoted as saying the installation was going very well, “but not very elegantly.”

My favorite line in the whole transcript isn’t mine — it’s my boss’s, quoted secondhand: “if you want to know how to reorganize a newspaper, figure out who has control of the furniture, because that is what it is all about.” Nearly 30 years later, I’d still defend that as sound organizational theory.

A note on the transcript: it was typed from the audio recording, so a few things come out oddly. QuarkXPress becomes “cork express,” HTML becomes “HTMO,” and my confession about being a former Macintosh bigot gets rendered as “math bigot.” I’ve left them as they are.

Interactive Newspapers conference program page listing the Pafet consortium panel and its six newspaper company representatives

Pafet Goes Public at Interactive Newspapers Conference

The conference program for the interactive newspapers gathering — built around The Kelsey Group’s and Editor & Publisher’s Sixth Annual Interactive Newspapers Survey — put the Pafet consortium on the Tuesday morning agenda, with a representative from each of the six member companies on stage.

AN INTERVIEW WITH PAFET
10:30-12:00
A discussion with representatives from the six newspaper companies comprising the Pafet consortium. These newspaper professionals will talk candidly about their plans to evaluate opportunities emerging from developments in technology and to focus on those related to their core competencies.

I was there for Phoenix Newspapers, one of six panelists listed:

Martha Duckert, Planning & Process Leader, Cowles Media Company
Howard Finberg, Senior Editor, Information Technology, Phoenix Newspapers, Inc.
Jim Galli, Manager of Business Development, A.H. Belo Corporation
Chris Hendricks, Manager of Technology, McClatchy Newspapers, Inc.
David Lipman, Chairman/Pulitzer 2000, Pulitzer Publishing Company
Mike Weaver, Vice President New Media, Freedom Communications, Inc.

The rest of the program is a nice snapshot of what the industry was worried about at the time: international interactivity, digital advertising, database marketing, and a keynote from Louis Boccardi, President & CEO of the Associated Press, on what he called the editorial perspective. My favorite session title on the page: “MAIN STREET U.S.A MEETS THE INFOBAHN.”

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 appointments column from Feb. 22, 1986, listing Howard Finberg as photography/graphics editor at the San Francisco Chronicle

E&P Notes My Move to San Francisco Chronicle

Before LinkedIn, before company press releases landed in your inbox, there was the back-of-the-book appointments column in Editor & Publisher. That’s where the industry found out who was moving where. This item, from the Feb. 22, 1986, issue, is where my arrival at the San Francisco Chronicle got recorded for the trade.

The Chronicle announced three appointments at once, and E&P ran them together in a single paragraph:

At the San Francisco Chronicle DANIEL E. ROSENHEIM has been appointed economics editor; KEN CASTLE, editor of the new Outdoors section in the Monday Sporting Green, and HOWARD FINBERG, photography/graphics editor.

Note the title: photography/graphics editor. The two responsibilities were bundled into one job, which tells you something about how newsrooms thought about visual journalism in the mid-1980s — pictures and graphics were still being sorted into the same drawer, even as informational graphics were becoming their own discipline. It also should be noted that I was the first person to hold this job at the paper.  Previously, the art and photo departments reported to other supervisors, such as the news editor.

The short biography that follows is a reasonable summary of the road that got me there:

Finberg joined the Chronicle from the Chicago Tribune, where he had been graphics editor, picture editor, copy editor and makeup editor. Finberg also has worked for the New York Times as assistant picture/graphics editor.

I’m also amused that Dan Rosenheim and I arrived at the Chronicle from the same place — he came from the Tribune’s financial staff. The Chicago-to-San Francisco pipeline was apparently running that year.

The rest of the page is a perfect artifact of the era: an assistant managing editor for graphics named at the El Paso Herald-Post, a promotion executive elevated at the New York Daily News, five advertising appointments at the Syracuse newspapers, the Los Angeles Times opening a Manila bureau (its 23rd foreign bureau), and a new journalism department chair at Bowling Green — all wrapped around display ads for a newspaper broker in Raleigh and a printing supply company in Chicago. That was the industry talking to itself, one column inch at a time.

My time at the Chronicle didn’t last long. The following year I left for Phoenix and The Arizona Republic, which announced my hiring as assistant managing editor for graphics in June 1987 — and identified me, naturally, as “Howard Finberg of the San Francisco Chronicle.”