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.”