“Graphics Editor” Items

Malofiej Infografia Awards, 1994

In 1994 I was a judge at the 2nd annual Malofiej Awards for Infographics, which were organized by the Spanish chapter of the Society for News Design (SND-E) for accomplishments in journalistic infographics. The awards were given each March in Pamplona, Spain.
 
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The awards are named for Argentine designer Alejandro Malofiej, who made simple and creative graphics.[6]

The Malofiej were an essential reference for their prestige and drawing power. The Awards, considered to be the Pulitzers for infographics, the professional workshop “Show, Don’t Tell!” and the Conference in Pamplona annually bring together the best infographics artists from media (newspapers, magazines, agencies) from around the world.

On October 1, 2021, the organizers announced that the awards would be paused “while we open a period of reflection to think about how to continue with them in the future.”

The organizers published a book with the award winners.  One of the questions asked of the judges was “How do you see the present and the future of infographics?” Here is my answer:

Informational graphics use in newspapers is coming to an important junction. One direction is to continue on our present course, with much energy, effort and space spent on large, complicated and time ­consuming graphics. The other way would call for a re-examination of the overall purpose and value of presenting information via a graphic or visual form. I’m worried that if we continue on our present path, the fundamental strength and value of graphics will be diluted and devalued as editors, facing increased pressures to make the most effective use of space, will rebel against the often-excessive “mega­graphic”. A more optimistic view would have editors – visual and written- jointly decide on the most effective presentation method and the more appropriate use of resources, which include staff and space.

Teaching College Students, Poynter 1984

In spring of 1984, Mario Garcia invited me to teach at the College Seniors/graduate Students Newspaper Design Seminar August 12-18.  Twelve students were selected for this Poynter fellowships in Newspaper Design.  Here’s what Garcia wrote  about the seminar in his invitation letter:

Obviously, the scope of this seminar is very different from that of the professional seminars you have taught for us in the past. These are students whose experience is limited to work on their campus newspapers, plus whatever time they have spent in newspaper internships. In fact, a majority are currently interning.

Therefore, our objective is to accomplish the following:

1) To train students beyond the basics of layout and design.
2) To introduce them to the role of the newspaper designer in today’s newspapers.
3) To showcase their talents to members of the industry who may be interested in young, capable (but inexperienced) newspaper designers.
4) To create a pool of young designers who will be way above the level of their peers entering the newspaper field.

I taught a couple of sessions:

Thursday, August 16
9 – 10:15 a.m.           Informational graphics as design tools
10:15 a.m. – noon   Informational graphics, continued. Exercise : Putting the facts together through the creation of an informational graphic
LUNCH
1:30 – 3 p.m.             Session continues
REST OF AFTERNOON FREE

Poynter Seminar on Design for 1980s

One of the first seminars I taught at was The Poynter Institute for Media Studies’ “Newspaper Design for the ’80s”.  Here’s the invitation letter from Mario Garcia bio, associate director of Poynter. I had been at the Institute earlier as both a participant and a presenter.

Dear Howard:
I am delighted that you will be working with us to present the Graphics & Illustration Seminar, November 27-December 2, 1988. As you can see, I have scheduled your session as a Wednesday evening wine/cheese session to be held at the hotel. However, I hope that you will be able to be with us the entire week since we feel that interaction with the faculty is part of the reason for the success of our programs….

The reception and dinner Sunday evening will begin at 6:30 p.m. at the St. Petersburg Beach Hilton where the group will be staying. Martha has reserved a room for you for Sunday through Friday night. Let her know if you plan to arrive earlier or depart later.

I’m looking forward to having you back with us at the Institute.

Sincerely,

Mario R. Garcia

 

Visual Editing. A New Textbook

In early 1990, Bruce Itule and I published: “Visual Editing. A graphic guide for journalists”.  This textbook was aimed at editors at newspapers who handled various elements — photos, illustrations and informational graphics. It also tied all those elements together with chapters on newspaper design. It also include some history and a section on ethics.  It was a great learning opportunity and I believe it helped become a better editor and manager. The Visual Editing textbook is on this site. More on the book is here.

Having Fun at SND Conference

At the 1990 Society of News Design conference in San Jose, there was a group of pranksters who created a “SND Funnies” publication. It poked fun at SND leaders [organization and thought] and put a little humor into an all-to-serious group of designers and graphics editors. I was way too serious myself. The humor was ‘inside baseball’ and some of the folks have disappeared. Many of those whose ox was gored did have a laugh.

Named Photo/Graphics Editor at Chicago Tribune

On Jan. 28, 1983 an Chicago Tribune assistant managing editor, Michael Argirion, announced that “Howard Finberg is appointed Photo/Graphics Editor, responsible for the Photo Desk and the Graphics Desk.”

This was an expansion of my duties, as I was currently Graphics Editor.  I would hold this position until shortly before I left the Tribune for a stint at the San Jose Mercury News and, later, the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Graphics Editor Takes Charge

The Washington Journalism Review ran a story about how newspapers were turning to graphics [and graphics editors] to give readers new ways of getting information.  The late 1980s and early 1990s were exciting time for graphics editors, thanks in part to the influences of USA Today and the Chicago Tribune.

Improved presentation of information is clearly a response to market demand. At the most successful papers, graphics are grounded in journalism and not in decorative arts. Content, not design, comes first, graphics editors say.

One of the article’s authors, James K. Gentry, interviewed me for the article and I ended up being the lead for the story.  That is pretty heady stuff, even for me.

In 1974 assistant picture editor Howard Finberg took on the task of making the Chicago Tribune more visually appealing. “I was clearing the field of rocks and stumps,” he says of his pioneering position as graphics editor. “I don’t think anybody else was doing anything remotely similar at the time.”

Top management wanted more visual awareness from the newsroom staff. Finberg says they accomplished this through “daily evangelizing.” He wrote his job description as he went along. A good deal of what evolved was acting as liaison between the newsroom and art department.

What interests me about the article 30 years later is how the newspaper graphics editor job was a catalyst for change.  Graphics editors were the change agents in many newsroom.  Today, change agents, if there any left, are working in online departments.

Graphics have mostly disappeared in today’s newspapers — victims of lack of space, fewer artists and, perhaps, the disappearance of the graphics editors job.  Gentry and his co-author, Barbara Zang, conducted a survey of newspapers about the graphics editor role in newsrooms.  It would be interesting to do another survey to see what remains of the “informational graphics revolution.”

Gentry and Zang concluded the article with an interesting observation about management:

Redefinition of the manner in which news is presented will demand newsroom managers who can function in a constantly changing environment. “The better managers adapt, the others don’t,” says Dave Doucette of the Salinas Californian. “The success of managers, of papers, means the ability to change.”

Finberg, the self-proclaimed old man of graphics editors. says the next wave of graphics editors must be able to edit tighter and make decisions faster. “We have to make the best use of finite space,” he says. “Maybe a whole new type of editor is needed for the future.”

I guess we still need that new type of editor.

When You Are the ONLY Graphics Editor

About a year after starting the Chicago Tribune’s graphics desk, I wrote a very long and detailed memo about what those duties.  The memo was for the lucky [or unlucky] editor who had to fill-in for me during vacation or other absences.  In some ways, it was a mini-handbook about how to create graphics and work with the artists and the news desk at the newspaper.  The memo also include information about to do the promotional banners across the top of the front page; we called them “overlines”.  It wasn’t the best memo I’ve ever written.  In fact, it reads a bit breathless and a bit high-handed.  However, it does have some good advice:

Each graphic must relate to the story it accompanies, either directly from information in the story, or indirectly with information only touched on but not expanded upon. Check first for sense; can this material be best explained in a graph, a map, a chart, a table? Or should it be an insert paragraph? The goal is to make readers understand–not make reporters have an easier writing time or supply “art devices” for makeup.

Perhaps I should have pushed harder at the idea that graphics would make it easier for reporters to do their job.  It might have made the graphics revolution easier.

Pushing for Better Informational Graphics

One of the interesting challenges of creating a new kind of editing role, the graphics editor, was helping others in the newsroom see the importance of involving the visual folks early in the process.  Roger Fidler, a like-minded design advocate in the 1970s,  created the Newspaper Design Notebook, a magazine/newsletter to push the concept of better design, better editing and better visuals.  He asked me to write an article about how the Chicago Tribune handled series and lessons other newspapers might learn from our experiences.  Vol. 3/No. 2 was the last edition of the Newspaper Design Notebook. Pity.

Planning. Teamwork. Execution.

These are the elements for the successful handling of a newspaper series. Unfortunately, no matter how valid that concept, most series are put together by luck, guts and a prayer.

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

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.”

1982 Chicago Tribune inter-department memo from Harriet Choice thanking Howard Finberg and the graphics department

A Thank You Note From the Travel Department

An inter-department memo from the Chicago Tribune, dated December 9, 1982, from Harriet Choice to Mike Argirion, with copies to Colleen Dishon and Jim Squires. It’s a note of appreciation for the work the graphics department was doing for the travel section.

Just wanted you to know how much the travel department appreciates the outstanding contributions to our section by Howard Finberg and the entire graphics department.

She mentions two specific packages — the Door County and O’Hare issues — as examples of what the collaboration produced.

I had been in the department less than 48 hours when Howard dropped by to say how much he thought his staff could add to our presentation. Indeed they have.

My favorite line:

I have yet to hear Howard say, “We can’t do it. We’re swamped.” Considering the volume of work they produce, I know it isn’t always easy.

The credit belongs to the staff, not to me. As she put it:

They’re a willing, talented gang of people, and I think we all are lucky to be working with them.

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.