“Information Graphics” Items

Transcript pages from a 1999 American Press Institute seminar presenting newspaper design survey results

Is There a Disconnect Here Someplace?

This is a transcript section from an American Press Institute seminar held in October 1999, where I presented the results of a design and visuals survey I coordinated. It was a follow-up to the survey we did for the 1988 J. Montgomery Curtis seminar, Newspaper Design: 2000 and beyond, with a nod to the survey the Society of Newspaper Design did in 1992. We reused a lot of the same questions so we could see what had changed.

This just goes to show you that if you volunteer to do something, you get to do it again.

The numbers: 628 responses in 1988; a little over 1,200 in 1999, about 200 of those from a Web site we built for the project. Sixty percent came from designers, 40 percent from editors. Ninety percent worked at dailies, and about 45 percent at papers over 100,000 circulation. One notable difference from 1988 — we didn’t ask about color or the use of computers. By 1999 those were givens.

We organized the discussion around five areas: the importance of design, the importance of visual elements, people, the relationship between online and print (new that year), and where all of this material was going to fit in the future.

As for the importance of design, the survey showed that it remains strong in the opinion of both editors and designers. And as for visuals, we’re also optimistic. And that’s the good news. The bad news is there appears to be a big disconnect between editors and designers in how they view the world.

Some of that disconnect showed up in the self-scoring. Asked to rate the quality of newspaper design across the industry on a 1-to-10 scale, 13 percent gave the industry an 8 to 10 and 71 percent put it in the 5-to-7 range. Asked about their own newspapers, more than half rated themselves 8 to 10. As I said at the time: the industry sucks, but we’re doing okay at our own newspaper.

Warren Watson of API‘s staff took the results to some 50 publishers, editors, designers and educators for reaction, and it wasn’t flattering. Terry Quinn of Thomson Newspapers called the 1980s an infatuation period with design. Darrell Moen said design had simply become institutionalized — not special anymore. Around the table, Mr. Sutton put a sharper point on it:

I do think most editors see design simply as layout, and I believe there is a design backlash, because some visual journalists have too much of a “make it pretty” mentality.

The section on informational graphics was the one that stung. As a former graphics editor who toiled in that vineyard when we had nothing but rocks and stumps, I wondered aloud whether informational graphics had just been a fad. Others weren’t ready to concede that. Marty Petty argued that graphics still engage readers and that the failure was in execution — chasing the big, sexy stuff instead of the basic maps and charts that inform. Mr. Curtis tied it to incentives:

Today, editors don’t value them highly anymore because they aren’t rewarded for them, and if you aren’t rewarded, you don’t do it.

On people — which I said then, and still believe, is the greatest challenge — 80 percent of respondents found hiring qualified visual journalists either very difficult or about as hard as it had always been, and the survey said it was getting worse. Asked where they’d put additional staff money, respondents put reporting first at 53 percent, design at 37 percent, online at 30 percent, graphics at 28 percent, photography at 27 percent and illustration at 13 percent. Roger Fidler noted that at Kent State most of the better students were looking at the Web and electronic publishing, and saw newspapers as passé.

The online results astounded me. Only 10 percent thought it highly important that a newspaper’s Web site look like the printed newspaper; 50 percent said it wasn’t important at all. So much for brand. And on leveraging print journalists online, the responses split roughly in thirds — including a third who thought it wasn’t very important at all.

Then there was space. Sixty percent said they had more room for visual packages than five years earlier, and looking ahead, everybody expected still more — this with the 50-inch web coming at the industry.

Everybody thinks they’re going to have more space in the future…what planet were these people on when they answered this question.

Two quotes from the session have stayed with me. Juan Antonio Giner, relayed by Warren: “newspaper design is dead; news design is alive.” And Mr. Lockwood, closing the argument with the Bauhaus:

Laszlo Maholy-Nagy said years and years ago from the Bauhaus that design isn’t a profession; it is an attitude. It is an attitude about information.

I ended on a deliberately hopeful note, pointing out that in Blade Runner — one of the darker visions of the late 20th century — our hero waits for his dinner while reading a printed newspaper. Reading this back now, well past the 2020 horizon we were asked to imagine, the survey’s optimism about space looks even more misplaced, and the disconnect between editors and designers turned out to be the least of the industry’s problems. But the argument about whether visual work is content or decoration never really got settled. It just moved to a different screen.

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.

Chicago Tribune weather page from April 15, 1983, reproduced in the Society of Newspaper Design journal with outlook, satellite and temperature maps

Weather Page Design: Chicago Tribune and Atlanta

From The Journal of the Society of Newspaper Design, No. 12, a two-part look at newspaper weather packages. My piece describes the rethinking of the Chicago Tribune‘s weather presentation — done while the Sun-Times was redesigning its own weather page and USA Today was about to enter Chicago with a full-color version. The steps: hiring a meteorologist for material beyond what the National Weather Service supplied, rebuilding the page in modular units with carefully measured type blocks, and strengthening the graphics — the outlook map, a satellite photo with an engraving overlay to hold the white state borders, a pollution outlook map, a full-color temperature bands map on the briefing page, and a simple regional temperature map for the Tribune’s eight-state region. The example page reproduced with the article is dated Friday, April 15, 1983. At the time I was the Tribune’s picture/graphics editor.

The pollution index is an example of taking a report that uses only words and defining boundaries to create a graphic display of information.

It takes an artist a few minutes to prepare because all the type has been set in advance.

The facing article is by Joe Coleman, then photo editor of the Atlanta Journal & Constitution, on that paper’s half-page color weather map, developed as part of a redesign of the afternoon Journal. Coleman credits then-managing editor Eddie Sears:

Eddie Sears, had seen the USA Today prototype and found one thing worth stealing — an expanded weather map.

Coleman also describes adding columnist Charles Salter to personalize the data, and lists cautions for anyone building a weather package — designate a person responsible for gathering data, format as much as possible, and be careful about dropping cities:

We got more calls on dropping readers’ home towns or favorite foreign vacation spots than any other changes made over the past ten months.

An interesting twist: Joe Coleman is the same Joe Coleman I would later hire as my photo editor at The Arizona Republic in the late 1980s.

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.

Chicago Tribune Inter-Department Memo dated October 30, 1974, from Max McCrohon praising Howard Finberg's work in the graphics area

A Short Note About Graphics

This is about as short as a memo can get, and it is a favorite document in the collection. Written on a Chicago Tribune Inter-Department Memo form, dated October 30, 1974, from Max McCrohon to C. Kirkpatrick. Two lines. That’s it.

Some of the things young Howard Finberg is doing in our graphics area are, I think, very good.

I was in the Tribune’s graphics area at the time, and “young” was accurate. Actually, I was the only graphics person at the paper. Getting noticed by the managing editor mattered, and getting it in writing mattered more — which is presumably why I kept a copy for the next fifty years. It was McCrohon who created the graphics editor job and put me in it.

What strikes me now is how much of a career can start with a sentence like this. Nothing in the memo says what those “things” were. But information graphics at newspapers were still being invented in the mid-1970s, and someone above me was paying attention.