“Newspapers” Items

Chicago Tribune — 5 Years Hence [1980 as the Future]

I don’t remember who asked for this memo about the future or why we were looking at “five years hence” (1980).  This is probably one of my earliest “future look” memos.

At the time this was written, the Tribune was publishing both morning and afternoon editions.  Lots of them, as we had just merged the staffs of the afternoon newspaper {Chicago Today} and the morning Tribune. It was a grueling publishing schedule that was truly a 24-hour publishing cycle.

I still like this thought about giving readers more about what a story means.

We need to stop thinking “freshest is best”; a need to end the traditional cycle of publishing edition after edition, sometimes barely enough time to consider what the news means. The Tribune could reduce it cycle to two editions (major remakes) with replate options.  Continue to provide a morning and afternoon edition; new equipment will allow a savings in time – use the savings to give editors and reporters time to include the “what it means” in their story.

Here’s the full memo, a carbon copy from the “copy book” it was written on.

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.

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

Clipping of David Noack's November 1998 Editor & Publisher article on the AP's fee-based news archive for The Wire

AP Launches Its First Consumer E-Commerce Venture

This November 21, 1998 article from Editor & Publisher, written by David Noack, reports on the Associated Press launching its first electronic commerce venture aimed at consumers: a fee-based archive for its online news service, “The Wire.” The service was available through The Wire’s Web site and the 250 online newspapers that hosted the AP’s online news service, with an official announcement expected around Nov. 23.

The subscription archive covered national, international, sports, financial and business stories dating back to July 1, 1997 — a big jump from the free two-week search, which held about 10,000 articles versus the new service’s 250,000. Individual pricing ran from $2.95 for a single article to a $99.95 “Annual Pass” for 1,500 articles, with a 20% revenue-sharing arrangement for newspapers that signed up customers.

Jim Kennedy, director of AP Multimedia Services, said the e-commerce component had been in the plans since 1995:

“This will be the first time that we have a text service of our own that goes directly to the consumer.”

“This was part of our original planning, but it took some time to get over some of these hurdles that we had with technically making this available to consumers and also editorially ensuring the integrity of the content.”

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.