“Pagination” Items

The Future: Embracing Change

In 1999, the Society for News Design published a handbook for editors about dealing with pagination and technology. I was asked to write a chapter about “the future” and embracing the changes new technology would bring.

Some of the things I got right:

  • Working at home, even doing newspaper design
  • Always connected to a network
  • Using databases to edit and present content
  • Constant feedback on what consumers are reading

Here’s the opening to the chapter:

Firing up her monitor with a verbal “log on” command, Kate gets ready for the daily meeting with her fellow editors and a managing editor at The Republic.

Almost instantly, her monitor is on the “virtual network” and eight images of her co-workers start to appear. Three are at home; two are at remote or shared offices. One is on the road with his team covering a live event. The rest are at the paper’s head­quarters building.

After discussing reports from the teams that worked the previous “info cycles” – each cycle is four hours and there are teams working around the clock – Kate and her fellow editors start the business of producing material for The Republic.

She doesn’t have a computer in her house, only a 27-inch flat-screen that is about one inch thick and connected to The Network. Everything is on The Network: broadcast entertainment signals, written communications and voice messages.

It was a fun assignment.  Thank you, Olivia Casey.

Pagination and a Look Into the Future of Newspapers

In 1999 I was asked to contribute to a book about pagination being published by the Society of News Design and the Association of News Editors. You can download the entire book from here.

At the end of the article I made some “bolder, out-on-a-limb” predictions:

  • Design as a unique job function in newspapers will slowly dissolve into other editing responsibilities.
  • Editing will encompass more than the technical aspects of copy editing and take on more responsibilities for the entire infopacks.
  • Computers will automatically handle most of the routine production responsibilities, freeing editors to do lust what we have always wanted them to do – make journalistic choices on behalf of their readers and the community.
  • Most, if not all, maps and charts will be produced by software. There will be fewer artists at newspapers doing “art work.”
  • The presentation of information will be of such importance for the organization that the senior editor with such responsibilities will report to the publisher.

I like my final paragraph:

Newspapers are on the verge of freeing themselves from the limitations of their production equipment. While I would not predict the end of newsprint as we know it, the era of print-centric delivery is coming to an end. We need to look beyond technology to find the solutions to organize and motivate our workforce for the new millennium. If we are successful, this is the last pagination book you will ever read.

Technology and Pagination

In 1999 the Society for News Design and the American Society of Newspaper Editors published a book about how managers could more successfully integrate new technologies into their newsrooms.  This project include a number of chapters from the leading technologists in the newspaper industry, including:

  • David M. Cole
  • Heidi de Laubenfels
  • Olivia Casey
  • Ed Kohorst

While pagination, strictly speaking, is an outdated technology, the concepts about workflow and organization are still very valid. 

I wrote about Embracing Change when it came to future technologies. There were a few things I got right:

  • Working at home, even doing newspaper design
  • Always connected to a network
  • Using databases to edit and present content
  • Constant feedback on what consumers are reading

“You May Need to Rethink Your Whole Organization”

I wrote an article the American Society of News Editors [ASNE] in October 1996 about how organizations need to rethink their structures and workflows when the introduce new technologies, such as pagination. Here’s my lead:

Pagination is an “old” technology. More importantly, pagination will not help a newspaper in the “new media” landscape of today. What’s really important are the opportunities of a publication database system. We can develop all the online, fax, and other new media products in the world, but unless we are lucky enough to be hiring dozens of new employees over the next ten years, we need to figure out better ways of using our existing resources of staff and equipment.

The article was based on a speech I gave at a Seybold Conference earlier in 1996.

Preparing Newspapers for Third Wave of Technology

At the invitation of Olivia Casey, I was invited to write an article for the “ASNE and SND Technology Survey ’96” report.  My topic was on the impact of technology and pagination upon the newsroom and journalists.

One of my key points was the need for editors to take more active control of the issues around pagination and other technology:

The challenge for today’s newsroom managers is to look at these new technologies and see how they might reshape the landscape of news and information gathering and how to make plans to adapt to those changes. It is time to get proactive and stop being so reactive to the changes that have affected and will continue to affect newspapers.

My concept was that newsroom technology was about to enter into a new wave or stage that would be driven by databases and computer systems that allowed for the easy storage and access of information bits and pieces. The industry’s attempts to modernize its backshop production can be divided into three
waves:

  • First wave – electronic paste-up
  • Second wave – electronic composition
  • Third wave – database publishing

Finally, I think I was pretty accurate about how journalists would need to be more generalists:

Where does that leave the journalist as specialist? My career advice is this – get new skills, learn new aspects of the business. This holds true whether you are a reporter or designer. In the future, newspapers will need more generalists, fewer priests guarding the gates of knowledge. These generalists will need the skills to deal with multiple forms of communication – the written word, the audio clip, still and video images. This new form of collaborative publishing will provide the potential of tapping a great number of people to assemble the news. And with more people involved, more and different ideas of how to inform, entertain and enlighten. That is the risk and reward of the third wave.

I also wrote a sidebar about how journalists need to think about the customer:

Tomorrow’s journalists — from reporter to designer to managing editor — must play an increasingly more important role in getting the customer to buy our newspapers, fax services and audio lines and to visit our online areas.  It doesn’t matter how good the content is if nobody reads it.

Again, its all about the customer.

 

Pagination: ASNE Asks the Experts

In the mid- 1990s, pagination was the hot topic for editors.  Most newspapers were starting on their journey to digitally produce the newspapers via computer terminals.  The American Society of Newspaper Editors {ASNE] and the Society of Newspaper Design [SND] collaborated on a project to help newsrooms deal with pagination issues.  I was one of a dozen experts who answered questions for a special report.

 

How the Arizona Republic Installed its 2nd Gen Pagination System

One of the most read newspaper industry technologist is David Cole, who published “The Cole Papers.”  In 1997 he sent one of his reporters, John Bryan, to write about how Phoenix Newspapers replaced its first generation of pagination with a new system from CCI Europe.  One of the reasons we selected CCI in 1995 was its ability to hold items in a publishing database. Here’s one of my quotes from the article.

Chief among the Republic strategist is Howard Finberg, longtime industry pundit, designer and evangelist who professes to be interested in pagination only as a means to an end.

“We don’t want to paginate anymore,” the paper’s director of information technology said. “I believe in publication systems that slice information into smaller and smaller pieces,” which can be used by an infinite number of information “products,” such as a web site, CD-ROM or whatever comes down the pike.

The article described how we made the transition [not quite complete when the reporter visited] and our vision for the future of newspaper publishing.

Pagination Into Database Publishing

As Phoenix Newspapers installed its new pagination system from its European vendor, CCI, I became increasingly interested in the human factors of installing new technology.  And while I didn’t get it all right, even at our company, we did see some of the changes that would be facing the production of newspapers in an ever-increasing digital world.

Pagination is an ‘old” technology. More importantly, pagination will not heip a newspaper in the “new media’ landscape of today. What’s really important are the opportunities of a publication database system.

We can develop all the online, fax, and other new media products in the world, but unless we are lucky enough to be hiring dozens of new employees over the next ten years, we need to figure out better ways of using our existing resources of staff and equipment.

I gave a speech about the topic at the 1996 Seybold Conference.  From that speech I wrote an article for The American Editor, the publication of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which was published in October, 1996

Pagination: Implementation & Human Factors

One of my roles as Assistant Managing Editor of The Arizona Republic involved steering Phoenix Newspapers [PNI] into its next generation of pagination, the electronic design and production of newspaper pages.  In early March, 1993, the Newspaper Association of America held a Prespress Technology Symposium in Phoenix, AZ. I gave two speeches at that conference, one on how The Republic implemented its system.

If you were to create an adage about the installation of a pagination system it might go something like this:

Installing a pagination system is much like building a ship while already at sea – it is possible, but be prepared to get wet.

The second speech involved the human factors in pagination:

A design department using pagination can be one of two things:

  •  A creative department using a specialized electronic tool
  • A service or production department using new tools but following the direction of the paper’s editors

A design department using pagination can’t be both.

This is the fundamental linchpin of any discussion about the human factors of pagination. How to manage the people doing the work.

 

The New Newsroom

One of the challenges for newsrooms in the 1990s was the introduction of pagination technology.  While it was clear that pagination equipment would change how the newspaper would be produced, many managers failed to recognized that installing the new software (and the computers to run it) was an opportunity to rethink the workflow of how a newspaper is produced.

At 1993 Seybold* conference in San Francisco, I gave a talk titled “The New Newsroom.” The subtitles on the PowerPoint reflected my focus:

  1. How technologies are changing organizations.
  2. How organizations are changing technologies.

I argued there was a need for a new type of worker and that managers should worry more than print — audio, fax and video.  Remember, online services were just starting.

My last slide called for “techno-evangelism” and finding the leadership within the newsroom to make the changes needed.  And is a foreshadowing of my future, the slide had these bullet points:

  • Teaching yourself.
  • Teaching your staff.
  • Teaching your boss.
*Seybold Seminars was a leading seminar and “the premier trade show for the desktop publishing and pre-press industry.