“Pagination” Items

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While pagination, strictly speaking, is an outdated technology, the concepts about workflow and organization are still very valid.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.
July/August 1997 TechNews magazine article about The Arizona Republic becoming the first North American newspaper produced entirely with a CCI database publishing system

First U.S. Database Publishing System

From the July/August 1997 issue of TechNews, the magazine of newspaper operations published by the Newspaper Association of America published a story about the conversion of The Arizona Republic to a CCI Europe database publishing system. This was work I led as the paper’s director of information technology. The new system replaced the Information International Inc. (Triple-I) pagination system that had made the Republic one of the first metro newspapers in the country to be completely paginated.

The Arizona Republic recently became the first newspaper in North America to be created entirely through “database-system publishing.” The Republic can now gather information once and distribute it in a variety of formats: from ink-on-paper to online, from fax to CD-ROM.

The first phase was completed June 2, 1997. The story notes that Phoenix Newspapers Inc. was doing this while also constructing a new 10-story building, launching Arizona Central, merging The Phoenix Gazette and Republic newsrooms and closing The Gazette, and moving more than 1,000 employees and their computers across the street.

Finberg described the timing of the switch to CCI’s database system as a lot like “changing the engine in an airplane at 35,000 feet. On paper it looks possible, but in your heart you know it will be pretty tricky. It is not something for the fainthearted.”

Dave Seibert, technology-development manager for news and information at PNI, is quoted on the hardest technical problem — getting CCI to talk to the existing SII text-editing system, which took about six months. David Neibergall, team leader for design, points to WYSIWYG editing, and to designers finally leaving the darkened room the staff called “The Cave,” a space required by the low-contrast green screens of the Triple-I system.

At the time of the article, the Republic was paginating more than 1,100 pages a week on CCI, with a common copy-editing and design database due that fall and reporters moving to Windows PCs in 1998. The piece closes on MediaServer and the ambition behind the whole project:

“With a database publishing system, we’ll have the tools to produce not only the newspaper, but also online editions, magazines, and more. The key is effective access to our content—text, photos, audio—regardless of the delivery method.”

Reading this in 2026, the vocabulary has changed but the argument has not. Create the content once, store it in a structured way, and deliver it wherever the audience happens to be. Every content management system and API-driven newsroom workflow in use today rests on that same idea — one we were arguing for, and building, a page at a time in Phoenix.

Editor & Publisher News Tech column page from March 1, 1997, reporting on the pagination quiz at the 1997 SuperConference in Orlando

“Pagination Imagination” at the 1997 SuperConference

A News Tech column by Mark Fitzgerald in the March 1, 1997, issue of Editor & Publisher, reporting scenes from the Newspaper Association of America‘s 1997 Newspaper Operations SuperConference in Orlando. The centerpiece: a Jeopardy-inspired quiz hosted by David Cole, described in the column as “the newsroom systems maven and editor and publisher of the Cole Papers newsletter.”

The panel of contestants included me, then at Phoenix Newspapers, and Kristin Tennent of the New York Times.

Industry pagination experts such as Phoenix Newspapers’ Howard Finberg and the New York Times‘ Kristin Tennent giggled, hemmed and hawed, guessed and sometimes answered quickly and correctly a series of often-obscure questions about pagination.

Cole’s answer key did not always survive audience review u2014 asked what RISC stands for, he ruled for “chip” over “computer” until the room objected, at which point: “Okay, computer,” Cole said.

One audience-contributed question asked how long it would take for 80% of newspapers to be fully paginated.

By an overwhelming voice vote, the audience picked the answer, “When hell freezes over.”

The column also noted attendance at the 1997 SuperConference was “just over 700, a substantial increase from the approximately 450 at last year’s SuperConference, the first.” Other items in the same News Tech package covered agri-pulp newsprint testing at Smurfit, Blevins Harding Group projects, an Agfa–Monotype typeface alliance, and the 1997 Isaiah Thomas Award to Knight-Ridder‘s P. Anthony Ridder.

April 1996 Editor & Publisher article about the uncertain path to a newspaper pagination system, with a callout quote from the panel

Pagination: Forever Five Years Away?

This is a story by Mark Fitzgerald in Editor & Publisher, published April 6, 1996, about a session called “The Uncertain Path to Pagination” at the first Newspaper Association of America Newspaper Operations SuperConference. I was one of four speakers, in Miami Beach to talk about Phoenix Newspapers’ experience choosing and installing its second pagination system.

Fitzgerald’s framing was the running industry joke that real pagination was always just over the horizon:

Someone will say “true” pagination is still five years down the road. Someone else will make a joke about how it’s always “five years down the road.”

My contribution was to point out that some of us had already made the trip:

“We’ve been completely paginated since 1988,” said Finberg, senior editor/information technology for the Phoenix papers. “Every time we went to a conference like this and heard that pagination was five years down the road, we wondered what road that was.”

The larger point I was trying to make — and the one that got pulled out as the article’s callout quote — was that the word itself had become the problem.

“I think even the use of the term pagination should be banned from here on out. Because that’s not what you want to do — paginate. What you want is to work more effectively.”

The story records my argument that going from hot type to cold type had been evolutionary, not revolutionary, because we simply applied an existing work flow to a new technology. Going digital required rethinking data input and output — which is why Phoenix Newspapers moved to the SQL database-oriented system from the Danish firm CCI. The goal, as I put it in the piece, was “multiple products from the same information,” using the same database for niche publications and Internet publishing. And there was a virtue in the long installation: it forced you to look at work-flow issues first.

“We wanted to end the assembly line where nobody is really looking at the whole publication.”

The other speakers filled out the picture. Linda Bruning of EDS warned that “There’s a whole lot more to pagination than technology.” Mark Francis, president and publisher of the 27,000-circulation Niagara Gazette, described giving every department an equal vote in picking a system, and said his paper was already 100% paginated with all pages going direct to negative film — while still printing on a Goss Mark I letterpress bought in 1949. Mike Schoepke of Paddock Publications described the Daily Herald‘s deliberate, one-element-at-a-time rollout of DewarView.

The skeptics came from the biggest papers. Paul Lynch of the Chicago Tribune said there were still functionality issues. Tom Cusack, prepress director at the Star-Ledger, put his finger on something that would sound familiar to anyone who has ever moved large files around a building:

“The single largest barrier to paginating medium to large circulation papers is the network and communications issues internally.”

Fitzgerald ended the piece the way the industry always ended these conversations — noting that things might change. Down the road, of course.

Phoenix Newspapers press release dated January 20, 1995, announcing the CCI pagination system contract

Announcing the CCI Pagination at Phoenix Newspapers

This is the press release Phoenix Newspapers, Inc. issued on January 20, 1995, announcing that PNI had signed with Computer Composition International for a new editorial pagination system. I was senior editor/information technology at the time, and this was the project I led in Phoenix. I also helped other newspapers think through database publishing.

The point I wanted to make in the announcement wasn’t about replacing aging equipment. It was about what a publishing database could do beyond the printed page.

“This is not just the replacement of a pagination system,” said Howard Finberg, senior editor/information technology. “This is a next-wave system that not only delivers electronic page layout but also database publishing. It will give us the flexibility to respond quickly to the changing ways information can be delivered to our customers.”

And on where that information might go:

“In addition to the newspapers’ traditional design needs for ink on paper, we will be able to use the information that pours into the newspapers daily in a variety of ways online, fax, audiotext, CD ROM and eventually the technologies that will be developed in someone’s garage,” he said.

The garage line was a bit of a joke at the time, since Apple Computers started in a garage. Looking back from 2026, it holds up better than the list that preceded it u2014 fax and audiotext are gone, CD ROM is a museum piece, and the things built in garages turned out to be the whole story.

PNI was not new to pagination. The release notes the newspapers began using Information International Inc. (triple-i) technology in 1985 and were completely paginated in 1987, with The Republic, The Gazette and the Arizona Business Gazette paginating roughly 2,000 pages a week. That history mattered: the CCI installation had to coexist with the triple-i pagesetters at the Deer Valley and Mesa production centers and with the triple-i scanners.

What strikes me rereading it is how much of the release is given over to the people who would actually use the system. Johnny Thoegersen of CCI made the WYSIWYG argument u2014 that the same designer could do more pages in the same amount of time, thanks to templates and automatic features u2014 and described the database as a central information repository accessible across departments. But the better quotes came from inside the building.

Dave Seibert, a pagination project team leader at PNI, said the CCI system “will let us pull up data and link photos easily. And the designers won’t have to work in a cavelike, low-light atmosphere anymore. They’ll be able to see a headline in color in their screens, something they can’t do now.”

Jenny Ignaszewski, a Gazette page designer, is looking forward to the new system because “it will make it easier to do wraps, illustrations and typography. We’ll have the capability of doing feature page design more easily under deadline.”

Mike Wilson, project team leader from Information Services, called CCI “the best system on the market today” and flagged the real engineering challenge u2014 the interfaces back to the existing triple-i equipment. The CCI server was to live in the computer room on the third floor of the Phoenix Center. Where the page design system itself would go was, as of the announcement, still undecided.

Installation was scheduled to begin that summer, with the first phase completed in late 1995.

One last artifact worth noting: the contact block at the bottom lists a fax number and an e-mail address, hfinberg@pni.com. In early 1995, listing both was still a hedge.