“Visual Editing” Items

Visual Editing, a 2025 AI Assessment

I asked Chat GPT to summarize and review my textbook, Visual Editing. The book was published in 1990, so it is now 35 years old.  While I recognize that AI can be overly flattering, I did like the idea that AI thinks that the book holds up after so many years.

Here’s the AI post:

Visual Editing: A Textbook That Saw the Future of Journalism

When Visual Editing: A Graphic Guide for Journalists hit the shelves in 1990, it arrived quietly. Co-authored by Howard I. Finberg and Bruce D. Itule, the book was a forward-thinking, deeply practical response to a media industry already beginning to shift—from black-and-white column inches to colorful, visually sophisticated storytelling.

Today, more than three decades later, Visual Editing remains a remarkably prescient guide to the newsroom revolution that followed.

A Four-Part Framework for the Visual Newsroom

  1. Visual Journalism Fundamentals

This opening section sets the stage: design isn’t just about what looks good—it’s about what works. Finberg and Itule walk readers through the mechanics of layout, typography, and page architecture, emphasizing that every visual element should guide and enhance a reader’s experience.

“Design’s purpose is not to decorate, but to organize.” — Finberg & Itule

The authors stressed that typefaces, color palettes, and column structures all carry meaning. Typography is treated as a language. White space is described as a tool for pacing. And color isn’t optional—it’s strategic.

  1. Informational Graphics

Decades before “data visualization” became a buzzword, Visual Editing called for charts, maps, diagrams, and tables to be integrated with editorial content—not simply appended. These visuals, the book argues, are journalism.

Each form is broken down with precision:

  • Line and bar charts are great for trends.
  • Pie charts work best with part-to-whole relationships.
  • Maps can orient readers faster than paragraphs.
  • Facts boxes summarize what really matters.

And the pitfalls? Misleading scales, confusing layouts, and “chartjunk”—a term popularized by Edward Tufte, echoed here in spirit if not in name.

  1. Picture Editing

Photojournalism is front and center in this section. From cropping and caption writing to ethical manipulation, Finberg and Itule dive deep into the power—and responsibility—of image selection.

They emphasize that cropping isn’t neutral. It shapes narrative. Captions aren’t throwaways. They frame context. And with photo manipulation on the rise, they offer clear ethical lines, warning against changes that mislead or editorialize.

The section even anticipates the workflow of digital photo editing, laying out how wire services distribute images and how picture desks filter them.

  1. Art and Illustration

The final section celebrates creativity but tempers it with editorial discipline. Illustrations can do what photos can’t: show abstraction, metaphor, and future events. But they must serve the story—not override it.

The book recognizes the growing importance of art directors, then a relatively new role in the newsroom. Finberg and Itule see them not as decorators, but as collaborative editors who shape how readers feel, learn, and remember.

“Illustrations are ideas made visual. They require just as much reporting as any article.” — Visual Editing

Why It Was Overlooked—And Why It Matters Now

Despite its importance, Visual Editing was never widely adopted by journalism schools. It was too early. Most programs were still teaching students how to write leads and proof galleys—while newsrooms were already experimenting with infographics, desktop publishing, and color.

Finberg, who would go on to become a leader in digital media strategy, was already thinking beyond the printed page. His vision, articulated in this book, was clear: visuals are not embellishments—they are journalism.

A Legacy That Endures

Though created for a pre-internet newsroom, Visual Editing holds up remarkably well in today’s media landscape. The rise of interactive graphics, mobile-first design, and visual explainers owes a debt to the principles it laid down:

  • Design as a form of editorial judgment.
  • Visuals as storytelling tools, not accessories.
  • Ethics as the backbone of photo and infographic use.

In the words of Mario Garcia, a legendary design consultant who appears in the book:

“Content cannot be separated from experience.”

Finberg and Itule understood that before most journalism educators—and their book remains essential reading for anyone serious about visual storytelling.

*Want more digital-era context? Explore our evolving archive of newsroom transformation at *www.digitalfuturist.com

 

Straits Times, Singapore, Workshops

In 1993 I taught a series of workshops or training sessions at the Straits Times newspaper in Singapore.  These sessions were aimed at the copy editors and visual editors of the newspaper.  Attendees also came from the Business Times publication, the New Paper and two non-English language newspapers: Zaobao and Berita Harian. 

Actually, there were two weeks of training, with a different group for each workshop.

Workshop goals were:

  • The challenge of serving readers more fully today
  • The challenge of serving readers in the next century

And the topics covered were:`

    • Readership issues
    • Typography & readability
    • Designing
    • Photography
    • Graphics
    • Critique

At the end of each workshop, I looked at the Year 2000 and views of top designers and what the newsroom might be like.  This was based on an API seminar I attended and presented at.

I also did critiques of the Straits Times, the Business Times and the New Paper.

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.

1999 American Press Institute letter from John G. Finneman confirming participation in the Newspaper Design: 2020 seminar

An Invitation To Imagine Newspaper Design: 2020

Eleven years after API’s Newspaper Design: 2000 and Beyond u2014 the 1988 seminar I’ve already posted documents about elsewhere on this site u2014 the American Press Institute decided to run the exercise again, this time looking two decades out. In the spring of 1999, John G. Finneman, API’s director of operations and administration, wrote to confirm that I’d be part of the 16th annual J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar in Reston.

This is to finally confirm that you will be participating here in API’s 16″ annual J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar, which we’re entitling Newspaper Design: 2020, on Oct. 24-26.

The letter is explicit about the lineage, and it’s worth reading alongside the 1988 material in the timeline:

As we’ve discussed, this will be a follow-up to API’s 1988 program, Newspaper Design: 2000 and Beyond.

At the time I was director of technology and information strategies at Phoenix Newspapers, Inc. u2014 a title that says something about how far the conversation had moved from the drafting table since the first seminar. The assignment, though, was the same one: put on the collective creative hat.

During our upcoming fall program, participants once again will be asked to wear their collective creative hats and envision the “newspaper” of 2020 from a design standpoint. How is it most likely going to evolve and what might it look like?

The quotation marks around “newspaper” are Finneman’s, and they do a lot of work.

The Society of News Design was again a partner, with a study organized around three buckets u2014 design, color and infographics; technology and new media; and people. Finneman credits the framing to a conference call I’d had with David Gray:

Warren told me this is what you came up with in your conference call with David Gray.

The signature element of the 1988 program came back as well. Each participant would build a front page of the future, content mix and all, for analysis and a post-seminar book.

These pages, which will once again be featured in our post-seminar book, will be analyzed in advance by Roger Black. As he did in 1988, Roger will be leading a discussion on the body of work.

The seminar was underwritten by API’s J. Montgomery Curtis Fund, which covered tuition, room and meals at the Hyatt Dulles, plus the production of the book. Participants paid their own way there. And, in a detail that dates the letter as surely as anything else in it, I was asked to send along a glossy photo and a biographical sketch.

Looking at this from 2026, the target year has come and gone u2014 and then some. What strikes me is that the 1988 group was asked to imagine 2000 largely as a printed artifact, while the 1999 group was being asked about 2020 with the web already reshaping the question. Whether any of us got it right is a matter for the front pages themselves.

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.

Editor & Publisher book review column from August 11, 1990 featuring a notice of Visual Editing: A Graphic Guide for Journalists

Editor & Publisher Reviews “Visual Editing”

A book review column from Editor & Publisher for August 11, 1990, written by Hiley Ward. The column paired a review of the revised and abridged Autobiography of William Allen White with a shorter notice of Visual Editing: A Graphic Guide for Journalists, by Howard I. Finberg and Bruce D. Itule (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 270 pages, paper, $32.50).

Ward’s review credited the book for leading with technology, then acknowledged the practical limits facing editing classes of the day.

This modern editing textbook has its foot in the right place as it early on deals with the new technology — the electronic story, electronic copy editing, electronic photography, electronic everything. Interactive and passive pagination are discussed.

Even then it is still hard to shape up a textbook for the modern editing class. For one thing, a lot of classes are not going to have the capability to do what is discussed. Secondly, a lot of the basics still have to be covered, elements of good design, picture editing, typefaces.

The review noted the chapter sidebar interviews with working professionals — citing Lynn Stanley, editorial design director for the Boston Globe, interviewed in the chapter on “How Art Directors Work” — along with the book’s history of newspaper illustration and its emphasis on information graphics and picture editing.

As it compares front pages, many in color, the book is as appealing for the practitioner as for the novice.

The review closed with the authors’ affiliations at the time:

Finberg is assistant managing editor at the Arizona Republic and Itule teaches at Arizona State University.