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.