All the News that’s Print-to-Fit ?
On Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer correctly noted that while the New York Times’ slogan is “All the News That’s Fit to Print” (first appeared in 1896) the reality is it is “all the news there is room for”.
While I was working for a newspaper pre-press software company, we often noted it was “all the news that’s print-to-fit”. Part of that cynisism came from the fact our customers (some very large newspapers from around the world) had more requests for ad layout and “creative formatting” features than editorial content.
One of the coolest things we did on that project was to create a “morning front page” each day. We had a direct feed from AP (the associated press) and one of our techie IT guys made an automated queue for the stories coming in. The original intent was to give us test content for our news page layout software.
When the communist easter block started tumbling like dominos, in the end of the 1980’s, we created a map of Europe and started marking the changes. This became a regular water-cooler conversation piece.
One day, while testing our product, we did a full frong page - complete with the map and real stories from AP. One of our more artistic people, Tamar, created a banner and Pete, who had a little marketing flare, did a slogan. Within a couple of days, we had what looked like a real news paper!
Over the next few months, we started most days with a nearly automatic run of our “local news paper”.
I miss those days of crteativity, working together, and world change.
Postscript: with today’s RSS and ATOM feeds, the above story is not so amazing. There are lots of ways to create a personal “home page” but I don’t think it will compare to the daily pages we created in 1989 and 1990.
Thanks Tamar, Pete, Steve, and Tom.
(This blog entry was from a mobile device. Please forgive and typographic errors.)
