Like our member newspapers, NAA is always trying to do more and work smarter with our limited resources. Sometimes this involves experimenting, or as some industry wags put it, "thinking outside of the box." (I've always wondered, "What box ?")
This issue marks the culmination of two such experiments--the first annual TechNews Best Practices Awards and the first joint TechNews/Atwood Convention Publishing/Presstime coverage of NEXPO.
To be honest, we launched the Best Practices Awards for mostly selfish reasons. Our reader surveys told us that the stories you find most useful are those where a newspaper has solved a problem better than anyone else-in other words, you want to read about best practices in the industry.
TechNews began its life with an inside track on these stories. Unlike any other industry trade magazine, we can boast unlimited access to a goldmine of information--NAA's Technology Department. Our technology staff spends much of its time consulting in the field and working with the NAA Technology and Telecommunications Committee. The staffers are the ultimate insiders--quite plugged into who's doing what, and who's doing it the best.
Even so, there's no way our staff can hear about everything that goes on in newspaper operations. We needed a way to "flush out" the best practices, whenever and wherever they might occur. Ideally, we wanted people who were engaged in best practices to stand up, identify themselves and tell us what they were up to.
We conceived the Best Practices Awards as an incentive for people to do just that, and hoped that a plaque, a $1,000 stipend and recognition in our magazine would be incentive enough. Thankfully it was, as I'm sure you'll agree when you read about the winners in this issue's cover story.
But the fruits of the Best Practices Awards don't stop there. Upcoming issues will contain stories about some of the nominated practices that didn't win an award, but are still creative, excellent and utterly fascinating. Stay tuned.
In Atlanta in 1995, TechNews, our sister publication Presstime and Atwood Convention Publishing all covered NEXPO separately--TechNews and Presstime for special issues of our magazines and Atwood for the NEXPO News, the show's daily newspaper.
There were a few problems with this approach, to put it mildly. Yours truly spent 27 straight days on a Mac to get TechNews to the printer and considered joining a monastery to soothe the resulting burnout. More importantly, the NEXPO News did not achieve a sufficient level of quality, and TechNews' NEXPO coverage was so similar to that of Presstime that the two magazines bordered on repetition.
This year we decided to pool our resources and differentiate our coverage. TechNews and Presstime worked with Atwood to produce the NEXPO News, and many NEXPO'96 attendees commented on how much the paper had improved. The next challenge was to analyze all the information we had collected and package it for the magazines. We decided that Presstime would run several overview pieces, each highlighting three or four main points, for its audience of general managers. TechNews would then produce separate stories about each of these main points, getting into technical detail for our audience of operations managers.
Change is always frightening and experiments sometimes fail. We like to think that these two experiments, however, worked fairly well. But you are the ultimate judge of that, and we'd love to hear your opinions. Please take a moment to drop us a line at one of the addresses listed under "Feedback Facts".
Oh, and if you're one of the wizards developing best practices for our industry, why not fill out a nomination form for the 1997 Best Practices Awards and send it in? There could be a plaque and $1,000 in it for you--and a great story in it for us.
Clark Robinson
Editor
Your feature article titled "Secrets of the Quality Winners" in the May/June 1996 issue was of particular interest to me as national product manager for newspaper blankets at Polyfibron Technologies Inc. (PTI). Until 1995, PTI was a division of W. R. Grace. Since 1995, we have been an independent company and the single largest supplier of offset blankets to newspapers in the United States. Our blankets are distributed in the United States exclusively by the New England Newspaper Supply Company (NENSCO).
The chart on page 13 that references primary blanket suppliers indicates that four respondents use Grace and four respondents use NENSCO blankets. There is no such thing as a Grace or NENSCO blanket! All eight of those respondents use Polyfibron blankets, sold to them by NENSCO.
All industry trade publications received a press release when the new company was formed and our products are exhibited under our brand name at all major printing trade shows worldwide. I am looking forward to Polyfibron Technologies being recognized in future issues of your magazine.
Les Bruce
Newspaper Product Manager
Polyfibron
Technologies Inc.
Billerica, Mass.
In tabulating the results of the survey, TechNews made no attempt to interpret the respondents' answers. In an attempt to be faithful to the survey respondents, we decided it would be better simply to report exactly what they said. So, even though they may be technically incorrect, some people in the industry who produce high-quality newspapers apparently still think of Polyfibron blankets as either Grace or NENSCO blankets. --Ed.
©1997 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.
