As we celebrate the completion of our second year, TechNews is giving you a present--a poster that shows the steps in the newspaper production process. The poster emphasizes new technologies that promise to eliminate steps, hence its title, "Less Is More."
To our knowledge, this is the first time any trade publication has tried to capture the entire production process on one sheet of paper, and now we know why. The task was enormous.
Our plan was to run the diagram as a gatefold in the center of the magazine. When I tried to sketch the first version by hand, though, it became apparent that I would need a 17-by-22-inch working space.
Then I called a meeting of NAA's technology staff to review and edit the sketch. They added a number of steps that I missed and also suggested other ways to accomplish the same production task ("A lot of papers do it that way, but Lexington does it this way...")
Two things became clear. The first was that I would have to grow the poster again, this time to 22-by-34 inches. The second was that I couldn't continue editing it by hand--the chart had become so complex that I was forced to enter it into a Windows-based charting program.
After another editing session with our technology staff, I turned the now spaghetti-like but accurate diagram over to designer Bill Pragluski of Critical Stages. He drew the final version in Aldus Freehand.
The entire experience gave me renewed respect for our readers. You truly have a complicated job--producing a new product every day of the week using a maze of people, processes and machines. It also taught me to think twice before trying similar projects in the future!
On a separate topic, a number of people approached me at the first meeting of NAA's Newspaper Color Reproduction Task Force to say that we got the colors wrong on the cover of our last issue. The colors should have emerged from the prism in this order (from shortest to longest wavelength): violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red. TechNews regrets the error.
Clark Robinson
Editor
©1997 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.