October 2001, Vol. 12, No. 10

The inexorable march of afternoon newspapers into the morning field had always seemed like a good idea. Until Sept. 11, anyway.

Thirty years ago, 20 percent of all U.S. dailies were morning papers; now, half are. So, on Sept. 11, with the biggest story of our generation pretty much happening live on television before noon, morning newspapers were in something of a fix: How could they react when their next publishing cycle was at least 12 hours away?

The answer was to reach into the past and remember the concept of the extra edition.

Thirty years ago, with hot type still dominant and cold type a relative newcomer, papers would have been hard-pressed to deliver extras in the middle of the day. Composing rooms would have been unable to build lots of pages quickly; there just wouldn't have been enough printers still at work.

But today, with the now near-complete adoption of digital full-page makeup, the pages could flow out of the newsroom with relative ease. I'm certain that in many instances, feature page layout editors -- who would have been the only paginators in the office at 10 a.m. or so -- were pressed into duty.

The Poynter Institute of St. Petersburg, Fla., has kept an on-line display of the front pages of these extras (as well as the Page Ones of Sept. 12) and you can see them at http://www.poynter.org/. The Society for News Design also has a collection, at http://www.snd.org/.

As I have said elsewhere, Sept. 11-12, 2001, was probably newspapering’s finest hour. And technology played a big role.

But the biggest role it played was the fact that (unless I missed it somewhere) nobody mentioned the role that technology played. The ability to create news pages quickly was a given for most editors and publishers: They didn't think twice about an extra because it didn't mean waiting for people to come in. The folks already in the newsroom could easily create whatever needed to be created.

It has taken the better part of the last 30 years to make computerized newspaper creation a relatively transparent process. Think back to those early days of the ’70s, when the idea was that a reporter typed with a special typewriter on special paper that was sent through a special machine that read the typing. Trying to put out an extra in the optical character recognition (OCR) days would have been hell (I did put out a couple of deadline-driven editions in the OCR days, and they were hell).

Inside, we look at the events of Sept. 11 through the prism of a trade show. Seybold San Francisco was held two weeks after the terrorism -- the organizers took the position that holding the show was the best thing to do. Though some East Coast exhibitors didn't come, and attendance was off as much as 20 percent, it was still a good show.

There were three major announcements at the show which I cover: Apple Computer Inc. released the latest version of its new operating system, OS X; Adobe Systems Inc. announced the release of an upgrade to its InDesign page layout application, and Quark Inc. released a public beta of the next iteration of its venerable XPress.

Next up, we go down onto the Seybold trade show floor with Correspondent George Powell; his piece is followed by some of the words I heard uttered at the conference.

We wrap up the issue with Correspondent Jason Zappe’s look at the Citrix cross-platform networking environment and the sale of Autologic Information International Inc. to Agfa.

They say that everything was different after Sept. 11; for most newspapers, the biggest difference -- the maturity of publishing technology -- wasn't even noticed.

--David M.Cole, dmc@colepapers.net