December 1998, Vol. 9, No. 12

Grammar school

Back to basics -- from web sites to 'teams' to color reproduction

In college, it was all pretty clear -- the way you wrote a story, the way you crafted a headline, the way you laid out a page. The professors' decades of personal experience supplemented a century of past practice in the journalism biz.

Today, it is less clear. Should every web page have an ad? Should we be running ads paid for by a company on the same page as a story about that self-same company? How many graphics go on a web page? What’s "too much" or "too little" in a web site?

As luck would have it, we have one of the World-Wide Web’s deepest thinkers right here on our staff. Correspondent Christopher J. Feola -- whose day job is director of the Media Center at the American Press Institute -- gets paid to ponder the future of on-line communications.

Last summer, he came up with the notion that over the years we have developed what he calls "a grammar" to all of our communications -- there’s the grammar of film and TV, the grammar of newspapers, the grammar of magazines. But, he realized, the World-Wide Web is too new to have yet developed a "grammar."

Hence, Feola convened an eclectic group of journalists, writers and computer geeks at the Media Center last month to figure out what this new grammar might be.

Obligations here in California prevented me from attending this, the third of what I call "FeolaFests," but J.T. "Tom" Johnson -- newspaper editor, magazine writer, magazine editor and journalism professor -- agreed to chronicle the goings-on of the 30 new media grammarians.

But, before we get to the grammar school, first I thought it important to show what a large-scale community on-line operation looks like. Correspondent Marion J. Love visited the Community Newspaper Co. operation in Needham, Mass., and gives us her look at how a group of weeklies -- albeit, with more than 115 logotypes, one of the biggest collections of weeklies in the country -- has gone on-line.

Love’s assessment is that the Community folk have harnessed a great deal of technology to give the community a tight, focused web site that provides information that isn't available anywhere else -- on the Web or in print. (It should be noted that last summer The Cole Group discussed doing some consulting for Community Newspapers; nothing came of those discussions.)

On the other side of the Media Center story, Correspondent L. Carol Christopher takes a look at how newsrooms are changing in the late ’90s. Christopher talks to editors at newspapers where the concepts of "teams" and "leadership" have pushed aside "desks" and "editors."

She draws the conclusion that the concept of middle managers at newspapers is fading fast, but that then means that line workers will be given more responsibility.

In the last story in the issue, Christopher gives us a peek at the work-in-progress known as the Newspaper Association of America’s Newspaper Color Reproduction Task Force. While attempting to gain more national advertising, newspapers have begun to confront the problem that advertisers desire consistent reproduction in all the papers they buy. And, while many papers are exemplary in their color quality control, others aren't quite so noteworthy.

The NAA Task Force (for which Christopher is doing some writing work) is moving at the speed of a committee, but it’s doing a good job that needs to be supported by the entire industry.

After all, if you can't get the color right, you may as well go back to grammar school.

¶

Holiday cheer desk: It’s been nine years since the humble offering we call The Cole Papers made its way through a difficult birth (little-known fact: there is no reference to newsletter publishing in the original business plan for The Cole Group). My life is immeasurably different today -- better, I might add -- in many ways because of the readers of this little newsletter.

Thank all of you for your support in 1998, and may you have a good holiday season.

Looking forward, we all have a lot to do in the penultimate year of the century. Here’s to a great 1999.

-- David M. Cole