Technology takes backseat to
workers in pagination systems
MELBOURNE, Fla. -- People are the key to pagination.
This message was delivered time and again during a two-day pagination workshop held here Jan. 25-26 under the auspices of Harris Publishing Systems Corp.
Workshop speakers -- editors, production executives, consultants, a professor specializing in newsroom burnout -- spoke of pagination with a singular voice: To do it right requires the right people doing the right things.
Forty U.S. newspaper executives attended the workshop, Harris' third pagination confab in the last six years. (Moderator of all three sessions has been the editor and publisher of this journal, who attends on his own dime.)
Once again, Harris put on a good conference, refraining from undue promotion of its own products and making an effort to enlist speakers who aren't Harris boosters.
'Doctor of pagination'
"A person directing a pagination project needs a master's degree in psychology to deal with all of the ramifications of a work force in the electronic world," said Randy Seelye, assistant managing editor for systems and pagination at the Press Democrat of Santa Rosa, Calif.
Seelye is well qualified to address the heartbreak of pagination.
He had been the morning paper's chief copy editor before taking over the transition to pagination in 1988. The 100,000-circulation paper, a member of the New York Times Co. group, moved toward pagination to offset retirements in its unionized composing room and to maintain quality, he said.
The Press Democrat was one of the first papers to use Interactive News Layout (INL), which allows copy editors to trim stories to fit on standard terminals while layout editors design pages on a graphical user interface terminal. INL is a product of System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento, Calif.
The version of INL used in Santa Rosa supports only text and rules pagination -- all stories come out in place on resin-coated paper, but graphics, pictures and ads must be pasted in.
The Press Democrat produces about 55 percent of its pages -- about 175 per week -- on the INL system. The remainder are pasted up in the traditional manner, Seelye said.
As experienced layout editors have taken up pagination, Seelye has recorded a range of responses:
"Some editors love it. They are generally very talented page designers, who see pagination as a way to complete their work of art before the X-Acto knives take over."
"Some hate it. They resist training and don't want to paginate pages if there is any way to avoid it." This group includes longer-term employees who tend to resist any kind of change, Seelye said, and those not skilled at page design.
One editor from this group told Seelye, "I'm trained to be a journalist, not a button pusher!"
"Most accept pagination because they have to," Seelye said. One copy editor at the Press Democrat decided a career change was in order, though, and went back to college to get a master's degree in creative writing.
The paper has found that while some pages -- those with a static layout but changing content, such as stock pages, TV grids and TV books -- can be handled by clerk-level employees, there is a duplication of effort if journalists do not design news pages.
A newspaper needs a "doctor of pagination," Seelye said. Such a person must ensure that everyone is well trained, that a coach or helpful co-workers are always available, and that all systems problems and issues are dealt with swiftly.
Illnesses and vacations being the bane of pagination, Seelye said Dr. Page also must "make sure no one gets sick."
And be prepared. "Always make sure a layout editor is available to back up another editor in an emergency," Seelye said. "We already have a group of three to four on-call copy editors."
The Times is a-changin'
It's been slow going at the New York Times -- deliberately.
With its pagination project just a year old, the Times reports that only a "tiny, tiny percentage" of pages each day are made up on the paper's EdPage pagination system from Atex Publishing Systems Corp. of Bedford, Mass.
"We decided to start slow," said Kristin Tennent, the paper's director of publishing systems.
The Times now is paginating 20 to 25 pages each weekday, none on Saturday and 60 to 80 pages each Sunday, Tennent said. Full pagination of the daily paper is targeted for mid-1996, with the Sunday sections on board by the end of 1996, she said.
Several major reasons have slowed the pagination project at one of the nation's premier papers:
A "surprise" issue was gauging the amount of time it would take to transfer the paper's existing typesetting formats to those that would conform to EdPage. Preliminary time estimates seemed to be exorbitant, Tennent said, so executives planned for a much shorter time frame.
However, when programmers started the conversion, it quickly became apparent that the projected longer development period was closer to reality. As a result, the paper has been scouring the country for typesetting format writers, Tennent said.
Learning pagination takes longer than anticipated. "We're still struggling with the people to understand [layout] doesn't need to be that precise," Tennent said. "We don't know where the learning curve ends."
The paper has to develop a new support structure for pagination. "There's no way support organizations can have the expertise a user has. We have to develop a support structure that has a lot of expertise," Tennent said.
To that end, the paper has enlisted the help of a cadre of "hand-holders" -- the early pioneers of pagination. These workers are now available for quick consultation with editors who are doing pagination.
"Perhaps our No. 1 problem," Tennent said, has been finding space in the newsroom to install the pagination hardware -- large monitors plus keyboard and mouse pad. A recently announced newsroom remodeling plan will alleviate this problem, she said, but not soon.
Another class of problems the Times has encountered comprises what Tennent labeled "technical resource eaters." These include moving the local photo operation to digital scanning, a transition to PostScript output, the implementation of four-color printing throughout the newspaper and the ongoing redesign of various sections of the paper.
The Times also laid out too many goals for pagination, she said, having sought -- simultaneously -- to reduce manpower in the composing room, enhance quality, improve deadlines and allow for more zoning.
"Pagination is not a system, it's a business process," Tennent said. "And we're reengineering that process."
If she were to do this again, Tennent said, she'd go with a "dramatic and speedy" implementation, because an incremental installation produces only "incremental pain."
Pagination should be "executed with surgical precision," she said. "Management at all levels must be totally committed and employees at all levels must be consulted."
The deal at the Dealer
When the Plain Dealer of Cleveland decided four years ago to build a new remote printing and distribution facility, the paper's executives also decided to deliver pages to the new plant digitally.
David Smith, the paper's publishing systems manager, detailed the ramifications of that decision:
"All ads would have to be available in digital format."
"Both color and black-and-white graphics would have to be in the page image."
Color would need to be available in every department, which would require "close coordination with the color lab" by any department that contributed data to a page.
Classified liners and all classified display ads would have to be available digitally. "Missing color classified display ads were of no use," Smith said.
To produce the Plain Dealer of tomorrow, "everyone would need to be tied together with hardware, software and mindsets," Smith said. "People would need to work closely together, consolidating functions and crossing existing department boundaries.
"All the walls would have to come down," he said.
The first task was to develop a networking scheme that provided full redundancy and supported two different workflows for each page component.
After that, Smith and his fellow Plain Dealer executives embarked on implementing a system that uses editorial and classified front-ends from the now-defunct Composition Systems Inc., color systems from Scitex America Inc. of Bedford, Mass., display ad makeup systems from Camex (now a division of Information International Inc. of Los Angeles), Harris and Macintosh-based systems running Quark XPress, and Harris classified and news pagination systems.
Today, the Plain Dealer paginates more than 800 pages of its weekly total of 1100.
Because output is timed in 90-second "slots," Smith said, page flow to the imagesetters must be tightly coordinated.
"Advertising, the color lab and news jointly determine every day, and for each of at least two press runs, which division will release which page for output and when," he said.
Executives were surprised at how quickly users embraced the new technology.
"We subscribe to training enough to get users on a workstation and producing," said Smith. "Then we enhance the training as users become proficient.
"Users constantly ask for more training and less time between the presentation of levels of training," he said. "In other words, they want to know how to use the tools we have provided to produce a quality product."
Because "training should not be one way," the Plain Dealer takes advantage of its users as "a giant resource pool for tips, tricks and shortcuts," Smith said.
Users are encouraged to "pass along information on any new hardware or software they find that will help them do their job easier, quicker or more effectively," he said.
Copy desk stress
Pagination seems to provide an emotional boost to some newsroom employees, according to Betsy Cook, an assistant professor in the department of communication at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
A former reporter and editor, Cook has specialized in assessing job burnout and stress in the newsroom. In the last few years, she has interviewed 326 reporters and copy editors at 31 daily newspapers, using a psychological questionnaire that measures burnout and stress.
Her findings are self-evident to anyone who has worked in a newsroom: One in four journalists plans to quit the paper within five years.
This figure was even higher among copy editors, of whom 39 percent said they planned to leave within five years. Not surprisingly, copy editors had higher job burnout scores than other newsroom employees.
"Copy editors have higher levels of emotional exhaustion and depression than other newsroom workers," Cook said. "They have lower levels of personal accomplishment."
The good news about pagination, Cook said, was that it "seems to increase personal accomplishment."
Pagination seems to decrease emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, she said. In other words, copy editors who paginate seem to have less job burnout than those who don't.
Cook concluded that when it comes to pagination, "copy editors want to be in on planning stages and want adequate training."
Harris Publishing Systems Corp.;
(407) 242-4220
-- dmc
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