Making models for a living

INDIANAPOLIS -- Inside the Old Gray Lady is a schoolgirl on rollerskates, and Tim Oliver gave her the skate key.

Oliver is a presentation editor at the New York Times, where until recently he worked on gussying up the Business Day section front "250 times a year."

Like others at the annual Society of Newspaper Design conference, he spoke pointedly about the need to work with others in the newsroom to ensure that gathering content in all forms was the top priority in designing a good page. For a display package to work, he said, an enterprise story "must be interesting, illuminating and newsworthy."

To spur the process, Oliver said, he adopted a role to play in the two daily planning sessions: "I feel like the Joe Reader in the meeting, saying what does this really mean?"

When the approach to displaying a story has been decided upon, he and others gather materials to present -- words, of course, but sometimes parts needed to create illustrations. A quest for realism guided the staff -- "try to take the Mac look out of your page," Oliver said.

He cited a story about how a consortium of nations was responsible for building the Airbus Industrie A300 jumbo jet. Not wanting to use photographs or computer-generated illustrations, the staff searched far and wide to find a model of the plane.

Made by Revell, the model's instructions were in German, the difficulty rating was 4 on a scale of 5, and there were 150 parts, which Oliver took home and assembled that evening, then took to the Times photo studio the next day to be photographed.

Images of the exploded parts were tagged to identify the source by nation of all the plane's components, clearly and effectively helping the reader grasp the scope of the production task.

The goal of the Business Day staff is to simplify complex stories, making them more accessible to nonbusiness readers while not turning off core readers. With two years of Business Day behind him, Oliver offered 10 presentation guidelines: