Why Robert Knilands Is Partly Right

Robert Knilands -- variously known as Rknil, Wenalway, and as a bete-noire and pain in the ass to the point where he has been banned from a number of discussion boards -- is too quick with ad hominem condemnations.

He hijacks various topics and keeps beating them against the wall with what clearly are posted rants.

He gets unduly personal and bitter. He not only holds people's work in contempt, which is churlish but fair, he holds them personally in contempt because of their work when he does not know them at all.

He continually presents the American Copy Editors Society for attack because it is not what he thinks it should be -- a phalanx to somehow force news organizations to change their ways -- instead of what it is -- a training and support organization that was not created to hold a cudgel to bosses' heads.

He comes across as an angry man whose idea of debate is, "Let me tell you how stupid you are, except you're too stupid to even realize it."

And yet.

Knilands' main point -- that when copy editors also became page designers, the craft of copy editing was pushed to the side -- is partly hyperbole, because at most papers copy editors were always page designers of a sort. Most small papers had people who edited copy and drew page dummies for the composing room. Occasionally you laid out a photo package or the like. It was part of the job. Only at the larger papers -- which from my knowledge Knilands never worked at -- were there ranks of copy editors who just edited copy. And only as graphics capabilities improved in the 1980s did some of these desk jockeys become designers instead of simply news editors or copy editors.

And yet.

My esteemed former colleague Charles Knittle, now in charge of copy editing for national and foreign copy at the New York Times, addressed the salient point at the ACES conference in Philadelphia, as noted on Doug Fisher's "Common Sense Journalism":

"•Knittle: Copy editors were unnecessarily smug when pagination rolled into newsrooms in the 1990s. Hundreds of printers and backshop makeup people were laid off. A few copy editors were hired. But what the editors actually were learning was a "machine skill," the same kind of skill those printers and makeup people had, the same kind of skill that is easily displaced."

And copy editors now indeed are being laid off (or, in foreign countries, their jobs are being outsourced) as publishers -- and yes, editors -- increasingly decide that they are "production" workers, the same as linotypists, stereotypers and the like used to be. They are no longer seen as actual editors, but as people who move something into the realm of publication the way the person running the Ludlow set the End of the World giant headlines. They are viewed -- wrongly, of course -- as mechanics who do not produce anything. Knilands might say, and such is justice, and he would have a point.

Yes, we did believe that by taking design and production into our own hands, we were becoming essential. And yes, we have found that when the monetary chips are down -- as they have now been for years -- some publishers and editors will say that a poorly edited story with a mediocre headline and an incomprehensible caption and a graphic that does not match the story is clearly sub-par but at least is something, whereas copy editors do not create and designers draw pretty pages that are irrelevant on the Internet.

So the main point of Knilands' criticism -- that copy editors ceased to be editors and became illustrators, doing work that can be outsourced or junked, while not concentrating on their real task, which is editing -- is one deserving fair consideration.

Yet -- how would he have had us act otherwise? Say "No, we're not going to do that?" The unemployment door awaited. It wasn't a vast conspiracy. Although the essential desire was to save money, most of the people proposing this also believed it would mean that the newsroom would now be in final control of all pages and that this was a Good Thing. Most of us wanted to be part of that. God knows I believe in copy editing, yet I also saw this as a Good Thing.

What's amazing is not that Robert Knilands has a valid point (although Charles Apple, Howard Owens, and others might think so). It's that whether the work is being outsourced to Corpus Christi or Lynchburg or wherever, editors who once proudly said "the newsroom will be in final control" now seem to just roll over and nod when that work passes from the control of their newsroom. (Yes, I know they can see the pages instantly on their computers. Yes, I know they can text or call. It's not the same as walking over to someone's desk in the newsroom.)

Is this simply a reflection of financial times? Or does it reflect that the editors of (now) 20 years ago, who welcomed pagination and design into their newsrooms, had come of age in the era of composing-room control, whereas fewer of today's editors experienced that and thus say, so what's the big deal? Or is it simply that the standards of the Web -- immediacy and convenience (combined with easy disposability) trump all, and the reader's expectation of quality is thus far lower -- are either inevitable, or are actually the same standards held by a number of publishers and editors?

Personally, I wish that Robert Knilands didn't act like such a jerk. Perhaps his points would have been taken more seriously. On the other hand, he might note, he got attention, and perhaps would not have had he been more civil. So, again perhaps, Knilands simply stands as a representative of the Internet media age, one that cannot fully meld its longings for the standards of old with its desire to be included in the new, and thus, as did Obi-wan, wishes this were a more civilized age as it tries to deal with the empire instead of the republic, and often ends up light-sabering its own foot as a result.

Excitement

In the early 1980s I was occasionally doing the front page for The Flint Journal, which had a big street sale with first-shift workers coming out of the city's then-gigantic auto plants. I was trying, in keeping with the best thinking about newspapers then -- you weren't selling breaking news in the afternoon, you were selling in-depth journalism, you didn't want to overplay stories -- to do a front page placing the most meaningful, thoughtful stories at the top, with evocative headlines that could convey their subtlety -- i.e. small. And I got word that I was killing the paper's street sales.

When people came out of the factory, they wanted to see a big headline on the Journal's front page, one that said -- there's something interesting here. Buy this. All I was giving them was a small blur of black. And until then we had run stories above the flag, we had chopped the flag down by two columns. I knew instead that one was always supposed to run the flag full-width at the top of the page, and laid out the page in that manner. The flag was the visual starting cue that let the reader know where to begin.

When I was a child reading The Honolulu Advertiser -- if I've never explained how, as a child in Indiana, I read The Honolulu Advertiser every day, don't ask, but I did -- the paper would have gigantic headlines in red, and sometimes the name of the paper would be placed as an afterthought in columns three through five. The Los Angeles Times "Preview" edition had huge headlines.

The thinking in the 1950s and 1960s, though, was that that treatment was just for street sales. The home subscriber wanted something more restrained, more middle-class.

Department stores used to have display windows facing Main Street, some of them over-the-top. I remember talking to executives of Ziesel Bros. Co. in Elkhart, Ind., in the early 1970s. They had taken out the display windows because research had shown that people liked to see into stores to see the actual merchandise. Unfortunately, what you saw inside the windows of Ziesel Bros. was the store and not that much merchandise. I'm sure that there was a turn away from artificially designed display windows, but if you replaced it with a boring view of a store that next week looked pretty much like last week, why would anyone get excited?

In the 1980s, newspaper designers said that the flag was sacrosanct. Did Time run the word "Time" at the bottom of the page? And so the flag became an immutable element. Now papers such as The State in Columbia, the Yakima Herald Republic and the Klamath Falls Herald and News are running mini-flags, overlay flags, embedded flags. Also, papers such as the Waco Tribune-Herald are making sure that every day's paper comes with one extremely large headline. Alan Jacobson's design for the Boomerang in Laramie comes with almost incredibly large headlines above the flag, which may be halfway down the page.

What this has needed is a blessing, and now designer Mario Garcia has given it. I'm sure many designers will be aghast, that this deviates from all the work done to create clear navigation and a sense of priority and reader comfort. And those things are important. But they only work when someone actually uses the paper. And clearly many papers are asking themselves if they have become too staid, too predictable, too caught in the New York Times vision of saying that whatever may happen in the world, it is (with rare exceptions) not a surprise to The New York Times or its readers and thus it will be treated appropriately and measuredly. That is how readers of The New York Times want to see themselves, but it probably doesn't move many papers in Tulsa.

Yes, the reader wants to be able to get through the paper easily, and yes, geegaws and gimcracks ought not to get in the reader's way out of our boredom. But America is full of front pages that nearly scream, "Gee, nothing in particular happened today." If we're just going through the motions, why should you care? The sanctity of the flag always seemed to me to be more about the sanctity of the designer's design than selling the paper. Even if it will inevitably swing too far, it's time to swing. Excitement and fun are not opposed to good journalism.

Might As Well Jump?

So my former colleague Ehren writes from Fort Worth to say, in essence: OK, smarty pants. Readers don't want jumps and you say you're on their side. But how does one really do that? Is all you can put on the front, then, short, substanceless stories, what with photos, graphics, indexes, and a shrinking page width?

Ehren's right; saying "no jumps" is disingenuous on my part. As long as you have a broadsheet you will have jumps. The question to me is: Do you use known reader dislike for jumps to say, "Let's hold them to a minimum or at least make them more user-friendly"? Or do you use the impossibility of having a totally jumpless paper to say, "Well, we can't do anything about that, sorry?"

We're not just talking about A1 here. I get four papers home delivered, and this morning they have:
Paper 1: Five A1 jumps, six B1 jumps, three D1 jumps, four E1 jumps, three F1 jumps. One story (C1) does not jump. Jumps are on three A section pages, five in the B, two in the D, two in the E, two in the F.
Paper 2: Three A1 jumps, three B1 jumps, four C1 jumps. Two stories (A1, B1) do not jump. Jumps are on three A section pages, two in the B, three in the C.
Paper 3: Four A1 jumps, three B1 jumps, five C1 jumps. Two stories (B1) do not jump. Jumps are on one A section page, one B section page, three C section pages.
Paper 4: Four A1 jumps, four B1 jumps, four C1 jumps, three W1 jumps. Three stories (B1 and C1) do not jump. Jumps are on three A section pages, two in the B, two in the C, three in the W.

So that's 59 jumpers and seven that don't (I hope, I'm a journalist, I can't do math). Of the seven, two were columns. And this was held down by its being a Friday, when two of the normal broadsheet features sections are replaced by Weekend tabloids. This is how we respond to readers' asking for fewer jumps.

How does one respond? Something's got to give. We could respond to younger readers' preference for tabloid- or Berliner-size newspapers, but that involve spending money we don't have, not to mention plunging into the unknown (upset older readers, advertisers who want a full broadsheet page, no comparability to the New York Times). Why, you can't completely change your product line and image! It won't work. Look at Cadillac. Oops, it worked for them, but you know...

But we don't have the money for new iron anyway. So what can we do?

1. Assume, like USA Today, that the reader has time for one substantive story per page, and try your best to always jump it to the second page of the section. This is a good method on inside tabloid or Berliner pages as well.
2. Do like Waco and hold down the story count. As noted earlier, readers seem to like this, although you have to devise a new internal reward system for good staff-written stories that aren't on A1, lest the reporters stop writing in despair. Or, you could just do like Singleton in California and lay off all the reporters.
3. Do like Rockford or Fort Worth and make the front page a poster for inside.
4. Do like the Guardian and have one or two substantive stories on A1, which may jump or which may refer to more inside, and have three to four synopses of stories.
5. I can't tell if the Globe and Mail does that or just jumps every story on a break, which is at least more reader friendly than jumping the story and having the first line on the jump page consist of:

Continued from A1

said.

Various jump-friendly strategems have been tried, such as the Johnson City Press' jumping all stories to the back page of the section and printing it upside down, or the more popular trying to herd all the jumps onto one page. None of these have worked in the long run, for probable good reasons -- usually involving advertising's wanting to sell the back page because it has color, or not all of the jumps fitting. The "there will be no jumps" edict has also been tried, and it always fails as well. So as long as we use the broadsheet front page as our model, yes, there will be jumps. If Al Neuharth could have gotten rid of them all at USA Today, I suspect he would have. Even he could not crack that nut. And there is no absolute solution that will work every time. The point is that the way we do it now is for our convenience rather than the reader's, starting with the Times' jumping A1 stories into the C or D sections because "it's coming out of their space."

Ehren also notes that Fort Worth's no-jump poster front page draws criticism from people who don't like reading a paragraph of a story. Well, anything you do will draw criticism. I wonder if it's from the same people who don't like jumps? If so, maybe there is nothing we can do short of being a tab (which they wouldn't like either). There still are people who read the paper from front to back, and they may not like being told "Oh, why don't you look at B7 now" whether by jump or refer, because they will and then they go back to A1 and they get confused. But if we confine our audience to the people who find newspapers the way they are today user-friendly, we are really in trouble.

The other question is whether they're the "give me red meat" readers who are mad at the Times for starting the inside of the A section with three pages of refers. (They may be the same as the front-to-back readers for all I know.) We think of these as our core readers, but part of our problem in the Internet era is that our most involved readers -- the real "news junkies," particularly the political ones -- are going to get most of their news online whatever we do in print. Why read one story about Obama when you can read 15? Trying to put out a print newspaper simply to satisfy those readers is a dead end. More on this to come.