Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 23, 1993 TAG: 9308230273
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: C3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Betty Strother
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The newspaper is in the process of yet another major change, my friends, though this is not one that will make you choke over your morning coffee. We're not moving any more section fronts to the backs of sections, moving Bill Cochran's Outdoors page again or tinkering further with our classified ads. This time, the agony is all ours.
Go ahead and snicker.
We are starting on a little process at the newspaper called pagination, which looks like a harmless word there on your printed page, which you are holding so comfortably in your hands and reading with such ease. For those of us who have to get that newspaper into your hands, it is a terrifying test of our ability to adapt.
Well, terrifying for some of us. Newspapers are not unlike the real world in that computer nerds exist here in roughly the same proportion to us common, garden-variety nerds as can be found in any business or group endeavor. They are in their glory.
But some of us, at least, are suffering a little anxiety.
What pagination is, basically, is printing out entire newspaper pages on the computer. Instead of typesetting individual stories, which are pasted onto pages by production workers, editors arrange all their stories onto a page on a computer screen and push a button. A few minutes later, the page spits out of the typesetting machine.
As Mike the Computer Guy says, ``Piece of cake.'' For him.
And, indeed, this might not seem like a big deal to you if you've been printing reports, letters and recipes on your personal computer for years. Trust me. It is a big deal. Each newspaper page is made up of many stories, each of which contains elements with several different type faces and sizes, all of which are set on the page in different widths and depths, and most of which have to be updated several times through one night's work.
If you're still discombobulated by your Extra section appearing on back of Sports on Saturday mornings, the thought of this titanic struggle should cause no alarm. Once the entire paper is paginated - and this will take months - the only change you should notice is that the type you are reading will never be crooked, and it should never be on the page in the wrong order.
This is progress.
Since I arrived at this paper 15 years ago, our computer nerds have been saying that pagination is five years away. The technology existed, but it would be five years before it was developed to a point where a large daily could use it and still publish daily. Always five years. That was such a nice, comfortable time in the future.
Then one day recently, a new computer showed up on my desk, keyboard-to-keyboard with the high-tech word processor that I'd grown to know and trust. After 15 years, our five years was up. Pagination was here. Our tech services guys were very excited, and told me brightly that they were leaving the new computer in my office so I could ``get familiar with it.''
A week later, I discovered it wasn't plugged in.
Oh, well. There wasn't much point in trying to use the thing yet, anyway, I thought guiltily. The pagination programs weren't on it.
So I wasn't exactly on a first-name basis with this baby when Mike the Computer Guy showed up at my office door. His real name is Mike McNall, and he's the site manager here for the computer company that sold us this system. He was going to be training me and a handful of other people the following week, and he wanted to introduce himself and make little reassuring noises that there was nothing to fear; it was going to be OK.
Obviously, he'd worked with newspaper people before. We're such whiners.
Which is why I'm pretty sure he was also here to gauge the numbskull factor, though he was too nice to be obvious about it. Some folks in our little training class actually have been working on similar computers for years, and they wouldn't need a lot of basic instruction. I assured him that when it came to computers, I knew a mouse wasn't a rodent, and an Apple was something other than a piece of fruit.
Hey, I figured, if I was going to be put through this torture, why should I offer him any comfort? He didn't seem at all discouraged. And he said he liked for the classes to be fun; we'd have a great time.
A sadist, I thought.
And then I noticed the pattern on his conservative business tie was actually lots of little Mickey Mouse heads peeking from behind swirls of color.
For the first time I thought, this just might not be too bad.
I was wrong, of course. The next week, I and another bonehead struggled with the simplest tasks associated with putting type on a page while being bombarded with confusing information about screens and windows and commands. We were opening up windows and working in them, closing them and opening new windows, and all the while I was wondering where the heck all this stuff went when it was no longer on my screen.
``You're doing great,'' Mike told us. ``I have no doubt you're going to get this.''
Right, Mike.
Meanwhile, the staff artist in the class with us whipped through our little practices and spent his free time drawing kitty cats on the screen and coloring them. And a features page designer yelled out answers to the harder questions in our pop quizzes just before I had a chance to answer. Really. I almost knew some of them.
The show-offs.
Mike assured us that along about Day 3 all this information would start to make sense, and we'd be ``rockin' and rollin'.''
Right, Mike. I had a layout right here on my screen, and now it's gone. Just tell me what I did and where it went.
He actually was right, as it turned out, though. It was maybe more like Day 4 for me, but it did finally start to make sense, and I finished the course feeling pretty confident I would be able to paginate my Commentary pages. Some day.
My first effort took me only a day and a half, and I figured if we could just go to every-other-day delivery of the newspaper and quit wasting time writing editorials, this would work well. And our critics would like it, too.
Mike looked a little hurt when I shared that thought - or maybe just weary. I figure it wasn't the first time he'd heard it, or something close. Newspaper people are, after all, such whiners.
I was just kidding, though. I've been working at this gamely for the past two weeks. And while it still takes me hours longer to put together a page than the old way, it's getting easier. I can tell the skeptics honestly that I think it will be faster once I'm used to the technology.
Of course, I've been wrong about everything so far, and I might be wrong about that, too. But this really isn't so bad. I'm going to zap this column on the page right now, in fact. Just have to put in this coding and call up the old layout window, and ...
Mike?
by CNB