ASNE - Pagination: It's hard, it's painful, it's worth it

The change is wrenching to those involved and quality can suffer in the short term, but the long-term payoff of improved design and better deadlines more than offsets it

At an October ASNE Copy Editors Conference in Lawrence, Kan., the question was posed to a panel of editors familiar with pagination: Would you ever want to go back to laying out pages with pencil and paper?

The answer was unanimous: "No way."

Despite the system crashes, blown deadlines, chaos and frustration during the transition period, newspapers that have successfully made the transition to pagination are now reaping the benefits.

That has certainly been the case at the Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier.

In 1992, we installed a Systems Integrators Incorporated Interactive News Layout system. At first, the transition was painful - I'm not sure we made a deadline in the first three months - but once the learning curve was achieved, the results were worth it.

We now move about 450 pages a week through the system, and almost all go directly to negative. Pagination has allowed us to alter our deadlines, allowing us to get in later-breaking news and sports results.

Other benefits of pagination are obvious: The newsroom is in control of the finished product. What you see on the screen is what you get. There are no errors that can happen with paste-up such as crooked copy, copy falling off the page or transposed paragraphs. Pagination also eliminates time waiting for pages to be completed, and multiple pages can be released at once. The newsroom is in complete control of page flow.

So what are the lessons we learned from pagination.

It takes more people

Publishers and bean counters too often see pagination as a means to eliminate jobs and add to the bottom line. Don't let them fool you. Work is not being eliminated. It's only being moved from the composing room to the newsroom copy or design desk.

We tried to make the transition with two additional people (one moving from composing), but quickly learned that we needed to add two more copy editors.

The copy desk needs TLC

The transition to pagination can create a lot of stress and anxiety on members of the copy desk. Too often, they feel they have gone from being word editors and designers to computer technicians. We even had one 20-year copy editor resign rather than attempt to learn the new technology.

During the first few months, we had a drop in editing quality, and an increase in the little irritating mistakes. While not excusing mistakes, editors need to be supportive of their desks during the transition and assure them it is going to get better. It will.

Training

Make sure you have an extensive training program before the transition and for new employees. Before switching to pagination, we put all editors through a two-week training period. With new employees, we put them through a week with our systems-training editor before they begin work.

You'll also need to phase in a pagination system. We started with the features and zoned pages since they were under the least deadline pressure.

Then we moved to the news/business pages and completed the transition with sports. Besides letting us work out some of the kinks off the live press deadline, that plan provided a group of experienced editors who could help other desks with the switch.

Reorganize

With pagination, the workload is going to change. You have to decide what is best for your size staff and newspaper. Most larger papers are moving to the design desk concept, where page designers do all the layout and pagination while the copy desk maintains the function of editing copy and writing headlines.

Others find that the best solution is to have the flexibility of having the copy editors do editing and designing. Still others have technicians, usually former composing room employees, do the paginating from dummies supplied by the copy desk.

At the Post and Courier, we adopted a combination of the first two systems.

Our features pages and advance pages are done by a design desk. But the news and sports pages on deadline are handled by copy editors. Because of our size (109,500 daily), we found that a well-trained desk where all editors are capable of editing and paginating is paramount for flexibility in scheduling.

The word is your most important product

With pagination, the copy/design desk has control over the pages. But there is no backup to catch errors once the page is sent to negative. That's why you need to develop a page-proofing system. You also need to hire good editors and teach them to paginate, instead of trying to teach computer geeks to spell.

Tarleton is executive editor of the Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C.