From Tedium:
Trimmed For Space
*Editor’s note: Tonight’s Tedium is an updated rerun of a classic issue about the stuff that newspapers get rid of when trying to slim down. Unspoken in this article: Usually, the final step of this process is people. And with the recent sagas of L.A. Weekly and (on the digital side of things) DNAinfo, now felt like a good time to revisit. (If you’ve read before, keep reading; there’s a new section on newsprint.)*
Today in Tedium: In an era when you can print anything on the internet with little regard to length, it makes sense that certain parts of newspapers and magazines would soon hit the chopping block, as lower budgets and higher newsprint costs made space for actual stories into a true luxury. Among those things were the TV listings, sports statistics, and stock tables. These things, once seen as necessary furniture to convince the public to buy newspapers, went by the wayside as soon as it turned out that the internet could simply do them better justice. Today’s Tedium talks about the earliest victims of the move from print to digital. — Ernie @ Tedium
5.5pt
The average size of agate copy, as found in most newspapers. Agate copy traditionally has been used for things like stock tables, sports scores, and classifieds. These pages generally have a lot of information to share but not a lot of space to share it in. Agate type—which generally fits 14 lines to a single vertical inch of copy length—is generally the smallest copy in a newspaper that is considered readable.
True story: If it weren’t for the 50-inch web, I may not have gotten my first full-time job in journalism.
When I started my job at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the company was one of many taking on the challenge of trying to figure out ways to cut back on the amount of newsprint they needed, with the goal of saving as much money as possible.
One of the ways they could do this was by cutting back on the number of pages used. But another slightly-less-noticeable way involved cutting the width of the newsprint used in creating the issue, a couple inches at a time. In publishing parlance, the width of the newsprint is called the “web,” so as a result, newspapers were cutting resources to one web as they were trying to increase them in another.
The Journal Sentinel was one of many newspapers eyeing shrinkage at the time I started working there as a temporary employee in late 2004, with the newspaper deciding to make some bigger changes to their software infrastructure as a direct result of the move.
However, they were far from the last, and definitely not the most aggressive in cutting away the amount of newsprint used. That honor goes to the Wall Street Journal, which went from a 60-inch-wide broadsheet to a 48-inch-wide broadsheet thanks to a single design change, one that effectively cost the newspaper a full column worth of content on every single page.
This decision to cut the width of the literal newsprint being used had some clear costs in terms of overall space, and it also required a lot of planning—getting copies of desktop publishing programs ready for the smaller size, for example, and getting advertisers and designers ready for the big shift....
....MUCH MORE
