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Tag: newspapers

Published November 1, 2019

Farewell – etaoin shrdlu

Farewell – etaoin shrdlu is a half-hour documentary about the last day of hot metal typesetting at The New York Times.

The 1978 film by Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss shows the remarkable nightly production process for a daily newspaper and the changes to come with the transition computers.

The title ‘etaoin shrdlu’ refers the words made by the letters of the first two columns of a type-casting machine keyboard. If I understand this correctly, the phrase was used by operators to create an ‘obvious’ mistake in a line of type to be discarded.

And if this sort of thing is your bag, the video was posted to Vimeo by Linotype: The Film along with number of other archive films about typesetting that are worth checking out.

via PressPad Apps / Open Culture

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Published June 12, 2015

Dear Araucaria

The Rev John Graham, better known as Araucaria, set the Guardian’s cryptic crossword for 55 years. In December 2012, Araucaria announced that he was dying of cancer through a series of clues in a crossword. In this short film, Graham talks about puzzles, the memories and ideas that inspired him, and setting crossword number 25,842:

You can read more about the film here.

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Published February 26, 2015

How The New York Times Works

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In a fascinating piece for Popular Mechanics, Reeves Wiedeman looks at how the New York Times gets made in 2015. It’s interesting how their graphics department has evolved in the past few years:

The Times employs approximately 1,300 journalists, a classification that now includes much more than writers, editors, and photographers. There are videographers and developer–journalists and graphic designers, who insist that you not call them graphic designers. Every section of the paper has been affected by the Internet, but the graphics department is hardly recognizable from the days not long ago when, to accompany a story about Borneo, for example, it would simply produce a small black-and-white map of Borneo. [Graphics editor] Duenes’s desk still produces traditional newspaper graphics, but it also now employs thirty-five people who have expertise in statistics, programming, cartography, 3D modeling, motion graphics, audio production, or video editing. At the department’s two long desks, designer Haeyoun Park combs through data on the racial breakdown of police forces—a story the graphics team reported without any instigation from print reporters—while nearby Matt Bloch is updating the paper’s digital hurricane tracker… A breaking-news event might require eight members of Duenes’s team, who are otherwise free to focus on the kind of in-depth reporting for which the Times‘ print reporters are generally known. Last August a graphics editor who had been tracking police data for four years discovered that the New York Police Department had more or less ended its controversial stop-and-frisk policy, which some critics had described as racial profiling. This was news to the reporters on the Metro desk, and the editor there assigned a story to go along with the graphics department’s analysis.

The story, and the graphic, ran on the front page.

I also particularly liked the stuff about their R & D Lab:

The R&D Lab opened nine years ago with the goal of looking three to five years into the future. (TheTimes declined to say how much it cost to build.) Marc Frons, the company’s CIO says he has no idea how people will interact with theTimes in ten years, “whether it’s on your wrist, or your forehead, or you take a pill, or it’s a holographic contact lens, or a head-up display in your vehicle—or on your mirror in your bathroom.” The lab explored E Ink before the Kindle even existed, was responsible for delivering the earliest versions of the paper’s mobile news alerts, and helped the Times become the first publisher with an application on Google Glass. One of the lab’s researchers recently designed a brooch programmed to light up whenever a topic is mentioned that matches something the wearer read about online that day. What good would that do, exactly? Boggie answers with enthusiasm, “We don’t know yet!”

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Published December 5, 2014

The Complete Little Nemo

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If you were wondering what to get me for Christmas this year, Taschen recently published Winsor McCay: The Complete Little Nemo 1905–1927, which collects together all 549 of Winsor McCay’s extraordinary Little Nemo strips.

First published in The New York Herald in 1905, McCay’s innovative, beautifully detailed strips have been available online for sometime, and there have been attempts at reprint collections before, but this oversize edition looks absolutely gorgeous:

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Published June 3, 2014

Times New Roman: Designing The Times

Originally designed for The Times in 1931, Times New Roman is now virtually ubiquitous — a default most people don’t even think about. In this lovely looking film — part of a series of beautifully produced short films about the history Times and Sunday Times newspapers — designers and typographers re-evaluate the font and its legacy.

(via Creative Review)

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Published January 2, 2014

Society is Nix: The Quotidian Chaos of the Urban Scene

J. Hoberman reviews the oversize comics collection Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip, 1895–1915, edited by Peter Maresca and published by Sunday Press Books, for the New York Review of Books:

Society is Nix focuses on the depiction of then-contemporary metropolitan life. In addition to Hogan’s Alley and other metropolitan jungles, the comics reveled in the quotidian chaos of the urban scene: the pushcart madness of “Familiar Sights of a Great City—No. 1, The Cop is Coming” is rendered as a mock-classical frieze. Genuine monuments are regarded with derision; several strips in Society is Nix satirize the rapid transit system then under construction in New York. As the twentieth century approached, cartoonists extrapolated a city of the future, replete with snow-capped office buildings, floating real-estate agents, and colliding single-person dirigibles, or ponder “the possibilities of wireless telegraphy” which, save for predicting communication with Mars, seems much like the Internet…

…In his introduction, Maresca refers to these comic strips as “the birth of modern popular culture”—perhaps “mass media” would be a better term. These strips were not only all over the page, they were in big cities all over the country—the most successful supplements reached hundreds of thousands of readers in New York alone. Yet at the same time, they were wildly experimental… [The] first newspaper comic strips were not so much an extension of vaudeville as precursors of the equally déclassé and temperamentally anti-authoritarian motion picture. The early strips thrived on choreographed violence, including runaway horse carts, baroque streetcar collisions, and a panoply of what Hearst might have termed polychromous explosions.

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Published October 11, 2013

Dear Mr. Watterson


Dear Mr. Watterson is a documentary film about the impact of  Bill Watterson’s beloved comic strip Calvin & Hobbes:

The film was funded by Kickstarter, and will be in theatres and available ‘on demand’ on November 15th, 2013.

(via Coudal)

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Published September 21, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

A short interview with Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C, in The Guardian.

Heart of Darkness — William Deresiewicz on Harold Bloom and his new book The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life:

I started to develop the Heart of Darkness theory of the Yale English department. Conrad’s novel is about colonialism and racism and the shadowed reaches of the human heart, but it is also a dissection of bureaucracy. My first clue came when I realized that my chairman was a perfect double for the manager of the Central Station, that creepy functionary who has “no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even,” who “could keep the routine going—that’s all.” But what clinched it was the recognition of the role that Bloom played in the paradigm. Bloom was Mr. Kurtz… Bloom, like Kurtz, ignored the rules and was strong enough to impose his own. Bloom, like Kurtz, was the shadowy genius who had sequestered himself in his private domain and was managing to produce, by methods however “unsound,” more material than all his colleagues put together… Bloom, like Kurtz, was a legend, a rumor, a vaguely malevolent presence (or absence) to be spoken of in awed and envious tones. What was not to like?

Paying For It — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on paywalls and the transformation of the newspaper business:

The newspapers that will survive, and perhaps even thrive, in the years to come will be those that are able to offer the most distinctive products and to tailor those products to a variety of consumption modes, spanning payment methods and devices, in a way that maximizes revenues and optimizes readership. And because an online news site is not a perfect substitute for a printed paper for either readers or advertisers – I cancelled my paper subscription a couple of years ago but ended up resubscribing after realizing that I was missing something – print editions will likely remain a crucial element in the mix indefinitely.

Browsing or Browsers? — The Economist neatly summarizes the effects of digitization on publishing:

Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is the gradual disappearance of the shop window. Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins, points out that a film may be released with more than $100m of marketing behind it. Music singles often receive radio promotion. Publishers, on the other hand, rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to books that they might not have considered buying. As stores close, the industry loses much more than a retail outlet. Publishers are increasingly trying to push books through online social networks. But Mr Murray says he hasn’t seen anything that replicates the experience of browsing a bookstore.

And on a related note, The Toronto Review of Books,  edited by former bookselling colleague Jessica Duffin Wolfe, launched this week.

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Published March 13, 2011

Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

James Fallows, veteran journalist and author of Breaking the News, has a lengthy article in The Atlantic on Gawker and the effect of digital media on journalism:

One by one, the buffers between what people want and what the media can afford to deliver have been stripped away. Broadcast TV was deregulated, and cable and satellite TV arose in a wholly post-regulation era. As newspapers fell during the rise of the Internet, and fell faster because of the 2008 recession, the regional papers fell hardest. The survivors, from The New York Times to the National Enquirer, will be what British newspapers have long been: nationwide in distribution, and differentiated by politics and class. The destruction of the “bundled” business model for newspapers, which allowed ads in the Auto section to underwrite a bureau in Baghdad; the rise of increasingly targeted and niche-ified information sources and advertising vehicles; and the consequent pressure on almost any mass offering except for sports—all of these are steps toward a perfected market for information of all sorts, including news. With each passing month, people can get more of what they want and less of what someone else thinks they should have.

Every news organization recognizes this shift… The Atlantic is now profitable in part because traffic on our Web site is so strong. Everyone involved in the site understands the tricks and trade-offs that can increase clicks and raise the chances of a breakout “viral” Web success. Kittens, slide shows, videos, Sarah Palin—these are a few. For us and for other publications, they are complications. For Gawker, they’re all that is.

According to Fallows, however, the disruption is also creating new, positive opportunities:

Economic history is working against “legacy” news organizations like the BBC, The New York Times, NPR, and most magazines you could name. But historical forces don’t play out on a set schedule, and can be delayed for a very long time. Economic history is also working against museums, small private colleges, and the farm-dappled French countryside, but none of them has to disappear next week. Even as it necessarily evolves, our news system will be better the longer it includes institutions whose culture and ambitions reach back to the pre-Gawker era, and it would be harder and costlier to try to re-create them after they have failed than to keep them on life support until their owners find a way to fit their values and standards into the imperatives of the new systems.

But the new culture also creates positive opportunities—as, it’s worth saying again, every previous disruption has… At no stage in the evolution of our press could anyone be sure which approaches would support life, and which would flicker out. Through my own career I have seen enough publications and programs start—and succeed, and fail—to know how hard it is to foresee their course in advance. Therefore I am biased in favor of almost any new project, since it might prove to be the next New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, NPR, or Wired that helps us understand our world.

If you are interested in journalism and news media, the whole article is definitely worth your time.

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Published November 19, 2010

The Bends

The Guardian has posted an transcript of this year’s Andrew Olle Lecture given by their editor Alan Rusbridger. The subject of his talk was “The Splintering of the Fourth Estate”, and even in its edited form, it is a long and fascinating read that covers movable type, the BBC,  Rupert Murdoch, social media, pay walls, collaborative journalism and more. It’s essential reading…

It’s developing so fast, we forget how new it all is. It’s totally understandable that those of us with at least one leg in traditional media should be impatient to understand the business model that will enable us magically to transform ourselves into digital businesses and continue to earn the revenues we enjoyed before the invention of the web, never mind the bewildering disruption of web 2.0.

But first we have to understand what we’re up against. It is constantly surprising to me how people in positions of influence in the media find it difficult to look outside the frame of their own medium and look at what this animal called social, or open, media does. How it currently behaves, what it is capable of doing in the future.

On one level there is no great mystery about web 2.0. It’s about the fact that other people like doing what we journalists do. We like creating things – words, pictures, films, graphics – and publishing them. So, it turns out, does everyone else.

For 500 years since Gutenberg they couldn’t; now they can. In fact, they can do much more than we ever could.

(via Jay Rosen)

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Published September 1, 2010

Jay Rosen on the Media

The Economist’s Democracy in America blog has an interesting Q & A with Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at NYU and author of What Are Journalists For?, about the American news media. The focus is largely on politics (Democracy in America is a blog about American politics after all), but Rosen’s insights into the future of the news media in general are also pertinent to the book industry:

The cost of changing settled routines seems too high, but the cost of not changing is, in the long term, even higher. A good example is the predicament of the newspaper press: the print edition provides most of the revenues, but it cannot provide a future. I know of no evidence to show that young people are picking up the print habit. So if the cost of abandoning print is too high, the cost of sticking with it may be even higher, though slower to reveal itself. That’s a problem…

…[T]he alternative to chasing clicks is building trust and an editorial brand. “What people want” arguments don’t impress me. I think anyone with a half a brain knows that you have to listen to demand and give people what they have no way to demand. You have to listen to them, and assert your authority from time to time, because listening well is what gives you the authority to recommend what is not immediately in demand.

Link

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Published July 19, 2010

Finding the Unique Visual Story

The latest Gestalten.tv video podcast is a conversation with New York Times Graphics Director Steven Duenes and Graphics Editor Archie Tse. Duanes and Tse talk about creating daily images, diagrams, charts, and interactive media for the newspaper, and providing the clearest possible visualization of data:

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