A frantic call at home on Saturday morning. “”What happened to Forum? Can my column be run on Monday before it goes stale?”
This was from a Canberra Times staffer, so the public must have been more worried.
Sure enough, I saw one of our better known lobbyists at the shops a bit later.
“”I see you have dropped everything for the Olympics,” he gruffed. ”Not even a Letters page.”
They were both wrong and both right. Forum was in Saturday’s paper. There was also a Letters page. The trouble was the Olympics special. Printing the 24-page Olympics tabloid has meant we have had to move things from their usual places.
The changes were indexed. The material was there. It was only a matter of turning pages to find it. Nonetheless, quite a few readers could not find things. The more regular the reader (or writer) the more likely they were to miss bits.
So we miss-read that one. We should have done more last Saturday to alert readers about irregular positioning of things. We spend years training our readers who get to know where things are. And they get annoyed when they are not there. TV Guide between the books on Monday. Education on Wednesday. Obituary on Friday and so on. Old habits die hard (ask the monastery laundry).
The paper has to evolve and readers will tend to accept a permanent move if they see an improvement. Opening the second book with Business, for example, met with approval. (A book, by the way is jargon for a section that can be pulled away separately, the front page of which is on the same sheet as the back page.)
Some of the changes to accommodate the Olympics special, however, appear to defy logic from a reader’s perspective. Week after week, Forum and the letters page open the third book, suddenly they don’t. We had to put the race guide in the Olympics lift-out last week (and may have done so today, but I don’t know at the time of writing). We are not on our own here. The Sydney Morning Herald had their Opinion Page in the middle of the Olympics liftout one day last week.
From the publisher’s perspective, however, there is method in this madness. It is called press configuration. There are limits to how many pages you can print at a time; which pages will have colour on them; how many books you can have; how many tabloid pages you can put between the books and so on.
Editors and Advertising Managers are at the mercy of press managers. Press managers (or the Operations Manager in modern, less meaningful parlance) monopolise their knowledge of press configurations like medieval clerics or modern lawyers. They will never reveal the detailed theory behind what the press is capable of. Rather they will just work out whether a particular combination can be printed. Our Operations Manager, Barrie Murphy, is a genius at working out whether it is possible to do say: 18 page front book with colour on Page 1, 8, 15, 17 and 18 with a 24-page all-colour tabloid in the middle and a back book of 12 pages with colour on the back for Sport. He’ll squiggle on a bit of paper for a minute and say, “”No, but you could do 16 in the front with colour on 1, 2, 7, 8, 15, 16 and 14 in the back.”
I know people in the advertising department who keep records of combinations to try to catch Barrie out. “”But we did that on December 8 last year,” they will plea in vain, because Barrie will have some other reason up his sleeve.
The limitations of the press are created by the number of units, the number of colour towers, the folders and the pre-printing capacity.
The basic roll of newsprint paper is four broadsheet pages wide. Each unit of the press pulls paper in from one of these rolls and prints two rows of four pages on each side. The first row is folded on to the second row horizontally. That is folded vertically twice — making 16 pages. We have five press units which gives the press a limit of five times 16 or 80 broadsheet pages, or 160 tabloid pages.
If you have a paper less than 40 broadsheet pages, you can print two copies at once and hence half the press time. If you have a paper greater than 80 pages you have to print some of it before the main run, put it aside and as papers are printed in the main run inserting machine grab a copy of the pre-printed bit and insert it into each copy printed in the main run. This is done, for example, with the real estate and Panorama section on Saturday.
The way the paper runs into the folder restricts the combinations of books and inserts. And not all of our five press units have a colour tower through which the paper is drawn across ink rollers with yellow, magenta (red) and cyan (blue) to give full colour. That adds further difficulty configuring the press to satisfy readers and advertisers.
When you add an Olympic special, particularly on a Saturday, something has to give. What gave was Forum, Letters and Sport. Instead of forming a separate book as usual on a Saturday, they had to go at the back of the second classified book. Advertisers have come to expect colour and so took the front of the book.
In an ideal world you would have a book opening or closing with colour for each editorial and advertising section of the paper. But the press (and the Operations Manager) rule. Hence on Friday and Saturday you will find Business in black and white in the middle of a book and, alas, Panorama inside the Real Estate section.
But if you think that is bowing to advertising, bear in mind that until 1966 The Times, London, started Page One with the Births, Deaths and Marriages, putting the news inside. Don’t tell that to the Advertising manager.
Jack Waterford is in India and will be back in the chair in a couple of weeks. He instructed me not to let on that he would be able to pick up his email (jack.waterford@canberratimes.com.au) from there, but rather to put mine at the bottom of this column.