Friday, August 7, 2009

How not to publish a newspaper, part 23

Looks like the Times Ledger hired a new layout guy.

5 comments:

Kevin Walsh said...

Or rather, News Corp got rid of the layout guys who knew what they were doing, like your webmaster.

www.forgotten-ny.com

Anonymous said...

This is why you need good proofreaders, copy-editors and layout men. Today's papers have more widow's and orphans than 911 and the Father's day fire together.

Put trained people back to work and stop sending every job overseas.

Ikon-smasher said...

Um, yo, Anonymous: get off your buy-American horse. The labor involved in producing a newspaper is not being shipped overseas. C'mon. You just look silly making such a comment.

The problem is that the local weekly underpay for content: writing, photography, etc. Cutting corners looks great when anyone with a computer is suddenly a typographer.

Anonymous said...

Here is an education for you. Work in the printing industry has been shipped to the far east as far back as twenty years ago. This was before the advent of personal computers when layout was still done on compugraphics machines.

This was disclosed to me when I was selling binding equipment to printers in the 1980s and I was shocked.

Please note that New York State was the capital for printing in the nation in the 1960s when I was growing up. Now the entire area around the low 20s and Varick street have been stripped of their printing houses.

Take a walk if you doubt it. And by the way, do it yourself typographers do exist too, but they are only part of the puzzle, not the whole thing.

Anonymous said...

When I was in college, in the early 1990s, I looked into a proofreading job at the Western Queens Gazette. They were offering minimum wage and 12-hour days. If you have the skills required for proofreading/editing work, you're likely to be able to get better-paying work elsewhere.