'Rewizardry' just a natural part of paper's evolution

Here's a sentence they didn't prepare me for in journalism school: "Your column modules need to be rewizarded."

Even the woman passing along this intriguing diagnosis - Lisa Miner, a key newsroom editor doubling temporarily as a specially trained mentor in our new computer system - was slightly embarrassed, prefacing the phrase with a tone mixing apology and pride, "I can't believe I'm going to say these words."

But say them she did, and in so doing, she summed up three decades of evolution in the journalism business. How is it that so many young poets, investigators and idealists who simply loved to find interesting things and write about them came to be ruled by such terms?

Wasn't it only yesterday that we were hacking away at our Coronas, the acrid smell of the glue pot burning our nostrils as we envied the grizzled old drunk two desks over hunting and pecking on the office's only IBM Selectric?

Ahh. Those were the days. Would that I could count the number of technological "improvements" that have occurred over the years in the interests of making our jobs "easier" and your newspaper more attractive, complete and up-to-date.

Indeed, they are many, and you'll pardon me in the midst of the anxieties of yet another technological transition for wondering if each advance hasn't also brought a trade-off of one frustration for another.

Consider, for example, a once-not-uncommon problem you haven't seen in the Daily Herald for nearly 15 years. Before the advent of electronic page-making, the text of stories was printed out in long strips of photo paper, cut into sections by hand and organized into columns on the page. Often, in the heat of deadline or just through the course of normal human error, paste-up workers would accidentally mix up sections of type after they'd cut them up and a story might appear on the page in a confusing, virtually impossible-to-decipher order. The advent of electronic pagination rendered this particular annoyance nearly extinct.

But it replaced it with another, even more common and less predictable one that we have spent years trying to eradicate - the story that seems to end in mid-sentence because a computer decided, between the time that a copy editor approved the page and it actually printed out on a metal plate, to hide the words behind an ad or picture.

So far in our current transition, our most-noticeable and most disconcerting challenge was a typeface that, in defiance of all logic and scientific measures, appeared to look smaller than previously. People who understand what rewizarding column modules is worked to eliminate this one and we're monitoring it carefully to make sure it doesn't happen again.

We prefer, of course, for these evolutionary transitions to occur seamlessly and beyond the notice of readers. But that is a vain hope. The fact is that our entire production system is changing. Eventually, all cynicism aside, it will bring improvements for you, helping us produce the paper more efficiently and giving much greater flexibility and capability to get you interesting information quickly on the Web. In the meantime, we are learning new techniques, procedures and, yes, vocabularies, so we hope you'll pardon us if, as remodelers might say, some of our dust shows from time to time.

Which reminds me that I've got to learn how to type fractions on this new system. I'm told all I have to do is create them from glyphs and then dock my glyphs on the side.

Sigh.

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.