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Learning to think in inches
We've been working up to this week's edition for almost a year now, ever since last November, when we cast a few electronic pages into cyberspace.
Amazingly enough, they were reeled in by the computers over at the Mountain Press in Franklin. By the end of 2003, we were routinely sending our section fronts that way.
While we understood intellectually that we were going to have to learn to make up the entire paper that way at some point down the road, we didn't necessarily believe it.
However, the "future" quickly turned into the present. This week's edition of The Sylva Herald is likely to be the last one to include pages made up with scissors and wax (Can you guess which four pages?) instead of with mouse and monitor.
Our younger crowd – Nick, Sherry, Kelly and Zeke – welcome the change. Computer-savvy since elementary school, they are used to trusting what they see on the screen. As for the rest of us – Carey Phillips, Margo, Cindy, Jan and me – well, we're learning, and we're adjusting.
Frosty and Norman, veterans of countless newspapers, will still proofread for us. But it won't be the same on Wednesday mornings as it was when we all gathered in one room, rushing around to manually fit in the last story, check the last ad, or make the last correction.
We're amassing a new vocabulary to replace "line gauge," "pica pole" and blue pen. Now we bandy about terms like "pagination," "pdf" and "ftp."
When I first joined the staff of the original Cashiers Chronicle in 1981, I didn't even know what a pica was. I soon learned that there are roughly six picas to an inch, but, more importantly, there are 12 points in a pica. If a line measured 30p5 picas, it didn't mean it was 30-and-one-half picas, it meant it was 30 picas and 5 points.
Tuesday, as I was preparing to end some 23 years of judging an item's heighth or width in picas, I learned something new from the glossary of a book called Designing the Total Newspaper by Edmund C. Arnold. He defines a pica as a "unit of printer's measurement, 12 points; also, name formerly used to designate 12-point type." I knew the first part, but I've never heard "pica" used to refer to a particular size of type.
With the advent of the computer-compiled page, picas are fading fast. The key to publishing a newspaper is the advertising, which pays the bills, and ads are calculated in inches. While I could cling to picas (the computer lets you choose whether you want to measure in picas, inches, millimeters or ciceros - whatever they are), it's not really practical.
For Frosty, who's been here longer than everyone else (only Maxi comes close), it's the second time he's gone through a vocabulary adjustment. He arrived at The Sylva Herald when all the "type" had to be set by hand into lead slugs that were then fitted into a steel chase – one for each page. A typical front page weighed in at around 110 pounds, he said. Metal wedges called "quoins" were used to secure the type in the chase. The quoins slid together and were tightened with a "quoin key." If it was turned too far, it could cause "work-ups (when the type spacers got pushed up causing the printing surface to be uneven)," Frosty said, which meant the quoins had to be loosened so the type could be realigned.
During National Newspaper Week, it seems appropriate to look back at how the mechanics of bringing the news to our community have evolved from "hot" type (melting the lead) to "cold" type (phototypesetters and offset presses) to digital files traveling the Internet. One thing that hasn't changed is our commitment to provide complete and accurate coverage of Jackson County's news. We may have had to alter our composition methods and deadlines, but we're not planning to shift our spotlight from local people and events – that's our niche, and we're sticking to it.
We'll just have to do it inch by inch instead of pica by pica.
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