The next Thursday, after three days of building bolder and bolder designs and scattering page proofs all over the desk he was using, Galen Gainey had the new Style page design finished. Style Editor Jill Fowler got a private audience with Gainey in the conference room to see his finished product.
He sat at the conference room table, which was littered with proof sheets lying beneath and around his MacBook laptop. As he was every time she had seen him, Gainey was wearing a vest. This one was gray with a chalk stripe. It obviously belonged to a three-piece suit, but Gainey was wearing tan dungarees and a burgundy shirt with it. His long shirt sleeves were rolled up above his wrists, and his glasses dangled low on his nose.
He greeted her warmly when she came in and smiled broadly. He invited her to sit close beside him so he could show her the page proofs while both could also look at his laptop’s screen.
She couldn’t believe the full-color proof when he showed it to her. The page was dominated by a four-column color photo of a painting. It was placed squarely in the center of the page with type running around all four sides, coming down the far left column, up to the top of the page and jumping across the photo to the bottom of the page and up again. The type continued all the way to the far right-hand column and ended at the bottom right corner of the page. A piece of artwork was at the top of the page, a color drawing of a beer tap, turned on and spewing out the type that flowed down the left-hand column. Jill had to admit that the type flowing out of the tap looked really cool. Incorporated into the beer tap, a label on the tap’s handle, were the words, in bright purple, “ON TAP.”
Jill realized that the river of type was her entertainment calendar, a weekly listing of plays, concerts, gallery exhibits and other events in the broadly defined category of entertainment. She ran it each Thursday. There were no news stories on the page and just that one huge, centered picture. The events were classified by date, and the type was in various colors — red, blue, green, gold, orange and pink.
“This is ... this is my Thursday arts and entertainment page?”
“No. This is your daily page. Same look every day.”
“This is my regular Style page?”
“I got rid of Style. Too cliché. Too plutocratic.
“Here’s the concept: Young people — your target audience, remember? — are interested in what can they do. You’ve been running daily themed pages, am I right?”
“Yes. Weddings and engagements on Monday, health on Tuesday, family on Wednesday, arts on Thursday, home on Friday and a weekly feature on Saturday.”
“That’s all wrong. That’s crap. The only people who read weddings and engagements are the families of the couples. Nothing there to interest anyone else. Young people aren’t interested in health stories; they’re healthy; they think they’re going to live forever. Family? Not everybody has warm fuzzies about their families, so that’s a negative. Arts might be fine for aristocrats, but not for our target audience. And home? Most folks in our target audience are living in an apartment, or they’ve moved back in with mom and dad; they don’t care about decorating and landscaping. They can’t even clean up their own bedroom. As for our Saturday feature, we can put that inside because on the front we’re going to give people what they want — a list of places to go, things to do, sights to see, all that. We’re going to make this section useful for a change.”
“You’re going to run this every day?”
“No. You are. Let me show you how this works. It’s ingenious. See we have all your events color coded: Green is nightlife — bars, restaurants, etc. Red is concerts. Blue is stage plays. Orange is movies. Gold is miscellaneous events, like street festivals or celebrations, and pink is causes, such as a Red Cross blood drive or an AIDS screening or a food giveaway. See, young people not only want to be entertained, they also want to be involved. This gives them a listing of how to get involved.”
Jill looked for a color key, something that explained what each typeface color signified. She found none. “I don’t see a key to these colors you’ve got. How will readers know the key?”
“They’ll figure it out. You have to give readers credit for some intelligence. It’s obvious; see Mick’s is in green, and everyone knows it’s a pub. The Jimmy Buffett concert is in red because it’s a ... concert! Simple as that. They’ll figure it out.”
“But do you realize that we’ll have a hard time filling this much space every single day? There’s just not that much going on in this area, especially during some weeks, such as holidays or the first of the year. There’s just not that much going on.”
“Of course there is. You’ll just have to work harder at collecting the information, and you’ll have to reach out a little farther to include more distant events.”
“That picture. Where is that from?”
“That’s an exhibit at the Mint Museum in Charlotte.”
“But that’s 60 miles from here.”
“Which means you can get there in an hour and take in a nice new art exhibit. Besides, it was the only good photograph you gave me. I would have preferred a concert picture or a bar shot, but you didn’t have any available.”
“I had used it as a thumbnail in last week’s listing. Are we going to run the same photo every day?”
“Oh no. Of course not. The photo will change every day, and the listings will be updated every day.”
“But we don’t get that many photos. You’re talking about six pictures a week, twenty-four or more a month. We probably don’t get more than five or six a month.”
“Then you’ll just have to request more. Or you’ll have to assign your alleged photographer to shoot some for you. That’s not a big deal.”
“You’ve got — what? — eighty or ninety inches of listings here. We usually don’t have more than twelve to fifteen inches most weeks, sometimes as much as twenty-five or thirty, but never that much.”
“As I said, you’ll have to spread your perimeter and include events from farther afield. Research shows that young people are willing to drive a long way to go to a concert or to hear a band.”
“I don’t know if we could find that many events if we included everything in the state. Where did you get all these listings?”
“Oh, they’re just dummy listings. I made them up for visual effect, see? But you’ll have time to track down the listings and get them in the paper.”
“And they’re going to change every day?”
“Well, of course you’ll want to update them every day. You don’t want to give your readers yesterday’s events.”
“I don’t see ‘Style’ here anywhere.”
“As I said, ‘Style’ is not a good word with our target audience. Your new section is ‘On Tap,’ just as it says here. Don’t you just love my art work on that beer tap?”
She looked at him blankly, hoping that he was joking. He stared right back at her, until she looked back at the proof. “I don’t see a date on here. Don’t we need a date on the page?”
“Oh, it’s right here,” he said, pointing to type set into the edge of the handle of the beer tap. Sure enough, it was there: “September 1, 2006.”
“What about everything we’ve been putting on our fronts?”
“You’ll want to talk to Greg about that. I suspect that a lot of it, you’ll just eliminate altogether. But what you do continue will go inside. With the higher readership I’m expecting from this section front, I think you’ll find your inside readership will increase also. It’s a win-win all around!”
Gainey was willing to show her more of his pages, which were all the same except for the one big, centered photograph, but Jill had seen enough. “So this is it? This is what we’ll be doing in my department? Greg and Mr. Wright have signed off on this?”
“They gave me carte blanche, so yes, they’ve signed off on it.”
“When does this start?”
“I’ve still got a few more pages to design. I need to do an editorial page, a Sports front and a Sports scoreboard page and then I think I’m done. We’ll launch the redesign all at once, so readers will have a completely new, fresh newspaper. The Dispatch will never be thought of as that stodgy old paper again. We’re going to make some eyes pop!”
“But when?”
“Oh, I think we’re talking at least another month. Maybe two months. October first, November first, somewhere along in there. We’ll have a big launch party, like in Hollywood, and introduce the new product to readers. I’ll see if Mr. Wright will spring for lunch for all the employees.”
Jill went back to her department and sat, shell-shocked, at her desk. She looked at the “Style” logo on the door and contemplated having new business cards made proclaiming her as the On Tap Editor. “Oh my God!” she muttered and shook her head.
Doug Reason saw Jill going back into her office and walked over to ask how the redesign went. He had just stuck his head inside her door, seeing the anguish on her face, when his attention was directed elsewhere.
“What the hell is going on around here?” Billy Wright was screaming — screaming — loud enough to be heard out on the street as he strode across the newsroom like a fullback headed for the defensive line, his arms pumping at his sides as he held a crumpled copy of a newspaper in his right hand. “Greg! What the hell is going on here?”
Pilcher walked to the door of his office, where Wright had just arrived, still holding the remote for the television in his left hand. “What’s wrong?”
“Wrong? Have you looked at the editorial page today? Have you?”
Sheepishly, Pilcher wondered whether a yes or a no would be the worse answer, so he stood there mute while Wright waved the paper in front of him.
“Look at this! Just look at it.” He was pointing to the masthead that topped the editorial page. On it was The Dispatch logo, the date, the names of the publisher, editor and city editor, the paper’s street address, e-mail address and telephone number, and a slogan that had been part of the page for as long as anyone could remember: “Standing Up For Freedom Since 1899.” Edgar’s and Frank’s father had coined the slogan in the late 1940s or early 1950s. No one could remember just when. Originally, it had been part of the front-page nameplate, but Edgar managed to move it inside to the editorial page masthead in the 1980s — a change that gratified Dale Weaver, who had thought since the day he interviewed with the paper that the slogan was hokey.
“Read that!” Wright commanded Pilcher as he stabbed at the slogan just below the words The Dispatch. “Just read it.”
Greg started reading it aloud but he stopped after one word. “Competence ... ,” he said and went silent. It didn’t say “Standing Up For Freedom since 1999.” It said, “Competence is Not a Requirement.” Greg looked around the newsroom for an explanation, but everyone, including Doug, who had rushed back to his own desk and grabbed today’s paper off of it, was looking for the editorial page masthead. Almost simultaneously, they all found what had turned Mr. Wright’s face so red. There were a few chuckles but more moans and groans. Greg’s face reshaped into an awkward grin, like a child caught stealing candy.
“Who lays out this page?” Wright demanded of Pilcher.
“I do,” Joe Lackey said, raising his hand and standing up at his desk to face in Wright’s direction. “But I never saw this. You ... you just don’t pay attention to static elements that are on the template. You assume they’re right.”
“Well, you assumed wrong! Are you saying you didn’t put this ridiculous slogan on this page?”
“No ... I only took the template that was in the system. I never changed anything in the masthead. I’m sorry. I should’ve noticed, but you just don’t pay any attention to static elements that are the same day after day.”
“Is this the first edition with this on it?” Pilcher asked, worried that the answer might be more bad news.
“No. I’ve gone back more than a week, and every damned paper has got this ‘Competence is Not a Requirement’ on it. A week! How does something like that go on and nobody sees it?”
“I’ll get to the bottom of this, Boss. This won’t go unpunished,” Greg said.
“I just checked, Mr. Wright,” Joe said, seated at his terminal again. “That slogan is on the template, and the template was last changed on the twenty-eighth. It looks like the new slogan has been on there since then.”
“Who changed the template?”
“The system doesn’t tell us that, just the date it was changed. There are, I don’t know, six or seven people with authority to alter templates, but it’s not something that gets done very much.”
“The twenty-eighth? That’s ... that’s ... eleven issues? How does something like this get past everybody?”
“How did you catch it?” Greg asked.
“I got a call from a reader a few minutes ago.”
“We’ll find the responsible party,” Pilcher assured Wright, “and we’ll make sure he regrets it. I think we can pursue legal damages.”
“Just make sure you get that goddamn slogan fixed. If it goes in one more edition, you’re all fired,” Wright said, stalking out of the newsroom the same way he entered.
Everyone sat silently for a moment, as if the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. Slowly, quietly, Joe Lackey walked over to Doug’s desk. “I’m sorry I didn’t catch it,” he said, “but I swear I did not change that template. I had absolutely nothing to do with it.”
“The scary part is that ‘Competence is Not a Requirement’ was printed for nearly two full weeks before anyone noticed,” Doug said. “Did you see the look on Greg’s face?”
Joe stifled a snicker. “You’ve got to believe me: I did not do this.”
“I believe you. You’re not the type. Any ideas who might have?”
“Needless to say, it’s an ‘inside’ job. You’ve got template authority; so do Jill and Tom and Greg ... and probably some others. But anyone could log in as any of us and get access to the templates, so the suspicion can’t be just on us. Anyone with just a minimal understanding of Quark — or not — could do it.”
Joe thought for a minute, then added sheepishly, “I guess I should add a confession here. You know how Greg insists on seeing my page proofs before I send a page back?”
“Yeah. He does the same thing to me.”
“Well, I had suspected for some time that he wasn’t really catching any errors on the page. He never pointed out any errors; he just wanted to rearrange the stories or change a picture. Well, I decided to test him. I started putting deliberate errors on the page — misspellings and transposed letters in headlines — to see if he’d catch them. He never did. I’d always correct the errors after he handed the proof back to me. None of the deliberate errors ever went to press, and my little test never had anything to do with this slogan change. I never changed anything on the template. Trust me on that.”
“I trust you, Joe. You know that.”
Doug thought for a moment and realized something. “Wouldn’t we be able to identify who changed the template if Greg hadn’t had the version history option removed from the system?”
“Yeah, we would. Or at least we’d know who the culprit logged in as, if that meant anything.”
“We’re not going to be much help to Greg’s investigation, I guess.”
“The big problem is, everyone here has a motive,” Joe said with a smile. “We all know the ‘new’ slogan is accurate.”
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1 comment:
Fiction, eh? Veeeery interesting.
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